Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

In our last installment, we looked at the knotty problem of how wargames deal with, or more accurately, don't deal with, their subject. Bloodshed and suffering is elided. No World War II game deals in any meaningful way with the horrors of the holocaust, and few games on the American Civil War bother with that war's underlying cause, slavery. Everything is viewed through the prism of maneuver; to come back to that Kubrick quote, it's all about those two majestic eagles viewed from afar, and not about the dove they're tearing to bloody shreds. But if we're playing that game,...

This morning (a Wednesday), Mary and I went to Cranbrook, the oldest manor house in the Detroit area, and spent a couple of hours wandering about a small portion of its forty acres. It was pleasant and warm, but about ten degrees cooler than it's been the last couple of days, which made being out-of-doors more tolerable. When it got too hot, a breeze coming off the pond provided some relief. Dragonflies and butterflies fluttered about, as well as several small rust-colored insects.  A little ways from the pond, the only relief from the sun was provided by a short...

We went to Origins last Friday. It was a somewhat impromptu thing. If you've been following us on Facebook or our podcast, you know that our convention plans for this year were limited to attending CSW Expo in Tempe, and that our plans were derailed by another installment in Tom's Lower Back Strikes Back (c'mon, Hollywood, enough with the sequels and reboots already!). With our convention budget being freed up, we decided we'd go to Origins for a day trip - much less ambitious than driving a couple of thousand miles from Detroit to Tempe! - and felt Friday sounded...

Sometimes, a cover starts with a sketch. (The word sketch is probably being overly generous, given that my drawing skills leave a lot to be desired.) This was the case with Operation Unthinkable. I started by sketching out the cover on a small scrap of paper. A quick sketch, of course, and an imprecise one: the box proportions are roughly there, but are a little too long, and thus a bad approximation of the actual canvas. The text is in my trademark illegible scrawl, and thus it's very irregular and lacks any sense of proportion. Once I select a typeface...

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...