Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

I am working on a game called The Vote. It is in some ways similar to This Guilty Land - the political will see-saw, the basic deck mechanics, the marker play - but takes as its subject voting rights throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. And in other ways it's quite different, because that subject itself is quite different. This Guilty Land was always a story of systems failure. It tried to show how the structures that a modern society uses to solve problems, such as legislature and debate, compromise and civility, failed to resolve the most pressing moral...

I read once somewhere that one of the biggest challenges that Charles S. Roberts faced when he invented the commercial board wargame was explaining to players that they could move more than one piece on a turn. That they could, indeed, move every piece on a turn if they so chose. This idea is so central to the illusion of maneuver that powers the hex-and-counter idiom that we who speak its language sometimes fail to recognize how strange and extraordinary it really is.  This gaming table constructed in Mainz, Germany (1735) and displayed in the Cleveland Museum of Art combines...

As promised in last week's blog-thing, this time around I'm going to dig in a bit to explain the fifteen event cards in The Toledo War. As you might recall, other than the two Mandatory Events, each card is associated with a side (Ohio or Michigan) and an aspect of the conflict (Authority, Belligerence, or Claim). When playing your own card, it can be either for the event or as influence for the specified A-B-C card; when playing your opponent's card, it gives you Influence that can be applied to any A-B-C (usually just 1 Influence). Authority Cards 1. Andrew...

When it comes to traditional abstract games, Chess is arguably the King (and Queen, and Bishop, and Rook). Only Go rivals it for popularity and fanaticism. Backgammon is older than both of them, and I actually find it more dynamic than Chess, but it hardly has the same following or the same kind of serious attention afforded to it. Only hardcore abstract enthusiasts have time for oddities like Nine Men's Morris or Fox and Geese, and even children get bored with Tic-Tac-Toe pretty rapidly.  And then there's Draughts (or Checkers). Draughts gets a bad rap. At least in the case...

As you probably know by now, every year I design a "freebie" game that is given away during our annual end-of-year Hollandays Sale. This year's game is The Toledo War, a card game about the 1835-36 border dispute between the State of Ohio and the Territory of Michigan. This conflict is quite obscure, and even Michiganders and Ohioans are unlikely to regard it as more than a piece of trivia. The broad outlines of the conflict are as follows: both Michigan and Ohio professed a claim to 468 square miles called the Toledo Strip. I'm going to say that Michigan's...