Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

Games are unusual in that they generally have the structure of a story (a beginning, a middle, and an end) but are not themselves stories. I don't build a plot or create characters, and I'm not leading you along from A to B to C. I'm not a storyteller; the idea is to create models and dynamics that allow you to tell your own stories. In the case of wargames, these stories are historical. The model is meant to isolate certain aspects of the historical event that the designer thinks were important and will help you understand how and why...

I remember a game submission we got two or three years ago for a card-driven game. Now, I'm not generally in the habit of discussing submissions that we passed on - spoiler alert, we passed on it - as that can feel rather gauche. Certainly when I was a freelance designer, I would have been disheartened and horrified to read a story from a publisher, and slowly realize that it was one of my games that was being discussed But I think this is a useful story, so I'm going to go ahead and tell it; details have been changed...

The Shot & Shell Battle Series originated because I had designed three previous games that had somewhat similar rulesets but at different scales, with different combat procedures and different ZOC rules and different activation mechanisms (an I-go-U-go for this one, chit pull for that one, activation roll for this guy over here). I couldn't really call those three previous games a "series", because for me as a gamer the appeal of a series is that you only need to learn the rules once, then you're off to the races. Having to learn each game separately, and if you happen to...

Suppose we have a game about the Battle of Hastings. It's a game about a single day - 14 October 1066. Men on high ground holding fast against a sophisticated invading force, until their discipline breaks. The important factors are the advantages of those invaders, and the discipline of the defenders. When the game ends, one or the other would have won out. Though the end result might be wildly different from match to match, the essential nature of the battle remains intact, with the same troops fighting over the same ground, and each match will follow a broadly similar...

I've written often about how our model and our niche audience gives me an incredible amount of creative freedom. I can do aggressively weird and interesting things without the financial repercussions that usually accommodate being weird and interesting.  It's such a rare gift for a designer and publisher to have, so much so that I think that freedom also comes with a sort of a responsibility to exercise it as often and as fully as possible. I remember reading something George Lucas said back in the late nineties or early aughts, that after he was done with his prequel trilogy,...