Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

In 2010, I began designing my first-ever wargame. It was something I did as a lark; as a sailor might say in salty language, "for ships and giggles". I was a Very Serious Eurogame Designer who was going to have a Very Serious, Prestigious, and Profitable Career designing mid-weight Euros. Just to be eclectic though I thought it'd be fun to do a wargame now and then on the side, and perhaps a nerdy train game. Of course, the way things panned out, I couldn't sell the Euros. The wargames sold, as did the nerdy train games, and so here...

Sometimes, your blog has articles about game design and development, or what it's like to spend your time making games, and sometimes it's Saturday night and you still don't have something for next Tuesday yet, and so you have no choice but to run a piece you wrote in 2014 about a sandwich you ate once. This is one of those times. Sometimes, I purchase the McChicken sandwich at McDonald's. I'd rather eat real food, but hey, it's a sandwich for a dollar, so I can't expect too much. I don't want to say that I necessarily like it, the...

Oh no, not another short blog article about elements of classic abstract games! What can I say, guys? I'm on a kick. Zugzwang is a concept in chess theory that refers to a serious disadvantage created by your compulsion to move. That is, because you need to do something on your turn, even when you would really rather not, you may be forced to fatally compromise your position. It's a function, like so many other things, of tempo and leverage. A player who has the tempo dictates the terms of the match; his opponent is stuck reacting to what the...

I used to be very wary of solitaire wargames. Not, mind you, of playing two-player wargames solitaire, but of honest-to-gosh solitaire designs. Partially, my reticence was somewhat aspirational: I might be playing both sides in this WW2 game, but the possibility existed that someday, someone who would dig the game would be sitting on the other side of the table. Whereas if I plunked down some of my hard-earned cash for a solo-only title, that possibility - however rarified and improbable - no longer existed. And, when you're on the sort of budget where you can only buy maybe five...

The scale of my Shields & Swords II titles has always been somewhat fungible. Hexes don't represent a specific, consistent distance from one title to another. The units do not represent a set number of men (especially as, for some battles, nailing this down with any certainty is next to impossible, given the exaggerations common in the source material). And each turn does not represent a given, defined period of time. There are some folks for whom this kind of thing is a supreme abrogation of a wargame designer's solemn duty to ensure the unity of, and historical accuracy within,...