Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

We didn't know Richard Berg very well, but we knew him well enough to know that we liked him.  This wasn't initially the case. For one thing, I didn't like any of Berg's games. For another, he had a reputation for being nasty and disagreeable. Early on, when Mary and I were drawing up a list of designers we wanted to work with, this was enough to keep him off it. And so, we didn't approach Richard. He approached us. He called us Hollanders, and, after he got to know us better, Russelloids. He pitched us a number of "ready-to-roll...

Richard Berg passed away Friday, 26 July 2019. We were honored to work with him on his game Dynasty. Shortly before we released Richard Berg's Dynasty, I got a message from a friend who wanted to know if I had played the game, and if it was any good. Well, of course I had played the game, and of course it was good; what kind of question is that? While I know there are some publishers who don't play their games before pushing them out into the world, that's not how Mary and I operate, and I can't imagine any...

This Guilty Land was a difficult and challenging project for a wide variety of reasons. Perhaps the most obvious is that I had to immerse myself in a subject that was depressing and enraging; it often left me exhausted. I acutely felt an overwhelming onus to treat that subject with sensitivity, to get it right; there were so many ways to get it wrong or handle it badly. Beyond that, there was an additional responsibility to clearly and effectively communicate what the game was and what it was not, and how I was handling such a fraught subject. We had...

It's January of 2012, and I've just found a publisher for what would be my first published game, Blood on the Alma. The publisher is very impressed with the design. He's excited; I'm excited; Mary's excited; everyone's excited, except perhaps our cats, who react with typical indifference. There's one hitch, though: the game has too many counters. Including all the variant scenario counters and status markers, there's 210 of them, and to fit in the magazine, I need to get it down to 120. Many of these are step counters - the way the game works is that each unit...

The scale of my Shields & Swords II titles has always been somewhat fungible. Hexes don't represent a specific, consistent distance from one title to another. The units do not represent a set number of men (especially as, for some battles, nailing this down with any certainty is next to impossible, given the exaggerations common in the source material). And each turn does not represent a given, defined period of time. There are some folks for whom this kind of thing is a supreme abrogation of a wargame designer's solemn duty to ensure the unity of, and historical accuracy within,...