Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

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...

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...