Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany
OUR SECOND YEAR PART THREE OF THREE (by Tom Russell)
Concluding our look at the games we've released over the last year, and what we learned in the process. 25. Hood's Last Gamble Our third John Theissen ACW operational level game, and also the largest. In this one, we changed the way step losses were tracked to cut down on the number of counters. That allowed us to add more cards and to utilize a larger map without significantly increasing the price. In our last installment, I briefly touched on the fact that each game we release increases the general awareness of Hollandspiele as a company, making it easier to...
OUR SECOND YEAR PART TWO OF THREE (by Tom Russell)
Continuing our look at the games we've released over the last year, and what we learned in the process. 21. Bitskrieg Perhaps even more-so than For-Ex, this one was an experiment. Bitskrieg is a semi-abstract "tank chess" game designed by a father and son team to be played by parents and kids. So, one of our questions going into this was, how much of a market is there for children's games produced using our model? Because it's not like kids are going to grab it off the shelf at Target and scream for their parents to "buy me this!" We're...
OUR SECOND YEAR PART ONE OF THREE (by Tom Russell)
We started taking orders for our very first game (Brian Train's The Scheldt Campaign) on August 16, 2016. That means that we are rapidly approaching our two year anniversary. Honestly, it feels like it should be longer. It's not just that we've put out an insane number of games in that short period of time (though, I mean, we absolutely have!). It's more that we've managed to increase our profile and grow our customer base at a frankly remarkable speed. When we started the business, we figured it would be a sideline for a while, and that somewhere down the...
IN OUR LITTLE CORNER (by Tom Russell)
I've written often about how our model and our niche audience gives me an incredible amount of creative freedom. I can do aggressively weird and interesting things without the financial repercussions that usually accommodate being weird and interesting. It's such a rare gift for a designer and publisher to have, so much so that I think that freedom also comes with a sort of a responsibility to exercise it as often and as fully as possible. I remember reading something George Lucas said back in the late nineties or early aughts, that after he was done with his prequel trilogy,...
TABLE BATTLE (by Tom Russell)
I often say that my job consists of playing board games all day. That's not a hundred percent true - my job also consists of answering questions on the internet, writing rulesets, laying out counters, designing covers, counting out little wooden bits and putting them into bags, and, oh yeah, designing games - but I think it gets across rather aptly that I have very little to be upset about in the grand scheme of things, and that I still can't quite believe that this is what I get to do for a living. It sometimes feels like I've gotten...