Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

  I do a lot of games on ancient and medieval topics. We often know far less about those battles and conflicts than we do about modern ones. Primary sources are fewer in number and also less reliable; the line between history and propaganda, always thin, becomes especially and uncomfortably porous the further back we go. When we do have multiple sources to draw from, they're often contradictory. It's common to be unsure where and when a battle took place, but there are also battles where we don't know who was on which side, who won, or if the battle...

Blucher at Waterloo, the French at Inkerman, the Eagles at the Black Gate: nothing turns the tide quite so dramatically as the timely arrival of reinforcements. There are some battles (and, depending on the decisiveness of the battle, some wars) that would have went very differently if said reinforcements arrived later, or sooner, or not at all. But reinforcements can pose a problem when it comes time to simulate those battles with cardboard squares and a paper map. If, for example, so-and-so arrived at such-and-such a time, which in game terms corresponds to Turn 6, then I know and you...

This interview with Wars of Marcus Aurelius designer Robert DeLeskie originally appeared in issue 142 of the French gaming magazine Vae Victis. This longer version was provided in English by Robert for publication on our blog. A big merci boucoup to Messrs. DeLeskie and Receveur. Why did you choose this period? Games about Marcus Aurelius are very rare. It's strange there are so few games set during this period because Marcus’s reign was consumed by war. But it’s also understandable. We know surprisingly little about the Marcomannic Wars compared with other major conflicts. There’s also the nature of the war...

I've tried, with varying degrees of success and failure, to impart my love of wargaming to others. Sometimes it's an uphill battle. I've had folks who told me they weren't interested in war (but who started playing Call of Duty immediately after abandoning our game of Hammer of the Scots). I've had folks who weren't thrilled with the cardboard and paper. There have been surprisingly few people who have had problems with odds ratios, for all the hay that's been made about math anxiety. Extra little chrome rules don't pose much of a problem to experienced Eurogamers and tabletop RPG...

At the end of twenty-seventeen, we published a three-part blog-thing looking at the games we had planned for twenty-eighteen. Writing a little blurb for each of these games was, I found, significantly easier than coming up with some kind of thesis about game design, coming up with a way to express that thesis, writing an introduction to lead me into it, realizing after two pages that I hadn't yet gotten to the topic at hand and so must either (a) come up with a new thesis that matches the new intro or (b) junk the intro and write a new...