Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Tom Russell

Note: I recently partook in a "how did you get into board games?" thread over at BGG, and Mary and I decided that a post might be of sufficient interest to warrant republication on the Hollandspiele blog. And so, here we are. When I was a kid, I loved to play chess and Othello/Reversi, despite the fact that I was terrible at both, and I remember playing Risk at my grandfather's house. And we had Monopoly, Uno, etc. So, fairly typical childhood exposure to board games. How I got into modern games... it's kind of a long, but hopefully mildly...

At the end of each of Agricola, Master of Britain’s game turns, you’re required to have met or exceeded a certain Victory Point threshold in order to stay in the game and, eventually, to win the game at the end of Turn 8. The thing to keep in mind is that you don’t earn VP for what you did on that particular turn, but on what you did over the course of all the previous turns. That is, each thing that scores you VP will score you that VP on every subsequent turn so long as the condition applies. Therefore,...

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......

So, we've been in business now for a little over a month. For the most part, everything is going according to our diabolical plan: people are buying the games, people are liking the games, people are talking about the games. We've kept up fairly regularly with our social media obligations, updating Facebook a few times a week, checking BGG and CSW daily for questions and concerns and then answering them, and producing articles for this blog at a fairly steady pace. We're not yet in the black, but we're not that far in the red, either. Our profit margin is...

Last week, I discussed the long, stumbling process by which Agricola, Master of Britain was transformed into a solitaire game, and got into some detail about how and why the central cup adjustment mechanism works the way it does. Almost as central as, and spinning out of, that same mechanism is the game’s army-building and battle system. It likewise underwent a dramatic transformation as the game was transformed from two-player contest to solitaire design, though a couple of key elements remained the same. What’s strange is that, perhaps more than anything else, it was these aspects of the original two-player...