Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

While Table Battles is a direct descendent of my earlier game Christmas at White Mountain, its existence can be better explained in the context of two apparently unrelated games: Richard Berg's multiplayer game Dynasty, and my two-player politics game Optimates et Populares. When we were publishing Richard Berg's Dynasty, we needed to get quite a lot of wood bits. We needed large cubes for armies and little cubes to demarcate control, black cubes for warlords, and wooden discs for home provinces and the Emperor's winter palace. And on top of all that, we also needed some long gray rectangular wood...

There was a game that was published several years ago that had a very good box cover - distinctive, memorable, something special - that is being republished with a very… well, it's not a bad cover but neither could I call it a good one; it's just kinda there, polished and skillful and utterly uninteresting. I'm not going to tell you what the game is - heck, if you're reading this, there's a good chance you know what the game is. I'm also not going to say that I don't understand the decision. First of all, it's quite possible that...

Many of the games we publish have a "small footprint". Partially this is because my own designs tend toward being compact, the result of working habits I developed over the course of a dozen-or-so games designed for magazines and ziplocks. I try to get as much game as possible out of as few components as possible. The venerable Bruce Geryk once said of The Grunwald Swords that it "punches above its weight", and that's a rather nice bit that I'm eager to use in our advertising copy. So for a long time, I've designed reasonably compact games, though of late...

Battles and wars are often lopsided. That doesn't mean the result is inevitable, or that just because it did happen a certain way means that that was the most likely result - indeed, it could have been a statistically aberrant one. (For more on this, I recommend reading Brien J. Miller's "The Application of Statistical and Forensics Validation to Simulation Modeling in Wargames" in the book Zones of Control.) But, for the sake of argument, let's say that we have a conflict we want to model that was definitely lopsided, in which absent major out-of-left-field counterfactuals, one side is very...

I've been listening a lot lately to David Dokter's podcast Guns, Dice, Butter, in which he presents "conversations with members of the wargaming tribe". Several of his interview subjects were designers and developers for Avalon Hill and/or SPI. (Several of the SPI folks tell a story about Jim Dunnigan casually asking an underperforming employee if he was planning on coming in tomorrow? "Yes." Don't bother, quoth Dunnigan; you're fired.) One thing the illustrious Mr. Dokter mentions is a philosophical divide between the games produced by Avalon Hill and SPI. Avalon Hill designs were more about providing a balanced competitive experience...