Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany
FROM THE ARCHIVES: TERSE (by Tom Russell)
Part of my job is to answer rules questions. It's not something that I mind doing; I want folks to understand the games and to play them correctly. I also want to know what parts of the rules are easy to grok and which are harder to parse, because that helps me going forward. Rules-writing is, after all, a human endeavor, and since we humans are fallible, so too are the rules to our games, despite our best efforts. And rules-reading is itself also a human endeavor. What is clear to some gamers might not be clear to others. As...
YEAR FOUR, PART TWO OF TWO (by Tom Russell)
Continuing and concluding our look at our fourth year in business. Last time, I gave a general overview of the year - spoiler alert, it wasn't exactly a fun year - and looked at our releases dating from August 2019 through our Hollandays Sale. This time, I'll be covering what we've released over the last eight months. Kingdom of Dyflin 2020 started with this expansion to my 2018 design Great Heathen Army. This added four new battles to the boxed game's original eight, and consisted of only a scenario booklet - no extra counters or maps. Partially this was a...
FROM THE ARCHIVES: QUANTITY (by Tom Russell)
Including the game I did for Winsome (Iberian Gauge) and our holiday freebie (Napgammon), I had ten game designs released last year. That's a personal record; 2016 and 2015 had only seen the release of nine games each. This year, if I manage to cross everything off my list, there'll be at least ten titles out there with my name on it, eight of which are Hollandspiele releases. I'm likely to do more; this time last year, I had no intention of designing Table Battles or brushing off For-Ex, two games that sold very well in the back-end of 2017,...
YEAR FOUR, PART ONE OF TWO (by Tom Russell)
Our third year in business, ending August 2019, was one of the hardest. Much of it was dominated by the long illness and eventual passing of our beloved cat Claws. That was the main focus of our time and energy, and as a result, we didn't release very many games. This was a problem for two reasons. One, our business model is centered around an aggressive release schedule, as the release of new titles remains our primary driver of sales. That model also depends on flexibility and relatively quick turnaround times. Early on, we could sign a game and expect...
FROM THE ARCHIVES: OWNING IT (by Tom Russell)
Before there was a Hollandspiele, there was a "Hollandspiele", the vague idea that Mary and I wanted to publish board games. We talked about it periodically for several years before we took the plunge, and there were a number of reasons for the delay. We needed some practical experience. I needed to learn my craft as a designer, and I wanted to develop some kind of reputation that could jump-start the proceedings. And then, of course, there was the fact that we didn't have any money. For years we existed perpetually on the brink of financial collapse and disaster. Being...