Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game publishing

There's an old chestnut that once you start making games yourself, you don't really have time to play anything but your own, and for me, that's more-or-less true. Every once in a while I manage to pull it off though, and I usually learn something from the experience. I actually got another publisher's game on the table recently, and I feel like the game was really let down by that publisher.  Now, it'd be pretty crummy for me to get on my little soap box and tear down another publisher, and being that we're some weird fringe thing that exists...

Before there was a Hollandspiele, there was a "Hollandspiele", the vague idea that Mary and I wanted to publish board games. We talked about it periodically for several years before we took the plunge, and there were a number of reasons for the delay. We needed some practical experience. I needed to learn my craft as a designer, and I wanted to develop some kind of reputation that could jump-start the proceedings. And then, of course, there was the fact that we didn't have any money. For years we existed perpetually on the brink of financial collapse and disaster. Being...

We deal with a handful of manufacturers - one for cards, one for wood bits, Blue Panther for everything else - and as you might expect, these manufacturers send us bills. We pay them promptly and in full, just as we pride ourselves on paying our artists and our designer royalties promptly and in full. Before we do though, we check over the bills to make sure everything is as it should be, because even with excel formulas doing the heavy-lifting, we're all still human beings and we sometimes make mistakes. Sometimes the manufacturer over-charges us, and when we bring...

In the days before Hollandspiele, I pitched a lot of publishers on a lot of games, and got a lot of rejections. I didn't really take any single one of them personally, though cumulatively, taken together, it did start to grind me down a little. The rejections that irked me the most were the ones that took the form of, "This is great, I had a lot of fun, but there's no way I could ever sell enough of these to justify printing it. If you ever get it published, I'll buy a copy, but if I publish it I'm...

Sometimes you want to explore how logistical concerns dictated the ebb and flow of campaigning in the American Revolution. Sometimes you want a game that weaves together political, diplomatic, military, and propaganda into a complex simulation of recent world events. Or perhaps you want a quick filler game that reduces set-piece battles to a contest of wills dominated by feints and counterfeints. Maybe "unusual multiplayer dynamics, set in China" ticks off all your boxes, in which case, I've got news for you, as we have two of those in our catalogue!  There's certainly a market for all manner of unusual...