Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Toledo War

As you probably know by now, every year I design a "freebie" game that is given away during our annual end-of-year Hollandays Sale. This year's game is The Toledo War, a card game about the 1835-36 border dispute between the State of Ohio and the Territory of Michigan. This conflict is quite obscure, and even Michiganders and Ohioans are unlikely to regard it as more than a piece of trivia. The broad outlines of the conflict are as follows: both Michigan and Ohio professed a claim to 468 square miles called the Toledo Strip. I'm going to say that Michigan's...

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...