Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — wargame
ON THE JOYS, FRUSTRATIONS, AND POSSIBILITIES OF FREE SET-UP (by Tom Russell)
The other day, the inestimable Robert Peter Bottos - he of BottosCon fame - commented on a Facebook post we had made about our upcoming release Plan 1919. Our post was as follows: Many of our wargames give the player a lot of leeway in setting up their forces, and Plan 1919 is no exception. The Germans set up on one side of the line, and the Allies on the other, and a solid set-up is really crucial. Each side has well over a hundred units (155 for the Germans and 226 for the allies, to be precise) of different...
DESIGNING PLAN 1919 (by John Gorkowski)
Major General John Frederick Charles "Boney" Fuller, (1878 – 1966) a senior British Army officer, military historian, and strategist, was an early theorist of modern armored warfare and the author of "Plan 1919". When Hollandspiele asked me to design a game covering JFC Fuller’s Plan 1919, I had to peer deep into my foggy memory of this might-have-been campaign. Luckily, I found a great web site that shared Fuller’s plan verbatim. Here are some telling excerpts (with the British use of s in certain words such as “disorganised” converted to a “proper” American z such as in “disorganized”). The Influence...
THE OPT-POP DIARIES PART 3 (by Tom Russell)
The primary currency in my Optimates et Populares design is Political Will (PW), with each action you take or attempt costing some amount of it. Small things cost less PW and big things cost more PW. This is a familiar concept for most gamers, which goes by various names: Operations Points, Action Points, Resource Points, etc. Usually you get these points in games randomly by playing cards, or you earn them by controlling certain areas on a map. It's a necessary abstraction that simulates not so much the actual choices made by leaders and commanders - Lincoln didn't fret over...
CHADWICK'S BATTLE FOR MOSCOW (by Tom Russell)
Russian stamp commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Moscow The first wargame I ever played was James Dunnigan's Drive on Metz, which I constructed following the instructions in his Complete Wargames Handbook. It was... kinda boring, actually. The game was limited to a very small map with very few units, and as a simple, introductory game, it had very few rules. But there wasn't all that much going on; it was too constrained, too simple, too blah. It didn't feel like much of a game; it was more like an exercise. I was, however, somewhat casually intrigued by...
THE OPT-POP DIARIES, PART 2 (by Tom Russell)
The curia was the meeting house of the Roman senate. The Curia Julia, pictured here, was begun by Julius Caesar and necessitated by the increase of senators from 600 to 900. The old curia, Curia Cornelia, was torn down and officially replaced by Curia Julia. Begun by Julius Caesar in 44 BC, it was completed by Augustus Caesar in 29 BC. In AD 94, Domitian rebuilt the Curia using Julius Caesar's original plan. The building was damaged by fire in AD 283 and later restored by Diocletian. In AD 630, Pope Honorius I transformed the property, presumably no longer...