Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

I have used an odds-based CRT in two of my wargame designs, and the second one only counts if you consider Napgammon a wargame. The eternal and interminable question of what is a real wargame very much aside, one might wonder why that is: do I dislike odds-based CRTs or something? Well, no; I actually rather like them. I've played and enjoyed a number of games that trot out this oldest and warhorsiest of old warhorses. Heck, Mary and I have published such games.  So, no, I've got no beef with comparing the strength of the attacker to that of...

Recently someone asked me if I was going to be doing a blog-thing about the design process for the Pharsalus and Inkerman scenarios in Table Battles Second Edition. I said maybe, though I didn't have any immediate plans to do that. Well, it's Thursday afternoon, I need a blog-thing for Friday and haven't written one yet, I'm drawing a blank on what to write about, and so here we are. Let's start with the overall purpose of these two scenarios. From a business perspective, they were added to provide an additional incentive for early adopters to purchase the Second Edition...

Five or six years ago, there was a discussion thread on Board Game Geek about a train game, and somebody said something along the lines of, "You don't win the game by making the most money; you win the game by having more money than the other players." At first blush that might seem like it's the same thing, but the meat of it is that the game wasn't about generating a return on your investment, or socking away insane amounts of cash; it was about bleeding the other players dry, using your money as a weapon. In the same...

I'm working on a game called Field of the Cloth of Gold, which we intend to release concurrent with the five hundredth anniversary of the historical event that saw the Kings of England and France peacocking at each other about how splendid and magnificent and powerful they were. Folks who might be expecting an intricate treatment of Tudor-era politics are going to be disappointed, as this is probably the closest thing I've ever done to a lightly-themed eurogame. In fact, I've been joking with friends that this is my version of a worker placement point salad game. On the surface,...

I've designed a lot of different games for a lot of a different player counts on a lot of different subjects. At first glance, my wargames look nothing like my train games - to the point where at least one person didn't realize that the same guy had done them, and even suspected the Tom Russell who does train games as being some kind of pseudonym. But there are certain features that all my games have in common, such as my usual obsessions with tempo, momentum, the need to weaken your own position in order to advance it, feedback loops,...