Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — An Infamous Traffic

The design of An Infamous Traffic’s cover began with a surprisingly rejection. Mary and Tom had both loved the design of the game. They had loved the look of my playtesting counters, and they had loved the map. They did not, however, liked the cover. What more could they want?! This cover had everything. It had fancy typography and it had a pretty painting. What historical game box could want more? Well, it turns out that they both had strong opinions about covers. Wargame cover design over the past fifteen years or so has followed the Rodger B. MacGowan school...

They're here! The cubes for An Infamous Traffic have arrived. It took slightly longer to pay for them then it did for them to land on our doorstep. (You can read about our adventures in international finance here.) On Saturday, 1 October, Tom and Mary had a cube party! Friends were invited. Friends came. Friends spent their Saturday afternoon bagging 10,000 tiny blue cubes, and talking movies, Steven Universe, ballet, board games and just catching up. So, with meager provisions... ...our intrepid cubepokes began to corral them little cubies.  And the pile of cubes... ...grew smaller... ...and smaller... ...and smaller......

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 to ignore the books that didn’t concern armed conflict. History was a list of battles and all the rest was window dressing. Of course, this was also partly...