Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

If a game lets you paint yourself into a corner so that you can no longer impact the game state, do you have agency? The obvious answer is that, no, you don't; if agency is defined as "the things I do matter", then being put into a situation where nothing you do matters by definition deprives you of agency. Okay, but what if a game never lets you paint yourself into that corner: do you really have agency? I would argue that the answer to that is also no, because if there are no consequences for your mistakes, whatever agency...

The fourth Table Battles expansion will be one that a surprising number of folks have been clamoring for since the release of the base game - the English Civil Wars. The delay in getting to it isn't due to any lack of interest on my part - quite the contrary, it's a subject I find fascinating - but because the base set drew very heavily from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and I wanted the first few expansions to show the range of the series, going back into the high middle ages (Wars of the Roses) and antiquity (Age of...

So last time I wrote about how a bad first impression with a game can make folks unlikely to try it a second time. There might be great and hidden depths that reveal themselves after x number of plays, but many folks aren't going to ever get to x. Or, as John Brieger put it, "you have a problem if it requires weeks of playing constantly for players to achieve the level of knowledge to make the game balanced." The thing is, I don't know if that really is a problem. I mean, yes, it is a problem, in the...

Years and years ago, I was talking with a fellow - we'll call him Henry - who had seen a film that Mary and I had directed and was, shall we say, underwhelmed. Which was fine, as far as that goes; not every film is for everybody, and that goes double for the weird sorts of comedies we were making. But Henry and I had a rather cordial and pleasant conversation about the film and some of the choices Mary and I had made with it, which he found too subtle for his tastes. I said something to the effect...

One thing all my shareholding train games have in common is that once you buy a share, it's yours for keeps. You can't sell off your holdings in one company for some quick cash to float a new one, as you can in the 18xx. Neither can you "buy low sell high", divesting yourself of a company when it's at its apex, deftly avoiding the inevitable fall. This is something that used to irritate one of our playtesters to no end. Every time a playtest was concluded, every time we asked for feedback, she always said that she wished there...