Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

I got very little sleep Friday night. This wasn't a surprise, necessarily; I discovered last year that I sleep very poorly when I travel, and that each day of a convention gets harder than the one before it. So while Friday morning saw your humble narrator bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, Saturday morning found him a little punchy. Bob and Travis were setting up Meltwater, so that left Matt, Marcus, and myself to our own devices. They thought a Winsome game would be appropriate - there had been precious few trains in this iteration of Trains and Chit - and I readily...

A full day of gaming commenced Friday morning with Time Agent. This is the game that Marcus really, really wanted to play last year, but that never got to the table for a multitude of reasons, first and foremost being his very serious dedications to the duties of playing host. There was a running gag going into this year's con that we actually had played Time Agent last year, we just don't remember it because someone jumped back in time and reversed the event.  If you're unfamiliar, here's the hook: there are six civilizations in outer space, one of which...

Thursday morning my plane landed at Dallas Love Field. I called Mary when I touched down and asked after the cats. Monster didn't put up much of a fuss about her pill; she's been on thyroid medication for over a year now. Claws, on the other hand, just recently started taking three different kinds of medication for his heart. Even with the three of them crammed into a single larger gel capsule, it's a struggle to get it into him and to get him to swallow. Even then, he's found a way to hold the pill in his mouth while...

At this point, I've written the rules for over twenty-five published games that I've designed. I've also rewritten, with Mary's help, the rules for about a half-dozen other games by other designers. So, at this point, writing rules is second nature to me; it's easy-peasy. It didn't always used to be that way, of course, but like I said, I've done this something like thirty-plus times, and after the first dozen games or so, I simply had to get better at it. The other thing is that over time I became much more confident in writing the rules my own...

There is something immensely, elementally appealing about laying out a battlefield map made of hexes, tracing the shape of a ridge from hex to hex with the tip of your finger, contemplating the importance of this city, its nearness to the river, and pondering the effect of this clump of green circles that signify a consortium of trees. Then the edges of the map are populated with cardboard troops, each side forming its line. If they're new to the topic, maybe the players recognize a few of the names on the counters or the places on the map, or if...