Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

"Schlacht am Weißen Berg", 1620, Pieters Snayers. Imperial-Spanish forces under Johan Tzerclaes, Count of Tilly won a decisive victory at White Mountain in November 1620. When Mary and I first started serious discussions about Hollandspiele a little over a year ago, one of the many little ideas we kicked around was doing a little freebie game that we'd give away as part of our December Holiday Sale. People like getting free stuff, after all, and we thought it might serve as some slight additional incentive for people to purchase multiple games as part of the sale. Once we launched the...

Hex grids. Column shifts. Odds ratios. Zones of control. These are the essential, primordial building blocks of commercial wargaming, invented whole cloth – much like the hobby itself – by Charles S. Roberts and his Avalon Hill Game Company. Many gamers grew up playing the Avalon Hill titles before graduating to more sophisticated simulations. Since the hobby had already started to collapse when I was born, and had started to rebound and grow in new and interesting directions by the time I was aware that it even existed, I didn’t have that experience. My first wargames weren’t Avalon Hill boxed...

A partial section of a rough prototype map Designers, stop me if you've heard this one before: you create a new game after lots of immersive research. You have a solid set of mechanics that have been designed specifically to represent that historical conflict. You make up a rough map (in my case, using Photoshop) and a set of counters (in my case, scrawling on some sticker paper), and you sit down at the table to give it a spin. You don't expect everything to work - almost nothing ever does the first time around - but you're hoping that...

"Destroying Chinese War Junks", 1843, E. Duncan. The East India Company steamship Nemesis (right background) destroying Chinese war junks during the Second Battle of Chuenpi, 7 January 1841 When I was growing up, history was a list of wars. This was partly the fault of games. From an early age I played any game I could find and hunted for more. At yard sales I would rifle through stacks of Milton Bradley to dig up a tattered copy of Third Reich or Wooden Ships & Iron Men. These games shaped my understanding of history. At the school library I tended...

The second game in the Shields & Swords II series is House of Normandy, a “quad” containing four battles of the twelfth century. The first question a prospective purchaser would have is, why does this exist? Even among middle ages aficionados, there’s not a huge demand for games on this specific period. None of the battles are famous, nor really the commanders who took part; this is after William conquered, but before Richard became lion-hearted, a bit of history that bridges the gaps between two more interesting eras and as a result is often skimmed past. So, what gives? USS...