Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Tom Russell
(RE)MAKING SHIELDS & SWORDS, PART TWO: THE SYSTEM (by Tom Russell)
"Battle of Grunwald", Jan Matejko, 1878, 426×987cm So, last time I touched on the history of the original Shields & Swords games, how they sold, why the folio series was cancelled, and why it made sense for Mary and I to resurrect it for Hollandspiele as Shields & Swords II. Today, I'm going to explain the mechanics of the system, how it was tweaked by each of the four S&S games, and how S&S II differs from that iteration. The core of the system is that each player has one or more color-coded Wings, with each Wing made up of...
(RE)MAKING SHIELDS & SWORDS, PART ONE: BIDNESS (by Tom Russell)
COUNTERFACTUAL - THE SCHELDT CAMPAIGN (by Tom Russell)
When Mary and I started talking about the feasibility of publishing games ourselves, one of the prime topics of discussion was how to keep down the costs of the artwork, while still paying our artists a rate that we felt was equitable and fair for their labor and talent - a tricky balance, to be sure. I know when I was developing pack-in games for Yaah! magazine that I had to adhere to a pretty strict art budget. One artist completed his work for a few hundred bucks at a hefty discount as a favor to me and to Mark....
HERE WE GO
Hollandspiele is a new company dedicated to the publication of historically-based wargames in handsome and affordable boxed editions. You're probably asking, "Okay, so what makes you any different than any other wargames company popping up these days?" And, sure, that's a fair question, and it's one we've thought about for a long time. The answer is a bit... complicated. Because it's not like we went into this thinking up a sexy "hook" or gimmick that we can use to stand out for the sake of standing out. We didn't spend a whole lot of time trying to gin up a...