Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — This Guilty Land

In most card-driven wargames/political conflict games, each card has a unique effect that, in theory, is meant to represent the effect in game terms of the historical personage or event that it represents. This is underlined with a few lines of flavor text. Because your cards are hidden from your opponent and vice-versa, players must operate in an atmosphere of uncertainty. The "event" cards in This Guilty Land are, barring a handful of exceptions, not event cards in this traditional sense. Each card within a certain type (Public Opinion, Organization, et cetera) functions in precisely the same way (though some...

I remember listening to a commentary track that the director Paul Thomas Anderson did about his film Boogie Nights, in which he explained why a scene was cut from the final film. He was watching a cut of the film, and as one scene was wrapping up, he was giddily anticipating the next scene, which was one of his favorites. But when that first scene had ended, it wasn't followed by the scene he was anticipating - it was followed by another scene that he had seemingly forgot was in the film. And I'm paraphrasing here - it's been maybe...

One of the things that irks people about card-driven wargames is the fact that someone who has learned the deck - who knows what events are in there and what events aren't - has an advantage over someone who hasn't.  If I place a bunch of troops or influence or whatever in Spain, but there's a card in the deck (maybe even in my opponent's hand!) that wipes out all the troops, influence, or whatever that are in Spain, it's maybe not such a great idea to pile my pieces into the Iberian peninsula, but I have no way of...

In This Guilty Land, Justice alone scores end-game VP for Support - each Justice marker scores one point. The more Compromise markers you can flip, the better. Using an Organization card to form a political party will flip half of the aligned Compromise markers to their Justice or Oppression side (depending on who is playing the card), and will exchange the other half with Compromise markers belonging to your opponent. On top of that, the acting player will score points equal to their Organizational Capacity. Together (action VP plus end-game) this can result in a huge swing, potentially transforming a...

We'll be releasing This Guilty Land later this month. The very first version of the cover went public well over a year ago. We don't usually do it that far ahead of the game's release. But given the scope of the project, and the sensitivity of its subject matter, there were a number of reasons why I would have wanted to give up and step away from the project, and announcing it that early in the development process essentially forced me to commit to it. It was important to me in designing a cover that it not tip-toe around the...