Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

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...

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...

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,...

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...

Sometimes folks will email me with questions about game design. This is not only very flattering, but it's also helpful, particularly when I need to write a blog-thing but haven't yet settled on a topic. The stars happened to align in just this way recently, and so here we are. The question was, When designing games and using mechanisms created by others, how do you avoid feeling like you're stealing from them? Specifically the designer in question was inspired by a game he loved to make something using similar mechanisms, and was worried that his own work would be too...