Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

We never know when something's gonna be a hit.  We make the best games we can, we try our best to help them find their audience, but whether they find that audience is out of our hands. I generally try to manage my own expectations, as I'd rather be surprised when something takes off than dejected when it doesn't. Going into last year's end-of-year Hollandays Sale, I suspected that we'd be giving away a large number of copies of Reign of Witches, the free promotional card game that got tossed in with every order of two or more games. And...

There's a Henry James quote I'm fond of. What is character but the determination of incident? And what is incident but the illumination of character? "Incident" here is a fancy word for plot, and so what he's saying is that plot should come out of characterization, and that characterization should be revealed as a result of the plot. They're not separate things, but the same thing, hopelessly intertwined, impossible to separate or to consider in isolation. And one reason I'm fond of it is, if you change "character" and "incident" to "theme" and "mechanisms", we're suddenly talking about game design....

One of the first games we signed was Sean Chick's Horse & Musket: Dawn of an Era. As others have remarked, it's a somewhat unusual entry in our catalogue. We're mostly known for unusual and experimental titles with a small footprint. Horse & Musket, with its twenty scenarios, three dozen optional rules, thirteen unit types, and five sheets of counters, definitely feels like an outlier. We didn't know that at the time, of course. When we signed the game – shortly after getting Hollandspiele off the ground – we figured that bigger, more traditional hex-and-counter games like Horse & Musket...

Stanley Kubrick directed thirteen features over the course of a forty-six year career, most of which are widely regarded as masterpieces. Folks can quibble over which ones, of course – I personally don't much care for A Clockwork Orange – but it's a career full of "major" works.   By contrast, Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed forty-one features in thirteen years. And while arguments can be made for this film or that one – I'm very partial to Lola – I don't think anyone is going to argue that every single one of these films are a "major" work.   But...

Last week I wrote about the Honshu half of the first Dual Gauge expansion: a nasty, sharp, cutthroat little map where money is very tight. As a contrast, I wanted the second map, Wisconsin, to sprawl a little bit: the map is a bit bigger, the game runs a turn or two longer, and money is more plentiful, especially in the endgame. The end is actually where I began. I knew I wanted the last couple ORs to be about running these big routes, ideally from one side of the map to another, ending in a route-doubling destination hex. These...