Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Tom Russell
HOURS IN THE DAY (by Tom Russell)
Not to belabor the obvious, but running a games company takes work, and work takes time, and time is a finite resource. There are twenty four hours in a day (slightly less if we're being pedantic), and at least a handful of those need to be spent sleeping. Like most folks, I spend five days out of seven at work for at least eight hours, and like some folks, I spend an hour each morning and an hour each evening commuting from my home to my workplace. That leaves, on a weekday, a window of about four or five hours...
CHADWICK'S BATTLE FOR MOSCOW (by Tom Russell)
Russian stamp commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Moscow The first wargame I ever played was James Dunnigan's Drive on Metz, which I constructed following the instructions in his Complete Wargames Handbook. It was... kinda boring, actually. The game was limited to a very small map with very few units, and as a simple, introductory game, it had very few rules. But there wasn't all that much going on; it was too constrained, too simple, too blah. It didn't feel like much of a game; it was more like an exercise. I was, however, somewhat casually intrigued by...
TEE-EEE-CEE (by Tom Russell)
Detail of Plan 1919 map, map art by Ilya Kudriashov I've tried, with varying degrees of success and failure, to impart my love of wargaming to others. Sometimes it's an uphill battle. I've had folks who told me they weren't interested in war (but who started playing Call of Duty immediately after abandoning our game of Hammer of the Scots). I've had folks who weren't thrilled with the cardboard and paper. There have been surprisingly few people who have had problems with odds ratios, for all the hay that's been made about math anxiety. Extra little chrome rules don't pose...
THE OPT-POP DIARIES, PART 2 (by Tom Russell)
The curia was the meeting house of the Roman senate. The Curia Julia, pictured here, was begun by Julius Caesar and necessitated by the increase of senators from 600 to 900. The old curia, Curia Cornelia, was torn down and officially replaced by Curia Julia. Begun by Julius Caesar in 44 BC, it was completed by Augustus Caesar in 29 BC. In AD 94, Domitian rebuilt the Curia using Julius Caesar's original plan. The building was damaged by fire in AD 283 and later restored by Diocletian. In AD 630, Pope Honorius I transformed the property, presumably no longer...
WARGAMING AND POINT OF VIEW (by Tom Russell)
Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus, Roman senator and historian, born sometime in the 50's AD, sits outside the Austrian Parliament Building in Vienna. On a recent episode of the 1 Player Podcast, they discussed wargames in general, and my solitaire design Agricola, Master of Britain in particular. One of the gents on the program mentioned that pretty much everything we know about Agricola's life and campaigns comes to us from Tacitus, his son-in-law. We know very little about the indigenous peoples of Britain during the same period - only what Tacitus tells us, much of which is suspect. (For example,...