Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

Eurogames are how Mary and I got into modern board games. My ambition, almost from the start, was to design medium-weight eurogames with broad appeal, and the only reason why I instead dedicated myself to designing weird wargames was that the wargames sold but the eurogames never did. You often hear from folks who say that once you start designing your own games, you never have time to play anyone else's, and while that's not entirely true, I can say that once the shift was made to designing and publishing wargames, I more-or-less stopped playing eurogames with any regularity.  Once...

One of the big shifts in the design philosophy behind the Table Battles expansions when compared to the base game is that I've made the morale cube splits more immediately fragile and asymmetric. The base game has a lot of 2-3 splits, and with bad play that lent itself to a lot of situations where I rout one, you rout one, I rout one, you rout one, passing the same cube back and forth until neither side has enough oomph to secure a decisive victory. The expansions are more likely to use a 1-3 or 1-4 split, or to offset...

Before there was a Hollandspiele, there was a "Hollandspiele", the vague idea that Mary and I wanted to publish board games. We talked about it periodically for several years before we took the plunge, and there were a number of reasons for the delay. We needed some practical experience. I needed to learn my craft as a designer, and I wanted to develop some kind of reputation that could jump-start the proceedings. And then, of course, there was the fact that we didn't have any money. For years we existed perpetually on the brink of financial collapse and disaster. Being...

We deal with a handful of manufacturers - one for cards, one for wood bits, Blue Panther for everything else - and as you might expect, these manufacturers send us bills. We pay them promptly and in full, just as we pride ourselves on paying our artists and our designer royalties promptly and in full. Before we do though, we check over the bills to make sure everything is as it should be, because even with excel formulas doing the heavy-lifting, we're all still human beings and we sometimes make mistakes. Sometimes the manufacturer over-charges us, and when we bring...

There are a number of reasons why I write these blog-things twice a week. Some of them are pretty obvious and mercenary: for example, it helps promote awareness of me as a designer and us as a publisher. Since we're a weird little outfit doing weird little games, there's plenty of folks that have never heard of us, and if they happen to follow a link to one of these things and as a result get curious about us or our wares, well, that's a win. I'm also primarily a verbal person, and there are few interests that equal the...