Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

It's unusual to ask the graphic designer to write about their graphic work. (We can write as a rule, although I’m not sure it’s personally my forte). Mary and Tom's request for me to say a bit about my board for their upcoming game The Vote: Suffrage and Suppression in America was unexpected, but I’m going to see if I can say something useful and maybe even coherent with an outside chance of being informative. In designing a board, the first thing to do is gather the specs, the art direction, and the rules/playtesting components. You’d be surprised how often...

A year or more back, a designer of some repute sent us a game submission that we fell utterly and immediately in love with. It was so clever, so tight, so utterly charming and light on its feet. Now, we had no idea if the thing would sell or if it would flop. Just because we're excited and effusive about a game doesn't mean that anyone else will be. But the great thing about our print-on-demand model of course is that it so thoroughly mitigates financial risk that we could publish the thing anyway, and likely turn at least a...

Around the time that Charlemagne came out, I stealth-announced the next game in my series of "cup adjustment" solitaire games, Aurelian, Restorer of the World. A few months later, I started working on the rules, prototype map, and counter-mix, and then I had to set the whole thing aside while I tried (perhaps in vain) to put a dent in the ever-growing submission pile. Mary pointed out that since it says "Lead Game Designer and Chief Bottle-Washer" on my business card, that maybe I should take a break from the submission pile and design something, and also maybe wash some...

Early on during the design of With It Or On It, the first game in our Shields & Swords Ancients line, I decided that this series, unlike its medieval predecessor, would not have a single be-all end-all rulebook. This makes sense of course because the new series would be covering a much longer period of time, and feature more diverse fighting styles and technologies. I wish I could say that in my infinite wargame designer wisdom that I looked at the scope of the thing and that this approach was immediately self-evident. But, no, I only really decided on this...

Beginnings are always difficult, as the fellow said in Trouble in Paradise, and boy do I know it. I've spent two-plus hours banging my head against the wall, writing and then discarding one intro paragraph after another in seemingly fruitless attempts to get to the part where I talk about what I want to talk about, which is kinda apt and maybe even ironic, because what I want to talk about is starting a thing - an area where, the occasional stubborn blog-thing aside, I usually don't have many problems. I recognize of course that this isn't the case for...