Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

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...

In my last four choo-choo games - Iberian Gauge (2017), London & Northwestern (2018), The Soo Line (2018), and Dual Gauge (2020) - the game's structure is bifurcated into stock rounds and operating rounds. In Iberian Gauge, a stock round will continue until all players pass consecutively, giving players multiple chances to buy shares before the next set of ORs. But with the other three games, a player only gets a single go during the stock round, in which they are limited to the purchase of a single share. This does a couple of things. First, and most obviously, it...

In my younger and more vulnerable years, a publisher gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. At that time I thought I was a eurogame designer, and I had a eurogame under contract with said publisher. Never mind the game - it never came out - and never mind the publisher - they're not really active anymore.  The publisher had been very excited about the game, though, and naturally being a designer with exactly zero published games at that time, I was likewise excited about it. A few weeks later, though, they had...

The Soo Line is my sixth train game design. In some ways, it's similar to the others - for example, it's the fourth in a row to use some variation of the "track leasing" mechanism I introduced in Trans-Siberian. But it's also the most aggressively weird of my choo-choo games, which is the primary reason why I didn't offer it  to Winsome and we decided to go the Hollandspiele route instead.  The core bit of weirdness is that there are only three railroads to invest in, and the majority shareholder makes all decisions for the railroad. The game seats three...

We're a small company, and that's by design. Being small and somewhat marginal allows us to take creative risks without risking our financial well-being. While we've grown our business over the last two-plus years, adding titles to our catalogue, adding components such as cards and wood bits to our games, and winning over new customers, we've also been careful to try and control that growth, and to stay small.  Partially this is because we've seen countless other examples of small businesses that got too big too quickly, and then collapsed as the things that made it work as a small-and-scrappy...