Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — wargame design

If you're reading this, you probably know how movement factors work. You move the unit from hex to hex (or square to square, or area to area, or whatever to whatever), expending a certain number of movement points for each hex entered. I'm going to assume that if you know that, you also know that a unit cannot exceed its movement factor, unless the rules make some kind of exception (for example, that the unit can always move one hex during a Movement Phase, even if it doesn't actually have sufficient MPs to enter that one hex). So, serious question...

Including the game I did for Winsome (Iberian Gauge) and our holiday freebie (Napgammon), I had ten game designs released last year. That's a personal record; 2016 and 2015 had only seen the release of nine games each. This year, if I manage to cross everything off my list, there'll be at least ten titles out there with my name on it, eight of which are Hollandspiele releases. I'm likely to do more; this time last year, I had no intention of designing Table Battles or brushing off For-Ex, two games that sold very well in the back-end of 2017,...

Today, a few brief words of advice about playtesting. Playtesting is of course the scalding hot viscera that brings these little Frankenstein monsters to life, and as might be expected by my choice of metaphor, it can be a messy, dangerous, and exhausting process. There's oodles and oodles of advice out there about how to choose testers, how to conduct tests, what to ask, with much of the advice often being contradictory. Really, you just have to find the method, or combination of methods, that will work best for you. But whichever method you choose - however you go about...

You nudge your little square division to the front, compare its attack factor of 4 to the enemy's defense factor, and roll the die: ugh, a six, AL, attacker loss. You flip the counter to its reverse side, reducing its attack factor to 2. Half the cardboard men under your command are dead. Only they're not, because as all grognards know, and as many rulebooks are quick to point out, a step loss doesn't represent death, but simply a reduction in effective fighting strength. That's bloodshed and wounds and prisoners, sure, but also general discombobulation and dispersal, exhaustion, morale collapse,...

In several of Ty Bomba's wargames, including Hollandspiele's own Operation Unthinkable, each player decides how they want to structure their turn: a move phase followed by combat, a combat phase followed by movement, or twin combat phases. Mr. Bomba explained the concept thusly in an interview with the fine folks at The Player's Aid:  It’s a way of cleanly modeling all kinds of command-control and logistical limits without a lot of specific rules. Essentially, it forces you to create a point of concentration (“Schwerpunkt,” as the Germans would say) and give it your full support by picking the phase sequence...