Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

It doesn't really bother me when people slag on my games. My games are often somewhat experimental and can be abrasive, so I can't expect everyone to dig them. Honestly, I'm surprised whenever a game does resonate with a larger audience. As long as the people who like the game like it, I don't really care about the folks that don't - and our production model gives me that luxury. That's not to say that I ignore the bad notices; quite the contrary! Negative feedback forces me to question my work - gives me useful doubts. This, in turn, helps...

In November of 2017, I wrapped up development on the second game in our Shot & Shell Battle Series, a treatment of the Battle of the Alma River in the Crimean War. The Heights of Alma would be my second bite at that particular apple, it having served as the subject of my first published game, 2012's Blood on the Alma. That development process started by getting my debut game back on the table. I hadn't played it in over four years, and remembered bits of it only dimly. As I started to push the counters around the map, I...

I'm working on this year's Table Battles expansion, The Grand Alliance, which covers battles drawn from the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession. Among them is the Battle of Fleurus. This is the 1690 Battle of Fleurus, naturally, not the 1622 or 1794 or 1815 - though that does remind me that tucked back in the old noggin is the idea to do a Table Battles expansion called "Battles of X", where every scenario is a different battle from a different time period, but all of them have the same name. Anyway. The cool thing about...

I've been designing wargames for a while now. Back in my salad days - during which time I was actually a lot more carnivorous than I am today in my non-salad days - I was a little obsessed with obtaining an accurate order of battle, and more than a little terrified that I was going to botch it. I assumed that I would make some seemingly small mistake - a misplaced regiment here, an imagined brigade there - and that my design's ability to function as a simulation would be fatally compromised. This panic was only helped along by the...

Every year we do a Horse & Musket Annual, a collection of twenty new scenarios drawn from the periods covered by the box games published up until that time. Last month, we just released the second, and earlier this month we put out the call for entries for next year's. The first time, series designer Sean Chick and developer Doug Miller asked me if I wanted in on the action, and I said I would try to come up with something, but I ultimately failed to do so. It was the same story for year two, and I was determined...