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

A new turn begins: you draw up to your hand limit and survey your new cards. A three-ops card, yes, this is just what I needed. A card that might diminish your losses in battle, okay, I can work with that. That powerful special event you were hoping to see on the previous turn, well, better late than never. And then, there's that Mandatory Event card you absolutely did not want to see on this turn, or on any turn. It's the card that will undo your modest, hard-fought gains, the card that will destroy you, that will cheerfully assist...

Some kind folks have expressed interest in This Guilty Land, my two player game about American politics in the forty years leading up to the American Civil War. Most know that it builds on my earlier design about Roman politics, Optimates et Populares. While that game was largely deterministic (random set-up and a once-in-a-blue-moon die-roll aside), this one has quite a bit more chaos, being powered by cards. This led at least a couple of folks to assume that the game would be similar to Twilight Struggle or 1960: The Making of the President, with alternating plays of cards either...