Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

I got my start doing magazine games. Working in that format, I generally had a half-sheet of five-eighths inch counters - eighty-eighty of 'em, in five blocks of sixteen and one block of eight - and one eleven by seventeen mapsheet. That allowed for about twelve reasonably sized hexes in a column and twenty or so in a row. Because having a separate display sheet would increase the production cost of the game, any tracks, including the turn track, needed to fit on that mapsheet. I could however have some charts to go on the back of the rulebook. It...

My new game Supply Lines of the American Revolution: The Southern Strategy begins with the Siege of Charleston, still one of the most humiliating defeats in America's history. Or rather, it can begin with the siege - it depends who wins the initiative die roll. If the Crown Player does, then it's likely to go down as it did historically. There's roughly a 58% chance of that happening, and if it does, it's going to shift the Political Will Track one space into the red zone - that is, in a direction favorable to the Crown Player - and for...

Oh no, not another short blog article about elements of classic abstract games! What can I say, guys? I'm on a kick. Zugzwang is a concept in chess theory that refers to a serious disadvantage created by your compulsion to move. That is, because you need to do something on your turn, even when you would really rather not, you may be forced to fatally compromise your position. It's a function, like so many other things, of tempo and leverage. A player who has the tempo dictates the terms of the match; his opponent is stuck reacting to what the...

Games are systems: a series of inputs and outputs, of actions and reactions and interactions. They can be many things - frivolous or serious, light or heavy; they can appeal to the mathematical rigor of your neo-cortex or ignite giddy thrills in the reptilian part of the brain; they can be meaningless or they can be laden with meaning, and that meaning might be built into the game, or it might be something that we bring to it, and discover, ourselves. But for all the different types of games that exist, and all the different types of experiences we can...

Newcomers to wargaming often struggle with the way wargame rulebooks are organized. The numbered sections with their numbered sub-sections can all seem a little "much" to the uninitiated. Once you've found your way inside though, you'll often find that it makes finding this rule or that one a heck of a lot easier, and a good rulebook will use handy-dandy cross-references in parentheticals to help you connect the dots and master the game's various concepts. At the same time, the structure of a ruleset can sometimes make the whole thing seem a lot more complicated than it really is. I...