Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

If you're reading this, you probably know how movement factors work. You move the unit from hex to hex (or square to square, or area to area, or whatever to whatever), expending a certain number of movement points for each hex entered. I'm going to assume that if you know that, you also know that a unit cannot exceed its movement factor, unless the rules make some kind of exception (for example, that the unit can always move one hex during a Movement Phase, even if it doesn't actually have sufficient MPs to enter that one hex). So, serious question...

Including the game I did for Winsome (Iberian Gauge) and our holiday freebie (Napgammon), I had ten game designs released last year. That's a personal record; 2016 and 2015 had only seen the release of nine games each. This year, if I manage to cross everything off my list, there'll be at least ten titles out there with my name on it, eight of which are Hollandspiele releases. I'm likely to do more; this time last year, I had no intention of designing Table Battles or brushing off For-Ex, two games that sold very well in the back-end of 2017,...

Today, a few brief words of advice about playtesting. Playtesting is of course the scalding hot viscera that brings these little Frankenstein monsters to life, and as might be expected by my choice of metaphor, it can be a messy, dangerous, and exhausting process. There's oodles and oodles of advice out there about how to choose testers, how to conduct tests, what to ask, with much of the advice often being contradictory. Really, you just have to find the method, or combination of methods, that will work best for you. But whichever method you choose - however you go about...

Sometimes you want to explore how logistical concerns dictated the ebb and flow of campaigning in the American Revolution. Sometimes you want a game that weaves together political, diplomatic, military, and propaganda into a complex simulation of recent world events. Or perhaps you want a quick filler game that reduces set-piece battles to a contest of wills dominated by feints and counterfeints. Maybe "unusual multiplayer dynamics, set in China" ticks off all your boxes, in which case, I've got news for you, as we have two of those in our catalogue!  There's certainly a market for all manner of unusual...

The first time I played Ty Bomba's Boom & Zoom, I opened with the equivalent of "1. e4", attempting to contest control of the center of the board: In Ty's notational system for this game, that'd be 1. 3T e1-Z-e4: that is, the three-piece Tower (3T) in e1 zooms (Z) to e4. Since each tower can fire (or "Boom") in eight directions, zooming to e4 would allow it to exert pressure on the maximum number of squares. This greatly restricts where my opponent can safely move, because there's only a handful of squares on their side of the board that...