Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

Sometimes folks will email me with questions about game design. This is not only very flattering, but it's also helpful, particularly when I need to write a blog-thing but haven't yet settled on a topic. The stars happened to align in just this way recently, and so here we are. The question was, When designing games and using mechanisms created by others, how do you avoid feeling like you're stealing from them? Specifically the designer in question was inspired by a game he loved to make something using similar mechanisms, and was worried that his own work would be too...

Part of my job is to answer rules questions. It's not something that I mind doing; I want folks to understand the games and to play them correctly. I also want to know what parts of the rules are easy to grok and which are harder to parse, because that helps me going forward. Rules-writing is, after all, a human endeavor, and since we humans are fallible, so too are the rules to our games, despite our best efforts. And rules-reading is itself also a human endeavor. What is clear to some gamers might not be clear to others. As...

Games are unusual in that they generally have the structure of a story (a beginning, a middle, and an end) but are not themselves stories. I don't build a plot or create characters, and I'm not leading you along from A to B to C. I'm not a storyteller; the idea is to create models and dynamics that allow you to tell your own stories. In the case of wargames, these stories are historical. The model is meant to isolate certain aspects of the historical event that the designer thinks were important and will help you understand how and why...

One of the many projects I've got on the backburner is a solitaire civ-building kinda-sorta legacy game. It has a neat twist that I'm going to keep to myself for the time being, but when I tell people about the game and about that twist, they get pretty excited and they very much want to know when the game is coming out, and why am I not working on it right now? And the reason why the thing is still on the backburner is that I have a problem with civ games in general, and that is the tendency of...

Shields & Swords Ancients is something I've been planning to do for a very, very long time - since before we started Hollandspiele, really - but which I've only gotten around to in the last while. Part of this is that I've had a few games that were critical and commercial successes (Supply Lines, Table Battles, Agricola) and so I prioritized more games along those lines (The Southern Strategy, the TB expansions, and Charlemagne, respectively) as well as idiosyncratic stuff like This Guilty Land and Westphalia. The S&S II series is something I enjoy, but it's far from being my...