Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

17. Chaeronea (2 August 338 BCE) When I translate a given engagement into the peculiar language of Table Battles, a lot of my time is spent on things that a lot of players won't really notice. What die results a card can accept, whether or not it's limited to one die per turn, how cards are divided into wings and how often die results are duplicated within a wing and within an army, how the cards interact with one another: it's there, and it's what makes the thing work, but it doesn't necessarily call a lot of attention to itself....

Weeks and months after I've finished development on a game, we get the proof from our printer and I put it on the table again. It's often the first time I've played it since the end of development. This is important for proofing purposes. You often hear about folks who are too close to a thing, too familiar with it, and they're unable to see it clearly. This little bit of distance helps us to see the thing with fresh eyes and to catch mistakes before we authorize production.  But more than that, the time away from the game allows...

When you write about a hundred blog things a year, sometimes you write about game design, sometimes you write about business and marketing, sometimes you write about a chicken sandwich that has too much mayo on it, and sometimes - sometimes you write about The Last Man on Earth, a sitcom that until very recently used to air Sunday evenings on Fox.  It's a program that I enjoyed an awful lot, and I was saddened to hear it was cancelled after four seasons, though not terribly surprised; really, it's amazing the thing existed at all. It is aggressively weird and...

A week from now, I'll be in Denver at Heavy Con, where I plan to get as many people as possible to play This Guilty Land. In fact, my hope is that I won't be playing the game myself at all, but will just be on hand to teach it and to observe each match. I've played the game more than anyone else and I already know how it works (even if that doesn't necessarily mean that I know how to play it well). Especially given the game's more unusual features and its potential brittleness, it's important for me to...

My high school had one of the best video programs in the state; it helps when the teacher is also a disc jockey turned rock and roll promoter turned cable mogul turned millionaire who put his own money into the program. I learned how to edit on an Avid and I learned how to light with a ceiling-mounted grid in a real if small studio with a three-camera set-up. We had all sorts of microphones and all sorts of boxes to mix the sound with. Many of the folks in the program went on to find work in the film...