Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — With It Or On It

I had a problem: my hoplite lines weren't breaking. One of the core things I wanted to do in With It Or On It was to represent units - those individual square pieces of cardboard - as parts of a whole. I wanted players to think of the ten or twelve counters that made up a wing as a single "piece". When an individual counter was flipped to its exhausted side as the result of combat, it was like a little stress fracture. As these pile up, it became more and more likely that the line would break. When it...

I usually handle the counter layout for our games - I can count the exceptions on one hand - but, NATO symbols aside, it's usually someone else doing the hard stuff, drawing the soldier or the horsey or the cannons. Each of those illustrations naturally increases the art budget and pushes our break-even point further down the line. One of the appeals of doing a series like Shields & Swords II is that we could pay for unit illustrations one time and then reuse them in subsequent volumes. In fact, even though the first release, The Grunwald Swords, only used...