Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

 Early in 2017, we agreed to publish Tim Taylor's At All Costs, a sequel to their To The Last Man, hoping to release it later that year. As it's now 2020 and we're about a month away from publication, it's taken a bit longer than that. Partially this was about giving Tim the time needed to finalize the design, partially this was about giving us the time we needed to playtest. Our implementation of the game involves printing directly on some specialty wood bits, and so we had to spend some time experimenting with that, in addition to the usual...

A few years back, I discovered backgammon. Now, of course I had heard of backgammon, and we even had a backgammon set growing up. Apparently it was one of my father's favorite games. That always makes me a little sad. I didn't know my father very well - he always felt distant, and I always felt isolated. He took my brothers fishing (I was squeamish) and went to their wrestling matches (I was a skinny little runt). If I had discovered and fell in love with backgammon before he died, I'd like to think that we'd have that, at least,...

I had a problem: the players in my highly-interactive game weren't interacting. The Vote tasks one player (Equality) with agitating for a more democratic American society, while their opponent (Supremacy) has to fight them tooth and nail. Equality tries to build popular support, Supremacy tries to confuse the issue with the usual bad faith arguments and calls for unreciprocated civility. Equality tries to garner enough votes for change, Supremacy suppresses them. Equality gets laws passed, Supremacy gets them overturned. And of course while Supremacy is trying to prevent Equality from pursuing their victory, they're trying to rack up points by...

In 2010, I began designing my first-ever wargame. It was something I did as a lark; as a sailor might say in salty language, "for ships and giggles". I was a Very Serious Eurogame Designer who was going to have a Very Serious, Prestigious, and Profitable Career designing mid-weight Euros. Just to be eclectic though I thought it'd be fun to do a wargame now and then on the side, and perhaps a nerdy train game. Of course, the way things panned out, I couldn't sell the Euros. The wargames sold, as did the nerdy train games, and so here...

Probably the thing I'm most terrified of is jellyfish. Mary found this out when we were watching a movie in the theater - I don't recall which one, but there was a shark who was a bad guy - and suddenly there were jellyfish on the screen and my whole body seized up. I was holding her hand at the time because that's the kind of mushy stuff we're into, and as a result, I squeezed her hand too hard. After the movie, I tried to explain it to her - their monstrous appearance, their vicious sting, and above all...