Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

I don't play a lot of tactical games; it's just not my jam. Occasionally someone will ask me to explain why it's not my jam, and there are several reasons, sure. Even the simplest tactical games are still a little too complex for my taste. I'm also not a big fan of turns that take twenty minutes to play but represent five minutes on the ground. And then there's a tendency for the hexes to get overly congested: I have a stacking limit of two units per hex, but one or both of those units can be a vehicle which...

One of the things I'm working on - and if you ask Mary, the only thing I should ever be working on, and why isn't it done yet - is Dinosaur Table Battles, a standalone offshoot of our flagship Table Battles series. This naturally seems like it should be the easiest thing in the world: come up with some dinosaurs, translate their various offensive and defensive abilities into the language of Table Battles, you could do this in a weekend, why isn't it done yet. But as the director said to the cowboy, would that it were so simple. Because...

A partial section of a rough prototype map Designers, stop me if you've heard this one before: you create a new game after lots of immersive research. You have a solid set of mechanics that have been designed specifically to represent that historical conflict. You make up a rough map (in my case, using Photoshop) and a set of counters (in my case, scrawling on some sticker paper), and you sit down at the table to give it a spin. You don't expect everything to work - almost nothing ever does the first time around - but you're hoping that...

One line early in my Westphalia teach always gets a laugh, and it's this one: There is no money in this game, only Debt, and you don't want it but you only ever seem to get more of it. Sometimes, but not always, I get a second laugh when I explain that Prestige reduces the rate at which the interest on your Debt accumulates, "kinda like a credit score". (Sometimes the laugh is tinged with a streak of bitter recognition - what better way to get away from thinking about my mortgage and my student loans and the fact that...

I used to be very wary of solitaire wargames. Not, mind you, of playing two-player wargames solitaire, but of honest-to-gosh solitaire designs. Partially, my reticence was somewhat aspirational: I might be playing both sides in this WW2 game, but the possibility existed that someday, someone who would dig the game would be sitting on the other side of the table. Whereas if I plunked down some of my hard-earned cash for a solo-only title, that possibility - however rarified and improbable - no longer existed. And, when you're on the sort of budget where you can only buy maybe five...