Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

The primary currency in my Optimates et Populares design is Political Will (PW), with each action you take or attempt costing some amount of it. Small things cost less PW and big things cost more PW. This is a familiar concept for most gamers, which goes by various names: Operations Points, Action Points, Resource Points, etc. Usually you get these points in games randomly by playing cards, or you earn them by controlling certain areas on a map. It's a necessary abstraction that simulates not so much the actual choices made by leaders and commanders - Lincoln didn't fret over...

I had a pretty good idea about how I would approach the cover for Plan 1919 even before John Gorkowski had designed the game. Part of this is that I had spent several months trying (and failing) to design my own game on the topic before Mary and I asked Mr. Gorkowski to take a whack at it. Which is one of the great things about running a games company: if you want a game to exist on a topic, but can't do it yourself, you can ask someone else whose talents are better suited to that topic. And with...

Not to belabor the obvious, but running a games company takes work, and work takes time, and time is a finite resource. There are twenty four hours in a day (slightly less if we're being pedantic), and at least a handful of those need to be spent sleeping. Like most folks, I spend five days out of seven at work for at least eight hours, and like some folks, I spend an hour each morning and an hour each evening commuting from my home to my workplace. That leaves, on a weekday, a window of about four or five hours...

Russian stamp commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Moscow The first wargame I ever played was James Dunnigan's Drive on Metz, which I constructed following the instructions in his Complete Wargames Handbook. It was... kinda boring, actually. The game was limited to a very small map with very few units, and as a simple, introductory game, it had very few rules. But there wasn't all that much going on; it was too constrained, too simple, too blah. It didn't feel like much of a game; it was more like an exercise. I was, however, somewhat casually intrigued by...

Detail of Plan 1919 map, map art by Ilya Kudriashov I've tried, with varying degrees of success and failure, to impart my love of wargaming to others. Sometimes it's an uphill battle. I've had folks who told me they weren't interested in war (but who started playing Call of Duty immediately after abandoning our game of Hammer of the Scots). I've had folks who weren't thrilled with the cardboard and paper. There have been surprisingly few people who have had problems with odds ratios, for all the hay that's been made about math anxiety. Extra little chrome rules don't pose...