Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

One of the key features of any game with cards - be it Cribbage or Bridge or Race for the Galaxy or Washington's War - is that you can't ever be sure exactly what's in the other guy's hand. In a wargames context, this provides for a quick and painless sense of fog of war; as Mark Herman noted in his article "My Philosophy Behind Card Driven Game Design", CDGs let "the player know the strength and location of enemy forces" but keeps you in the dark regarding "what his opponent can do with those forces and where he intends...

I owe a lot to board game maps. When I was a kid, I had many more wargaming maps than I had games thanks to the vagaries of yard sales. I also had a drawer in my desk stuffed full of old roadmaps. There was nothing systematic about either collection. I just liked looking at maps. I guess I couldn’t help but become interested in a hobby that was so preoccupied with geography. When I was first exploring roleplaying games I produced maps by the dozens. Gradually my gaming maps moved digital, and I often used these projects to learn...

The design of An Infamous Traffic’s cover began with a surprisingly rejection. Mary and Tom had both loved the design of the game. They had loved the look of my playtesting counters, and they had loved the map. They did not, however, liked the cover. What more could they want?! This cover had everything. It had fancy typography and it had a pretty painting. What historical game box could want more? Well, it turns out that they both had strong opinions about covers. Wargame cover design over the past fifteen years or so has followed the Rodger B. MacGowan school...

My acquaintance with Cole Wehrle began when I asked him for a favor. I was editing a wargames magazine and the publisher had asked me to run a review of Mark Simonitch's The US Civil War. I didn't have the game and didn't know anyone who did, so I went on BGG and started looking at the ratings and comments, hoping to find someone who thought highly of the game and might be interested in writing an article about it. I came across Cole's name, and had always enjoyed his writing, which included a very nice piece he wrote about...

When I was growing up, history was a list of wars. This was partly the fault of games. From an early age I played any game I could find and hunted for more. At yard sales I would rifle through stacks of Milton Bradley to dig up a tattered copy of Third Reich or Wooden Ships & Iron Men. These games shaped my understanding of history. At the school library I tended to ignore the books that didn’t concern armed conflict. History was a list of battles and all the rest was window dressing. Of course, this was also partly...