Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany
SOME VERY QUICK THOUGHTS ON FORCED JUMPS (by Tom Russell)
When it comes to traditional abstract games, Chess is arguably the King (and Queen, and Bishop, and Rook). Only Go rivals it for popularity and fanaticism. Backgammon is older than both of them, and I actually find it more dynamic than Chess, but it hardly has the same following or the same kind of serious attention afforded to it. Only hardcore abstract enthusiasts have time for oddities like Nine Men's Morris or Fox and Geese, and even children get bored with Tic-Tac-Toe pretty rapidly. And then there's Draughts (or Checkers). Draughts gets a bad rap. At least in the...
DESIGNING WITH MY GUT (by Tom Russell)
My design process is often largely intuitive rather than analytical. So, for example, while I will certainly take a look at casualty returns when designing a game on an ACW battle, I'm not going to plug those returns into some kind of algorithm, or determine the average losses per battle per brigade over the course of a campaign in order to determine the fighting value of the unit, or the leadership ability of its general. Rather, I make these decisions with my gut, with what "feels" right. Then I try it out and see if it works. If it doesn't,...
FAIR (by Tom Russell)
PITCHING (by Tom Russell)
When I had delusions of being a eurogame designer, the worst part of the whole thing, besides finding out that Uwe Rosenberg had already come up with an idea two years before I did, was pitching games to publishers. I invested a lot of time and energy carefully drafting emails that would, I hope, convey the essence of the game without getting into too much detail but also without making the game sound too simple and also without saying anything that would turn them off. It was an exhausting process, and what made it more exhausting was the fact that...
ATTACK OF THE BOTS (by Tom Russell)
Most of our games are for two players, and like a lot of two-player wargames, there's relatively little to prevent a gamer from playing both sides when he lacks an opponent. One of the weirdest quirks of wargaming is that there's a long and storied tradition of solitaire play, a tradition that looks positively bizarre when viewed from the outside. Heck, when I first got into this side of the hobby, I thought it sounded absolutely bonkers and solipsistic. I soon learned better, and there are times when I even prefer solitaire play, particularly when I'm first learning a game....