Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

In November of 2017, I wrapped up development on the second game in our Shot & Shell Battle Series, a treatment of the Battle of the Alma River in the Crimean War. The Heights of Alma would be my second bite at that particular apple, it having served as the subject of my first published game, 2012's Blood on the Alma. That development process started by getting my debut game back on the table. I hadn't played it in over four years, and remembered bits of it only dimly. As I started to push the counters around the map, I...

NATO Air Commander is a love letter to 1980s Cold War Gone Hot games like NATO: The Next War in Europe (VG, 1983), The Third World War series (GDW, 1984), and Red Storm Rising (TSR, 1989). In all of those games, you basically control the progress of a ground war in Central Europe between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. I suppose my attraction to this era and type of game comes from my youth. My earliest memories are of Ronald Reagan. I can remember how much the idea of a big war in Europe seemed like an inevitability rather than...

I have used an odds-based CRT in two of my wargame designs, and the second one only counts if you consider Napgammon a wargame. The eternal and interminable question of what is a real wargame very much aside, one might wonder why that is: do I dislike odds-based CRTs or something? Well, no; I actually rather like them. I've played and enjoyed a number of games that trot out this oldest and warhorsiest of old warhorses. Heck, Mary and I have published such games.  So, no, I've got no beef with comparing the strength of the attacker to that of...

The 18XX has a reputation for being the heavy gamer's heavy game, to the point where there is a small but passionate number of folks who literally play nothing else. I enjoy them myself, at least to a point: I'm fairly rubbish at them, and because even the shorter ones take a while to play (with not-insignificant downtime) I haven't played any of them often enough to acquire any kind of competency. There's a learning curve for the series as a whole and for each of the better games in particular, and I'm still at the bottom of that incline,...

Today I'm going to talk about this year's freebie holiday game, Absolutely Aces. You might be wondering why the heck I'm talking about a game that won't be out for two whole months - usually the blog-thing about the holiday sale freebie game goes up just before the holiday sale. And the short version is that we just got our proof copy in the mail from the card printer, so I've been playing it a lot, and because I've been playing it a lot, I've been thinking about it a lot - and we need a blog-thing for Friday and...