Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

  Ever since I was a little girl – before I even knew I was a girl – I was obsessed with movies about giant monsters stomping around, knocking down buildings, and beating the snot out of each other. More specifically, I was obsessed with movies where people in rubber suits pretended to be giant monsters stomping around et cetera. The artifice was part of the appeal. The fact that the buildings were constructed, that the tanks and planes that annoyed the monsters were models, that the monsters were people sweating under a couple hundred pounds of poorly ventilated rubber...

Eyelet is a roll-and-move game where you thread shoelaces through holes in a board. Each turn you roll two dice, and for each die, you must thread a lace through an empty hole that number of spaces distant. Neither player "owns" any of the laces on the board. If on your turn you're unable to complete both required moves, you lose. The object of the game, then, is to lay traps for your opponent, though in so doing you're also laying traps for yourself. Zugzwang! When I first announced the game late last year, a few folks assumed it was...

In my game Nicaea, various bishops and theological issues are represented by cards. But in game terms there's little practical difference between say Saint Nicholas of Myra and Saint Pope Alexander of Alexandria. It treats all the personages as mostly fungible, just as it treats the theological issues being debated as fungible. And this led a couple of folks to opine that the game was essentially themeless. "The names on the cards don't matter! There's no special effects for this person or that one, they're all the same!" The argument the game is making is that basically everyone was going...

The battle system for my block game Siege of Mantua wasn't quite where I wanted it. Don't get me wrong. The basic construction was very sound. The thing worked, and worked well. But it sometimes felt just a little loose – in the way that a shirt can be just a little too big. The short version is that on your go, you spend Commands to advance and attack with your troops. Said troops are randomly pulled from a pool of counters to reflect the uncertain morale situation in a given battle; that pool shifts over time, morale degrading when...

Publishing historical board games involves a lot of writing, or more accurately, a lot of rewriting. With few exceptions - I can count 'em on two hands with fingers left over - everything we publish (rules, background material, et cetera) gets a style pass. Now, this isn't a reflection on the quality of the writing done by the original designers. It's not about that. It's about how we as a publisher organize and present information to the reader, and about what we value in that presentation, what we want to emphasize. A good example of this is the historical background...