Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

You nudge your little square division to the front, compare its attack factor of 4 to the enemy's defense factor, and roll the die: ugh, a six, AL, attacker loss. You flip the counter to its reverse side, reducing its attack factor to 2. Half the cardboard men under your command are dead. Only they're not, because as all grognards know, and as many rulebooks are quick to point out, a step loss doesn't represent death, but simply a reduction in effective fighting strength. That's bloodshed and wounds and prisoners, sure, but also general discombobulation and dispersal, exhaustion, morale collapse,...

In several of Ty Bomba's wargames, including Hollandspiele's own Operation Unthinkable, each player decides how they want to structure their turn: a move phase followed by combat, a combat phase followed by movement, or twin combat phases. Mr. Bomba explained the concept thusly in an interview with the fine folks at The Player's Aid:  It’s a way of cleanly modeling all kinds of command-control and logistical limits without a lot of specific rules. Essentially, it forces you to create a point of concentration (“Schwerpunkt,” as the Germans would say) and give it your full support by picking the phase sequence...

Throughout my life, from my childhood until the present day, I've had brief, intense periods in which I became obsessed with chess. It's an irresistible compulsion, the gaming equivalent of pon farr. After a few days or weeks, the fever passes. This waning of my sudden affection is helped along by the fact that I've always been pretty rubbish at chess. I've no head for playing competitively nor competently.  I'm a much better fit for backgammon, a game I came to late in life, but deliberately and by choice. That is to say, at an early age, someone decided I...

So last time I wrote about how a bad first impression with a game can make folks unlikely to try it a second time. There might be great and hidden depths that reveal themselves after x number of plays, but many folks aren't going to ever get to x. Or, as John Brieger put it, "you have a problem if it requires weeks of playing constantly for players to achieve the level of knowledge to make the game balanced." The thing is, I don't know if that really is a problem. I mean, yes, it is a problem, in the...