Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

The Soo Line is my sixth train game design. In some ways, it's similar to the others - for example, it's the fourth in a row to use some variation of the "track leasing" mechanism I introduced in Trans-Siberian. But it's also the most aggressively weird of my choo-choo games, which is the primary reason why I didn't offer it  to Winsome and we decided to go the Hollandspiele route instead.  The core bit of weirdness is that there are only three railroads to invest in, and the majority shareholder makes all decisions for the railroad. The game seats three...

 One of the maxims that I would repeat to myself back when I was a tyro designer was this: There is no such thing as a normal scenario. The idea being that when you’re designing a scenario-based game, every scenario should have some kind of gimmick: this is the one where one of the commanders might defect, this is the one with the convoy passing through the gauntlet, this is the one with the exploding wagon. You would think it would be easier to come up with these when you're doing a fictional or hypothetical game, but for me...

One problem that became apparent after the release of Table Battles is that when players made poor decisions or did not properly work toward force preservation, the game would degenerate into an exhausted slugfest, a bunch of piddling little one- or two-stick formations limping along as the morale cubes passed back and forth, neither side achieving a definitive advantage. Over the course of the two expansions, I made the morale splits much more asymmetric and fragile as a way to "protect" the game against bad play. If losing just one formation would lose you the game, you'd be less likely...

One of the worst gaming experiences I ever had was when Mary and I (long before Hollandspiele) got roped into playtesting a tactical game. And by tactical I don't mean a game where the decisions are largely tactical in nature - in many ways, granular right-now immediate decisions are kinda my whole thing - but rather tactical as in one of those games about small units fighting over possession of a single building or hilltop, the sorts of games with complicated LOS rules and op-fire and everything else that comes with it. Such games are very much not in my...

To some degree, almost all of my games are about controlling the balance - about pushing the system until it works in your favor, and preventing your opponent from doing the same. Deadlock-as-decision-space, yadda-yadda-yadda - I've done this song and dance before, and sure, when you've got to write roughly a hundred blog-things a year, you do find yourself returning to the same wells more than once. What I want to talk about today however is one aspect of this - about the state of the balance at the start of the game. It's very seldom in these sorts of...