Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — train games

The Soo Line is my sixth train game design. In some ways, it's similar to the others - for example, it's the fourth in a row to use some variation of the "track leasing" mechanism I introduced in Trans-Siberian. But it's also the most aggressively weird of my choo-choo games, which is the primary reason why I didn't offer it  to Winsome and we decided to go the Hollandspiele route instead.  The core bit of weirdness is that there are only three railroads to invest in, and the majority shareholder makes all decisions for the railroad. The game seats three...

The 18XX has a reputation for being the heavy gamer's heavy game, to the point where there is a small but passionate number of folks who literally play nothing else. I enjoy them myself, at least to a point: I'm fairly rubbish at them, and because even the shorter ones take a while to play (with not-insignificant downtime) I haven't played any of them often enough to acquire any kind of competency. There's a learning curve for the series as a whole and for each of the better games in particular, and I'm still at the bottom of that incline,...

Note: this article originally appeared on Board Game Geek on August 12th. It's being reposted here because I was lazy and forgot to write a blogpost for today. It is customary I suppose to begin a designer diary with where the idea for the game came from - what the impetus was for the design. I wish I could say that it started with a theme or a mechanism or a player dynamic, but the simple and mercenary truth is that I designed Northern Pacific because I wanted to be a full-time game designer. That's an ambition I had almost...