Today, we round out our pipeline announcements (last one for a while, I promise) with a very unique and exciting opportunity. Hawk & Dove has licensed the rights to develop and produce a second edition of Westphalia, designed by the inimitable Amabel Holland and first released in 2019. This game has a fascinating history, and who better to tell it than the designer herself. So, for this one, I’m turning it over to Amabel:
Westphalia started as a game about the Thirty Years War, an incredibly horrific conflict that stretched on and on not because its result was in doubt – the winners and losers were determined long before its conclusion – but because the various parties were trying to eke out minor advantages in concessions and territory. So during the peace negotiations, the diplomats would drag their feet hoping their guys in the field would win this battle or take this town, and then use that as a bargaining chip. They did this for years, and it made me so sad and so angry I had to make a game about it. That process took me about ten years.
Early on I decided the negotiations in the game would be pretty free-wheeling: anyone could trade anything for anything. The one problem with this of course is you get into situations where someone gets ahead and the other players stop trading with them, or yell at the player who does for kingmaking. The solution was to allow multiple players to win simultaneously, each player having their own victory condition, with the wrinkle that if all six players fulfill their victory conditions, then there's some pretty unfair scoring and only one player wins. These victory conditions are somewhat entangled with each other. I think one of the things I'm proudest of with the game is how well it models the political entanglement of the six polities the players represent.
But in order for all of this to work, you really do need six human players, with all roles represented, and I eventually decided that the game would sit exactly six and only six. Well, actually, I had decided on seven and only seven but then Mary Holland, the co-owner of Hollandspiele, pointed out that most games top out at six, and six wasn't as unreasonable an ask as seven. Even then, it's still a big ask, and while that limited sales, the game still did quite well when it released in late 2019.
Early in 2020, for obvious reasons, the game's sales fell off a cliff. Six and only six is not a great player count for folks in lockdown. The sales did improve over its last couple years in the Hollandspiele catalogue.
Folks have asked me why we took the game out of the catalogue, and there are a couple of answers to that. One, the game has too many wood bits. If you don't know, all the wood bits for Hollandspiele games are sorted and bagged by hand – in recent years, almost exclusively by me. The different bits are all stored in bins in the basement. For Westphalia, that's fifteen different bins, and there are different counts for each kind and color of wood bits. It's a lot of running up and down the stairs, a lot of fiddly counting, and honestly I just kinda started to hate putting the bits together whenever we were running low on copies of the game.
The other reason is the name on the box – the game was published under my previous name. I made a decision early in my transition that I wasn't gonna go back and revise the literally dozens of games Hollandspiele had published with my old name on it. I don't even have all the original files, so in some cases it would require brand new layout, redoing countersheets, asking artists to change copyrights on maps. I'd much rather put my energy toward new things. The name doesn’t exactly "bother" me, so much as it feels like someone else's. It makes the game feel like someone else's.
That's more true for Westphalia than for most of my other games. My brain functions differently on estrogen – it completely changed the way I think, the way I process information, and my approach to creating things. If I was making a game on this subject today it would be radically different. After seven years, it's clear the game had a few problems, and I knew if I started trying to fix them I would end up doing a total redesign. Like I said, I'd much rather put my time and energy into new projects, and I also feel it'd be a disservice to radically alter a game that has resonated with people.
When I took the game out of print, it was with the intention of finding a new home for it – someone that could handle the wood bits, that would put the name "Amabel Holland" on the box and materials, and that could give the game the tweaks it needs to shine while preserving the spirit of the original. I was ecstatic when Brooks Barber reached out to me about publishing the game through his company.
I had the pleasure of publishing Brooks's game Sykes-Picot, and I knew he would bring the same thoughtfulness and attention to detail to a second edition of Westphalia. I've been approached by other publishers wanting to republish some of my Hollandspiele titles before – some quite large publishers, in fact! – but this is the first time I've done it, because Brooks is the first person that's approached me that I felt I could trust with the task. I am eagerly looking forward to seeing what he makes of it.
Thanks, Amabel! I have to say that I am honored to be entrusted with this game, and with Amabel’s vote of confidence in what Hawk & Dove will be able to do with it. I agree with her assessment that it would be a disservice to totally overhaul the design of a game that has already resonated with so many people.
With that in mind, I reached out to a few folks I know for their comments on the game and the possibility of a second edition. Here’s what they had to say.
“I love Westphalia because it's a fun, chaotic negotiation wargame that captures the historical petulance of all the powers involved in the wheeling and dealing that concluded the 30 Years War. It's easy to teach and has a really fun asymmetric pseudo-cooperative puzzle.
For a second edition, I would love to see more evocative map art, player power mats (I've printed out my own from someone's excellent BGG versions), and a development pass on possibly rebalancing some of the victory conditions for the harder/easier powers (Austria and Bavaria, respectively).”
~Justin Fassino, designer of Seljuk: Byzantium Besieged, 1068-1071
“Westphalia is a breath of fresh air, and a genius design. It may be my favorite Amabel Holland game, which is a high bar for someone with her unparalleled body of work.
Too many wargames express conflict as a solely military endeavor, where fighting and conquering territory is the primary objective. Westphalia depicts warfare more realistically: as a political and economic endeavor meant to be achieved at as low a cost as possible. This is my favorite theme in wargames, and this game handles it brilliantly. You move forces and fight not because you think you can win, but because you know you’ve already lost and want to avoid feeling like all of that debt and bloodshed was for nothing.
Additionally, too many wargames express conflict as a zero-sum game, but Westphalia does not. The countries engaged in the war are completely interdependent, so victory conditions are unapologetically messy and require working with other players. In a time when many games are streamlined to the point of sterility, Westphalia portrays its subject matter with a fitting texture and complexity.
When I first heard rumors that Westphalia was being reprinted, my first thought was “I hope Brooks is printing it through Hawk and Dove,” knowing that he’d do it justice. I’m excited to have been right. I hope that the new edition of the game will avoid the temptation to streamline too much or change the tone. I hope it will keep a lot of the game’s subtle aesthetic touches (like representing all units as cubes of the same color, attached to armies of different colors, which implies an artificiality of national distinctions at the human level, a la Yoko Ono’s White Chess Set). I hope a new version will work to reduce the effort needed to learn the game, which is its greatest barrier to entry.”
~Akar Bharadvaj, designer of Chalice of Poison: The Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988
“Amabel Holland's Westphalia is one of those rare games that I wish I had designed. It's a marvelous diplomatic puzzle that has beguiled me for years.
I regard Westphalia as something like a great, unfinished masterpiece. It's a breathtaking accomplishment, even in its present form, but it begs for further development and refinement. With a little work, this could become an essential classic of diplomatic maneuver.”
~Cole Wehrle, designer of many cool games, y’all know who he is
I know there are many others who have played and love Westphalia. I can’t yet say what a second edition will bring, but I look forward to engaging deeply with the game, honoring its existing form, and creating a version of it that sits in line with its legacy. Our current plan is to launch this game sometime in 2028.
This brings our pipeline announcements to an end (for now). Painkillers, El Pulpo, Small Steps to Fight Fascism, and Westphalia give Hawk & Dove plenty to do over the next two years. Our work right now is primarily focused on the first two, but we will be chipping away at testing and development of the other two as well.
As always, thank you for reading this far, and for following Hawk & Dove on its journey to establish itself as a publisher of high-quality historical games. Your support and interest are what drive us forward.
Cheers,
~Brooks
