Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

At some point in the very early nineties, a new McDonald's restaurant opened up within walking distance of my house. This was a welcome addition for my siblings especially, as the only fast-food restaurants within walking distance were Arby's (which was much too expensive) and White Castle (which they abhorred). Both of those establishments were several blocks farther down the road, and in the opposite direction, from the McDonald's, and so it made sense that my brothers and sister would gravitate toward it; one of my brothers even got his first job there, and met the mother of his first...

A new turn begins: you draw up to your hand limit and survey your new cards. A three-ops card, yes, this is just what I needed. A card that might diminish your losses in battle, okay, I can work with that. That powerful special event you were hoping to see on the previous turn, well, better late than never. And then, there's that Mandatory Event card you absolutely did not want to see on this turn, or on any turn. It's the card that will undo your modest, hard-fought gains, the card that will destroy you, that will cheerfully assist...

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...

V. The Discreet and Subtle Charms of PanzerZug Immediately after checking in we collapsed on the bed, both of us hoping that the angry nest of hornets in our heads would dissipate with an hour or so of bed-rest. But when I woke nearly two hours later, if anything they were angrier. There had been tentative plans to meet Marcus, Travis, and some others at a local pub for a pre-con game of PanzerZug, but I was hardly in any shape for it, and Mary was worse off than I was. But I had wanted to play PanzerZug for a...

Years and years ago, when I still suffered from the delusion that I was a eurogame designer, one of my games was picked up by a small firm who never quite got around to publishing it. While that experience wasn't entirely a pleasant one, they did have several playtest groups at their disposal, and the feedback from those playtesters was generally useful and constructive, and made for a game that would have appealed to a broader audience than my original design if it had ever made it to market. Every time there was feedback, the publisher amended the ruleset, often...