Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

One of the projects I've got in my hamper is my multiplayer negotiation game on the Peace of Westphalia. The short version is that these various political entities are trying to disentangle themselves from a costly and ruinous war, but they're trying to do so in a way that's advantageous to them - and so, as the negotiations drag on for months and years, they are still campaigning, angling for a decisive battle or a territorial gain that will strengthen their bargaining position (and, when they've suffered a loss, dragging their feet diplomatically in hopes they'll be able to reverse...

I wanted to take a moment to talk about three games that impacted the development of This Guilty Land in a subconscious way. That is, when I was designing the game, I don't think I ever thought of these games specifically, at least not for these reasons, and I wasn't aware of borrowing from them directly, but in retrospect I can look at elements of the design, and look at those other games, and say, "Oh, so that's where I got that from." The first game is Washington's War, designed by Mark Herman. I know what you're thinking; they're both...

As most folks know by now, we publish games using a print-on-demand model. This means that when you buy a game, we take the money that you gave us and from that we pay our printer and set aside money for royalties. We don't pay a cent before then, and this allows us to publish a larger number of games, and to sometimes publish games that are aggressively unusual or uncommercial. Okay, so that isn't exactly one hundred percent true. For one thing, wood bits and cards - which are becoming increasingly prominent in our games - have to be...

I had a dream about a week ago that I found deeply unsettling.  This isn't a new phenomenon, necessarily. My childhood was full of disturbing dreams, mostly centered on a painting that hung in the bedroom I shared with my brother - a painting of a mother with her child that was supposedly innocuous, but for me (and my brother) radiated a distinct level of unbridled malevolence. I couldn't stand to look at it. In the dreams, this mother had an army of creatures that consisted only of bald heads and hands, with wrists where their necks should be. When...

One of the things that drew me to Mark Herman's Ribbit, and made Mary and I so eager to publish it, is that it oddly reminds me quite a bit of backgammon. Backgammon, as regular readers of these blog-things might recall, is my favorite classical abstract. On the surface, there perhaps doesn't appear to be a lot of similarity between the two. Backgammon is after all a game of both luck and skill, while Ribbit is a pure combinatorial abstract. And it isn't as if backgammon has the market cornered on moving, attacking, and blocking, features common to most abstract...