Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

Military history is not only the story of greatness, of inspired leadership, of singular genius, and masterful campaigns, but also of folly, failure, and disaster. There are plenty of moments throughout history where you just have to wonder, "what the heck were they thinking?" A new & correct map of the trading part of the West Indies : including the seat of war between Gr. Britain and Spain : likewise the British Empire in America, with the French and Spanish settlements adjacent thereto : adorn'd with prospects of ye most considerable towns, ports, harbours &c. therein contained from the latest & best observations....

Last year, we purchased a Wacom Tablet, which is a little pad with a little pen-type thing that plugs into your computer and lets you draw on it. As you probably know, I do the graphic design for almost all of our covers, and the layout for almost all of our counters, and I was starting to feel the limitations of what I could accomplish in those spheres with a mouse and the shapes tool in my ten year old version of Photoshop. The idea was that getting the Wacom might allow me to do things that were slightly more...

I was initially at a loss as to what kind of cover to do for Bitskrieg. Because one of the game's big selling points is that you can just as easily play it with a smart child as you can with a fellow adult-person, I knew I wanted something that would appeal to children. I knew what I didn't want, which was the "title done in a childish scrawl with random letters written backwards", because kids can smell that kind of baloney a mile away. I didn't want to be phony. I wanted something that was genuine, and would genuinely...

I don't like Cards Against Humanity. I think it's fairly rubbish mechanically, it's devoid of the social dynamics that I like in multiplayer games generally and party games in particular, and as for the gross-out humor, as Paul Simon once said about dogs in the moonlight, I don't find this stuff amusing anymore. I don't own Cards Against Humanity, and I don't seek it out. A handful of times - usually when hanging out with people who don't know what a combat factor is or who aren't particularly interested in the difference between full-cap and incremental - that's been the...

Before I made board games, I made video games. And long before I lived, breathed, and ate board games (and there's less fiber in that diet than you'd expect), I lived, breathed, and ate video games. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with video games. I was also obsessed with books, and with the Bible, and I'm not sure if all of those obsessions were necessarily healthy. Whenever I wasn't reading a fantasy novel, or reflecting on how I was a sinning sinner who had committed unforgiveable transgressions (I was maybe six or seven), I was playing video...