Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

I remember listening to a commentary track that the director Paul Thomas Anderson did about his film Boogie Nights, in which he explained why a scene was cut from the final film. He was watching a cut of the film, and as one scene was wrapping up, he was giddily anticipating the next scene, which was one of his favorites. But when that first scene had ended, it wasn't followed by the scene he was anticipating - it was followed by another scene that he had seemingly forgot was in the film. And I'm paraphrasing here - it's been maybe...

 This is a new series of blog-things where instead of delving into highfalutin experimental game design theory, I look more practically at a specific game design problem and talk about how I solved it. This is the first of a handful about our end-of-year release The Vote, a game about voting rights in America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I had a problem: I didn't want to do the thing that scores me points, because if I did it wouldn't give me enough time to score enough points to win the game. So, let me back up...

Eurogames are how Mary and I got into modern board games. My ambition, almost from the start, was to design medium-weight eurogames with broad appeal, and the only reason why I instead dedicated myself to designing weird wargames was that the wargames sold but the eurogames never did. You often hear from folks who say that once you start designing your own games, you never have time to play anyone else's, and while that's not entirely true, I can say that once the shift was made to designing and publishing wargames, I more-or-less stopped playing eurogames with any regularity.  Once...

As I've written about before, I generally don't revise my games after they've been published. It's not that I think my games are unimpeachable pinnacles of design; it's that I have new games to work on, and would rather spend my time on those. I learn from every game and its reception, and I'd rather apply that knowledge forward than backward.  There were a number of lessons I've taken from the Table Battles base game, and those lessons have been applied forward as the series has continued to evolve. For example, the Bombard action has essentially disappeared from the expansions,...

My high school had one of the best video programs in the state; it helps when the teacher is also a disc jockey turned rock and roll promoter turned cable mogul turned millionaire who put his own money into the program. I learned how to edit on an Avid and I learned how to light with a ceiling-mounted grid in a real if small studio with a three-camera set-up. We had all sorts of microphones and all sorts of boxes to mix the sound with. Many of the folks in the program went on to find work in the film...