Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

I was pleasantly surprised that a number of folks were able to get Table Battles on the table within a few hours or minutes of receiving it, and that it seems to be hitting those tables frequently and enthusiastically. It's not that I think the game shouldn't be hitting tables regularly; I think it’s one of my strongest pieces of design, particularly on a mechanical level. So of course I think people should play it. I think people should play all of my games: that's what they're there for. But even something that's proven to be as popular as, for...

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...

Sometimes, your blog has articles about game design and development, or what it's like to spend your time making games, and sometimes it's Saturday night and you still don't have something for next Tuesday yet, and so you have no choice but to run a piece you wrote in 2014 about a sandwich you ate once. This is one of those times. Sometimes, I purchase the McChicken sandwich at McDonald's. I'd rather eat real food, but hey, it's a sandwich for a dollar, so I can't expect too much. I don't want to say that I necessarily like it, the...

I go through cycles of being intensely productive and intensely lazy, periods where everything clicks and it's go, go, go, all excitement and energy and new games and new ideas, followed by periods where it feels like I'm stuck in mud, slow and struggling and feeling faintly like I'm sinking and will never come out of it.  Of course, I do manage to come out of it. It doesn't feel like I can when I'm in the middle of it. It feels interminably long, impossibly long, like one of Zeno's paradoxes, like every step is incremental but never actually gets...

Probably the most hotly-anticipated title in our opening line-up is Cole Wehrle's An Infamous Traffic. Certainly, we're very eager to bring Mr. Wehrle's design to the public, and are putting steps into place to ensure we'll be able to keep up with the demand as much as humanly possible. Photo of what The Precious might look like. These fake precious were found on Amazon for $1.95 + $3.82 shipping for a total of 10. Yes, only 10, not the nice little pile as seen in the photo. Part of keeping up with that demand is to make sure we have...