Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany
DISRUPTION AND COMBAT AVOIDANCE (by John Theissen)
Designer John Theissen has designed several operational-level games for us: More Aggressive Attitudes, Objective Shreveport!, Hood's Last Gamble, Campaign of Nations, and Antony and Cleopatra. In this guest article, he touches on two features of his designs. There are a few rule concepts that find their way into most of the games I’ve designed, and I’d like to talk about two of them here. The purpose of these rules is to provide models reflecting some historical effects while keeping the rules fairly simple. The goal here is to combine the gaming concepts of playability and realism, hopefully in an effective...
FROM THE ARCHIVES: ON PUBLISHING THE SCHELDT CAMPAIGN (by Tom Russell)
In 2012, Brian Train's game Summer Lightning came on my radar. If you haven't played it, it's a game focused on the German invasion of Poland, and as you might expect, it's a tough game for the Poles to win. This, along with the unusual combat system, fascinated me, and I put it on a list of games I was interested in playing. I mentioned that I had heard that the game took an extraordinary amount of time to set-up. Brian stepped in to let me know that this was not true. Shortly thereafter, we arranged a trade by which...
YEAR THREE PART TWO OF TWO (by Tom Russell)
Continuing and concluding our look at what we've been up to over the course of our third year in business. Hex no. 37, The Soo Line So, this one turned out to be a "love it or hate it" sort of game, which didn't really surprise me. There's a reason, for example, why almost all stock-holding rail games have at least as many railroads in play as players: otherwise, one or more players are going to be doing a whole lot of nothing during the operating rounds. This game started with the question, what happens if there aren't enough...
FROM THE ARCHIVES: A GOOD FIT (by Tom Russell)
The first bit of advice that every designer gets about trying to get a game published is to approach publishers who will actually be a good fit for your game. You want to look at what other games they've put out on the market and get a feel for their catalogue and their general philosophy. Some companies have a very narrow focus. Winsome is a prime example. About a dozen years ago, Winsome's John Bohrer was interviewed by some guy named Tom Vasel, who asked Mr. Bohrer what he was looking for in a game: Well, first of all, the...
YEAR THREE PART ONE OF TWO (by Tom Russell)
It's hard to believe it, but August 16 will mark our third anniversary. Over the course of the last twelve months, we've published eleven boxed games (hexes number 32 through 42) and three non-boxed expansions, for a total of fourteen releases. That's two less than in year two, and quite a bit less than we had intended. There are reasons for that, which we'll get into next time. For now, as is tradition, let's start by taking a look at some of the games we published. Hex no. 32, Ribbit The first game to be released in our third year...