Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

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,...

One of the things I really enjoy about John Theissen's operational ACW games (More Aggressive Attitudes, Objective Shreveport!, and Hood's Last Gamble, for those keeping score) is how difficult it can be to have a proper battle. Whenever you declare combat, your opponent usually has the option of attempting to Retreat Before Combat (RBC), with a 66% chance of success (sometimes more). With a successful roll, the enemy stack slips through your fingers. And, when the shoe is on the other foot, you slip through theirs. Both sides generally want to do battle with the enemy, because winning battles decisively...

On what I imagine to have been a pleasant September morning - being partial to autumn, I generally find September mornings to be pleasant - there rode a man who would be dead in ten days.  Now, by rights, he shouldn't have been riding. This man - an intelligence officer - had two days prior disembarked his ship to make contact with one of his assets, an enemy commander who wished to defect, and in so doing, turn over possession of a key fort. Having made the agreement, our young officer was to return to the ship. But in the...

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,...

The core idea of With It Or On It, the first game in our Shields & Swords Ancients line, was to create a simplified model that could capture the essential nature of hoplite warfare - the advantages, the disadvantages, and most importantly, the feel. Each individual counter is only as strong and as resilient as the counters adjacent to it, leading one gamer to dub the game's model "the hoplite buddy system". Winning a battle is a matter of putting pressure on the line, pushing at it, until you force it to weaken, to crack, and to collapse. I knew...