Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

One of the things that irks people about card-driven wargames is the fact that someone who has learned the deck - who knows what events are in there and what events aren't - has an advantage over someone who hasn't.  If I place a bunch of troops or influence or whatever in Spain, but there's a card in the deck (maybe even in my opponent's hand!) that wipes out all the troops, influence, or whatever that are in Spain, it's maybe not such a great idea to pile my pieces into the Iberian peninsula, but I have no way of...

When my first few games were published, I wasn't very sure of myself, my abilities, or my judgment. I was constantly afraid that a game would come out and gamers would immediately discover some glaring and obvious hole in the rules that had somehow gotten overlooked. Then I'd be the guy who had designed a broken game. But you do enough of these things and you'll start to build up your confidence. After six years of working in the games industry, I have worked on nearly fifty games in some capacity or another, mostly as a designer or as a...

The first time we got Brave Little Belgium on the table, I was convinced that Ryan and Dave had created something really special, something that had a considerable amount of crossover appeal. And we wanted to capitalize on that in the way the game was presented - the box cover, the map, the rulebook, and the counters all needed to be clean and inviting. Ryan's prototype counters used photographs of infantry and cavalry soldiers, and I originally experimented with doing something in the same vein. But I just didn't find my efforts to be particularly compelling - it didn't "pop"...

The other day, the inestimable Robert Peter Bottos - he of BottosCon fame - commented on a Facebook post we had made about our upcoming release Plan 1919. Our post was as follows: Many of our wargames give the player a lot of leeway in setting up their forces, and Plan 1919 is no exception. The Germans set up on one side of the line, and the Allies on the other, and a solid set-up is really crucial. Each side has well over a hundred units (155 for the Germans and 226 for the allies, to be precise) of different...

A year or more back, a designer of some repute sent us a game submission that we fell utterly and immediately in love with. It was so clever, so tight, so utterly charming and light on its feet. Now, we had no idea if the thing would sell or if it would flop. Just because we're excited and effusive about a game doesn't mean that anyone else will be. But the great thing about our print-on-demand model of course is that it so thoroughly mitigates financial risk that we could publish the thing anyway, and likely turn at least a...