Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

Years ago, I made computer games - a few of which still survive and are somewhat diverting if completely inessential - and during that period of my life, I spent a lot of time with library books about said games. In fact, the first time I read Dunnigan's Complete Wargames Handbook, it was because it was shelved between two programming books, and I was fairly irritated when I opened it up and it was primarily about some weird and unappealing cardboard things. (The second time I read it, after we had gotten into board games, I had a very different...

I had a problem: I wanted one player's victory thresholds to be hidden from the other players, but didn't want that player to be hobbled by pure dumb luck. The game was Westphalia, and the player was Austria. The way Austria works is that they start with a bunch of territory and a bunch of authoritarian prerogatives, and over the course of the game they're ceding territory and giving up some of those prerogatives in order to satisfy the demands of their enemies and safeguard the victories of their allies. The trick is that they can't give away too much,...

I'm a better designer now than I was six years and thirty games ago, and there are a lot of reasons for that. I've had a lot of practice, for one thing. There's a greater awareness and following for my designs these days, which means more people are playing them, which means I'm getting more feedback from gamers and other designers, and I'm able to turn around and use that feedback as I continue to press on. There's a huge difference between designing in a vacuum and designing in and for an active and engaged community, and it shows. It's...

The other day, I was chatting online with some euro-y types about why we find so many new euro-y games so unsatisfying. Is it a trend toward hollow complexity - full of multiple paths to victory and interlocking mechanisms, signifying nothing? Is it a binary conception of balance that desperately prevents the players' actions from having consequences? Or perhaps it's that these games are built to deliver an optimal experience on the first play, which often means the types of experiences that the game can provide are very narrow and shallow, perfect for the one-and-done crowd, first impression reviews, and...

I often say that my job consists of playing board games all day. That's not a hundred percent true - my job also consists of answering questions on the internet, writing rulesets, laying out counters, designing covers, counting out little wooden bits and putting them into bags, and, oh yeah, designing games - but I think it gets across rather aptly that I have very little to be upset about in the grand scheme of things, and that I still can't quite believe that this is what I get to do for a living. It sometimes feels like I've gotten...