Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

Before there was a Hollandspiele, there was a "Hollandspiele", the vague idea that Mary and I wanted to publish board games. We talked about it periodically for several years before we took the plunge, and there were a number of reasons for the delay. We needed some practical experience. I needed to learn my craft as a designer, and I wanted to develop some kind of reputation that could jump-start the proceedings. And then, of course, there was the fact that we didn't have any money. For years we existed perpetually on the brink of financial collapse and disaster. Being...

When Mary and I evaluate a game, one of the first things we look at is the Sequence of Play. Perhaps the most important part of understanding a game is understanding what a player does on their turn. It doesn't mean that we're looking for anything really ornate, or fancy, or different for the sake of being different - we have published, and will continue to publish, games that stick to "Player 1 Move, Player 1 Combat, Player 2 Move, Player 2 Combat" - but it does mean that we're trying to get a sense of how that turn is...

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...

One of my favorite tools to use in a game design is the feedback loop. While it's something that's featured in several of my designs, Blood in the Fog is probably the one that illustrates it best. The Russian Player has certain advantages while the dense fog neuters the range of the powerful enemy rifles. This fog remains in place until a Fog Chit is drawn from the Russian cup, at which point it starts to gradually lift. Every time the Fog Chit is drawn, the number of Activations per turn - the number of chits drawn - increases, which...

I was talking with someone last week about my game Optimates et Populares. This is the game where I first used the political will "teeter-totter" mechanism that also powers This Guilty Land and The Vote. I'm proud of that mechanism, and of the design in general. I set out to capture (in very broad strokes) the political processes of the late Roman Republic - how they functioned, and also how in the face of hyper-partisan class conflict, they ceased functioning - and I think I did that. Consuls act like Consuls, Tribunes like Tribunes. For its scale and level of...