Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — board games

We have been in business for one year. We started taking orders for our first release, The Scheldt Campaign, on August 16, 2016, and a couple of weeks ago, we released our seventeenth title, Seven Pines; or, Fair Oaks. Seventeen games in one year - that's not bad! In fact, that's more than we had originally intended. But Hollandspiele has had a way of defying, and exceeding, our expectations. Seven years ago, give or take, Mary and I first started talking seriously about publishing board games. At that time, I was designing mostly euro-style games, and our intention was to...

ears ago, when I had delusions of being a euro-game designer, I designed a game about monks in the dark ages copying the masterworks of antiquity. There was something like nine different actions a player could take, which were all somewhat related to one another. The crux of the game is that each player started with an identical set of action tiles, which they added to as they bought and placed new tiles, increasing the actions that were available to them (and, eventually, to other players). And so the rules for the game began by explaining the components and the...

As I've mentioned more than once, Mary is amazing. One of the reasons why she's amazing is that she stops me from doing dumb things. Don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure she once had to legitimately stop me from putting aluminum foil in the microwave, and also from wearing Velcro shoes to a professional interview. Recently I thought it was a smart idea to put fennel in twice-baked potatoes, and learned that it wasn't such a smart idea after all when we were eating said potatoes, and also two, three, and four hours later during repeated visits...

Whoopee ti yi yo, get along little cubies... Our intrepid cube wranglers were back at the table on Saturday, May 13th, riding some ornery chairs, and corralling over 30,000 little cubies for our upcoming Dynasty: The Era of the Five Dynasties by Richard Berg. Our cubepokes had much catching up to do and movies and television to discuss. The hungry and thirsty cubepokes partook of pizza, crazy bread, Dr. Pepper and Vernors from the chucktable. Just your typical fare for hardworking professional wranglers. Thank you to our cube wranglers for a wonderful afternoon. Whoopee ti yi yo! Cubies came in...

So, a few folks have asked, in various corners of the internet, why Optimates et Populares is a two-player game, instead of something that sits four or five, as you might typically see in other political games. I never really seriously considered designing it as a multiplayer game, and there are in retrospect a few reasons for that, so I thought I'd dig into 'em a bit here. From the start, the game was about poisonous, hyper-partisan deadlock. You have two well-defined sides in direct conflict with diametrically-opposed and mutually-exclusive goals, unwilling and unable to give an inch. Scoring points...