Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

As I write this, we are in the process of reviewing the maps for the first Dual Gauge expansion pack. This adds two new maps to the base game, Honshu, set on the main island of Japan, and Wisconsin, set in the mythical and fantastical land of Wisconsin. You’re probably wondering, wait a second, what about the base game, which has been out of print since early December? Well, the good news is that we finally got the wood bits we were waiting for, and are also starting the long and tedious process of sorting, counting, and bagging them, with...

When I was in my twenties, I was pretty clueless and very stubborn (a potent combination). I confused a love of puns with a personality (in addition to being clueless and stubborn, I was also unfunny). I was adamant that a reel mower was more effective than gas or electric (I was also cheap). I was pretty sure I was a boy (still scratching my head on that one). And I was convinced that a press-your-luck dice game about panama disease should not only exist, but should be about an hour long. This was monumentally dumb for a number of...

I try to avoid complicated and persnickety set-up procedures in my games. The last thing I want is a list of sixty or seventy units – this goes into hex 1011 and that one goes into hex 1012 – sprawled over the course of a couple pages. I’m much more likely to go “all your units set up on this side of this line, and all their units set up on that side” (cf. most of the Shields & Swords II games) or “this division sets up within two hexes of this hex” (cf. the Shot & Shell Battle Series)....

Designing a new game can be hard, but designing a new scenario for an existing system is relatively easy. Oh, it’s still work, still a matter of research, thoughtfulness, time, effort, and playtesting, but on the whole you already solved the big problems the first time around, and what you’re left with are smaller ones and the peaceful, steady hum of craft and process. And even this gets easier to do over time. We just published the fifth Table Battles expansion, The Grand Alliance, which adds six scenarios, bringing the total number in the series up to forty-five, and I...

Most of my games play in an hour or less. A small handful of games top out at two. And off the top of my pretty little head I can think of exactly two of my designs that take about three hours – Charlemagne, Master of Europe and Supply Lines of the American Revolution: The Northern Theater, 1775-1777, and heck, that last one, getting through the title alone takes about ten minutes. The games that eventually followed each of those releases – last year’s Aurelian, Restorer of the World and 2018’s Supply Lines of the American Revolution: The Southern Strategy...