Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

So, a few folks have asked, in various corners of the internet, why Optimates et Populares is a two-player game, instead of something that sits four or five, as you might typically see in other political games. I never really seriously considered designing it as a multiplayer game, and there are in retrospect a few reasons for that, so I thought I'd dig into 'em a bit here. From the start, the game was about poisonous, hyper-partisan deadlock. You have two well-defined sides in direct conflict with diametrically-opposed and mutually-exclusive goals, unwilling and unable to give an inch. Scoring points...

  Scenarios are good and well, but one has to decide what rules to include and what kind of units to simulate. I wanted to avoid a boilerplate feeling where each nation plays the same relatively. After all, this period saw French tactical dominance whittled away by Dutch and British tactical innovations in both volley fire and thinner formations. Sweden, after a brief period of stunning military success, saw a stunning decline in power and military expertise, eclipsed by the rising states of Russia and Prussia. Bayonet charges were rare but coming into prominence. Artillery was mostly heavy and hard...

Horse & Musket covers the development of musket warfare from Vienna in 1683 and Sedgemoor in 1685 to Appomattox in 1865 and Königgrätz in 1866. After the American Civil War and the triumph of Prussian tactics at Königgrätz, warfare moved from muzzle loaded weapons to breechloaders. Volume I, titled Dawn of an Era, covers the years 1683-1720, which saw the conversion from pikes and matchlocks to bayonets and flintlocks.  If all goes well there will be five other volumes, each covering the development of linear musket combat. "The Battle of Königgrätz, July 3, 1866", Christian Sell, Lithograph, 1866. In the...

Blucher at Waterloo, the French at Inkerman, the Eagles at the Black Gate: nothing turns the tide quite so dramatically as the timely arrival of reinforcements. There are some battles (and, depending on the decisiveness of the battle, some wars) that would have went very differently if said reinforcements arrived later, or sooner, or not at all. But reinforcements can pose a problem when it comes time to simulate those battles with cardboard squares and a paper map. If, for example, so-and-so arrived at such-and-such a time, which in game terms corresponds to Turn 6, then I know and you...

When we took over Horse & Musket: Dawn of an Era, it had a sort of cover already, which designer Sean Chick used to advertise it on BGG. It's a very nice painting, and one that evokes the period - in fact, we used it on the cover of the rulebook - but wasn't really our style; we're not "nice painting on the cover" sort of publishers. We don't mind incorporating period artwork or photos into our box cover designs, and we do that more often than not; we just don't want to let that artwork do all the heavy...