Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany
RESEARCH AND SCALE (by Tom Russell)
As any designer or publisher will tell you, game design is a lot of "playtest, playtest, playtest". But when designing wargames especially, it's also a lot of "research, research, research". If designing a wargame is about modeling the historical factors that influenced the course of a battle, campaign, or conflict, then determining those factors is a crucial part of the process. Not to mention, of course, finding the right map and coming up with a reasonably accurate order of battle. When I first started designing wargames, I had a paralyzing fear of getting something wrong. Someone who really knew their...
COVER STORY: MORE AGGRESSIVE ATTITUDES (by Tom Russell)
As I've mentioned more than once, Mary is amazing. One of the reasons why she's amazing is that she stops me from doing dumb things. Don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure she once had to legitimately stop me from putting aluminum foil in the microwave, and also from wearing Velcro shoes to a professional interview. Recently I thought it was a smart idea to put fennel in twice-baked potatoes, and learned that it wasn't such a smart idea after all when we were eating said potatoes, and also two, three, and four hours later during repeated visits...
TWO EAGLES AND A DOVE, PART 1 (by Tom Russell)
We're on twitter now (@hollandspiele, naturally), and recently participated in a rather lengthy discussion with a handful of folks about games and their thematic material. It began with An Infamous Traffic, but touched on my upcoming Charlemagne, Master of Europe, and also the venerable eurogame Puerto Rico, the holocaust "game" Train, and the video game Counter-Strike (a "masterpiece of dark and terrible brilliance", per Cole Wehrle) - you know, just how things roll on twitter. I mused out loud that I could probably get a blog post out of this, and some folks said, "yes, well, you should, please do",...
ON DESIGNS FOR OTHER PUBLISHERS (by Tom Russell)
Winsome Games recently announced (sort of) that one of my games would be coming out in this year's Essen Set. If you're a 100% grognard who has no time for trains unless they halve the cost of entering a hex, you might be only tangentially aware of Winsome and how they operate. The short version is that they release a handful of railroad games as a set each year at Essen. Winsome releases very little information about their games beforehand, and you basically need to commit to buying the set blind at 100 Euros. Said set comes in clamshells, with...
PLAN 1919 SETUP (by Tom Russell)
When Plan 1919 was released, there was some considerable discussion about the game's set-up. The short version is that both players are free to set up their forces as they please, and that this is neither a trivial decision nor a simple one. For the German Player especially, who is on the defensive, the decision has some serious repercussions, as he's faced with the challenging task of defending everywhere without sufficient strength to do so. A bad German set-up can make the game a blow-out for the Allies, and personally, I love that, because boy oh boy does that decision...