Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — wargames

Throughout my life, from my childhood until the present day, I've had brief, intense periods in which I became obsessed with chess. It's an irresistible compulsion, the gaming equivalent of pon farr. After a few days or weeks, the fever passes. This waning of my sudden affection is helped along by the fact that I've always been pretty rubbish at chess. I've no head for playing competitively nor competently.  I'm a much better fit for backgammon, a game I came to late in life, but deliberately and by choice. That is to say, at an early age, someone decided I...

The first time I met Cole Wehrle, at Origins this year, I was somewhat startled by his appearance. Not that, mind you, there was anything wrong with his appearance; there wasn't. But for years, I had known of him mostly through his presence on Board Game Geek, where his avatar is a Winsor McCay drawing of Little Nemo in an admiral's uniform. I'm not saying that I expected him to look like that, any more than I would expect Charles Vasey to look like Charlie McCarthy, or that I would expect myself to look like a hexagon with an "H"...