Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

During our first year in business, Mary and I would buy banner ads for some of our titles. It was, after all, a Thing That Publishers Did in order to let people know that their products existed. But when we looked at the actual numbers, we saw that it didn't really make much of a difference. All other things being equal, the games that we advertised didn't sell better than the games that we didn't, and traffic from a given website didn't appreciably increase when we advertised there. That being the case, we felt it made more sense to keep...

Years ago, I made computer games - a few of which still survive and are somewhat diverting if completely inessential - and during that period of my life, I spent a lot of time with library books about said games. In fact, the first time I read Dunnigan's Complete Wargames Handbook, it was because it was shelved between two programming books, and I was fairly irritated when I opened it up and it was primarily about some weird and unappealing cardboard things. (The second time I read it, after we had gotten into board games, I had a very different...

Years ago I wanted to do a big, complicated game about the Thirty Years War, and spent some time immersing myself in the topic. I eventually decided that my ambitions far outpaced my abilities, and chose somewhat lower-hanging fruit instead, which has worked out pretty well for me. But still the topic fascinates me, and from time to time I've circled back and dipped my toe in those waters, only to jump right back out. "The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 15 May 1648", Gerard Terborch, 1848, oil on copper. But the last time I did it, I became...

At CSW Expo in Tempe, we gave a seminar in which we previewed our next few releases and answered some questions about our games, our model, and our point of view. Figuring that a lot of people might not know much about us, Tom opened with a little speech. In retrospect, it probably wasn't the ideal audience for this particular speech, but hey, at least we got a blogpost out of it. Tom Russell speechifies I'm Tom Russell, one-half of Hollandspiele. The other half - the better half - is Mary Holland-Russell. She's also the smarter half, as evidenced by...

I had the pleasure over Memorial Day weekend of attending Heavy Con in Denver, where I dedicated quite a bit of time to running playtests of This Guilty Land for twelve persons who had never played the game before. I was more than a little nervous going in. While the dozens of playtests before Heavy Con had all seemed to confirm that I knew what I was doing, it's always a little nerve-wracking pushing something in front of brand new people, particularly when that something is as aggressively odd as my open-hand political CDG.  In particular, the way that cards...