Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany
HOW TO PLAY TABLE BATTLES (by Tom Russell)
Like many of my designs, Table Battles is a fragile game, one in which the game state is prone to sometimes gentle and sometimes severe distortion. A player who obtains an advantage can see that advantage rapidly increase over time, and even become decisive and irreversible. The trick is to stop the other guy from getting one over on you in the first place, and to put him in a position where you can get one over on him. So both players should have this goal in mind, and should be working toward maintaining deadlock until it's to their advantage...
NEXT TURN, I'LL ATTACK (by Tom Russell)
A common complaint about a certain type of wargame is that attacks can be much more frequent (and sometimes much more decisive) than they were historically. Especially in games where factor-counting figures into it, there's a tendency to pile as many counters up near the front-line as possible, and to attack every turn with everything you've got provided the attack isn't a stupid or pointless one. As a result of this, many wargames are "bloodier" than the real thing - if the removal or flipping of a small square of cardboard can truly by said to be "bloody" - with...
ON THE INSIDE LOOKING OUT (by Tom Russell)
I. AT THE BAKERY Mary and I were at the grocery store earlier today to get a round loaf of nice Italian bread for grilled cheese sandwiches (mayo on the bread instead of butter, with extra-sharp pinconning, a local delicacy). Mary had the woman working in the bakery slice the bread for us, and the woman recognized me from the time I had worked for the city library. I recognized the sound of her voice - she had a heavy Polish accent. She also remembered me from the time I ran for mayor while wearing a fuzzy yellow bathrobe and...
TABLE BATTLES PLAY EXAMPLE (by Tom Russell)
In this play example, we'll be looking at the first few turns of the Marston Moor scenario. THE SITUATION Each player has seven formation cards, with five formations being active at the start of the battle. For both sides, these five formations include two cavalry, two infantry, and an artillery card. The active infantry are roughly similar on both sides: they're limited to placing one die per turn, and when they attack, they do one hit per die while taking a hit themselves for launching the attack. One of the two infantry cards on each side can place only sixes,...
COVER STORY: TABLE BATTLES (by Tom Russell)
With any cover design that I do, I try to find the simplest and boldest way to represent the game and its theme. Sometimes I succeed - Supply Lines seems to pull this off rather well, as does the cover for the forthcoming Wars of Marcus Aurelius. But Table Battles isn't about a specific battle, personage, or era. It is, instead, about everything. The base set covers some four hundred years of warfare, bridging between the late Medieval period and the American Revolutionary War, but expansions will go back into the days of Alexander and leap forward into the twentieth...