Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

When Mary and I were working on getting Hollandspiele off the ground, we looked at several of my old designs to see if there were any I could brush off and, conceivably, sell to the wargamers who we figured would make up the bulk of our customer base. Agricola, Master of Britain was an obvious yes. So was my Crimea-set Blood in the Fog. One of our favorite games to play together was Supply Lines of the American Revolution: The Northern Theater, 1775-1777, and with just a little bit of prodding from Mary, I decided to hammer the game into...

I was pleasantly surprised that a number of folks were able to get Table Battles on the table within a few hours or minutes of receiving it, and that it seems to be hitting those tables frequently and enthusiastically. It's not that I think the game shouldn't be hitting tables regularly; I think it’s one of my strongest pieces of design, particularly on a mechanical level. So of course I think people should play it. I think people should play all of my games: that's what they're there for. But even something that's proven to be as popular as, for...

I spent my twenties without very many useful skills, but with an abundance of creative energy that I applied in many different directions, trying (sometimes quite desperately) to find something that worked. Film, novels, comics, video games, even music, despite the fact that I am by all accounts quite tone-deaf. I wasn't necessarily bad at all of these things, though in some cases, in retrospect, it felt like I was working against the format rather than in or with it. But all of my work was idiosyncratic, even aggressively weird, off-putting, and extremely personal - and so it utterly failed...

Years ago, Mary and I were talking with an actor about a role in one of our projects. He was a bit of an odd duck, to be honest. The project was about zombies (yes, yes, I know, I know) and he didn't know what zombies were, and when we explained it to him, he found the whole thing grotesque and sacrilegious, and maybe thought we were part of a Satanic cult? So, anyway, that didn't pan out. Before we went our separate ways, the actor did a little improv where he pretended to bump into us again some years...

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...