Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

Years and years ago, I was talking with a fellow - we'll call him Henry - who had seen a film that Mary and I had directed and was, shall we say, underwhelmed. Which was fine, as far as that goes; not every film is for everybody, and that goes double for the weird sorts of comedies we were making. But Henry and I had a rather cordial and pleasant conversation about the film and some of the choices Mary and I had made with it, which he found too subtle for his tastes. I said something to the effect...

  One of the joys and pains of scenario design in Horse & Musket is creating and learning about obscure battles. Sometimes maps and sources are so few that a scenario has to be abandoned, such as Villmanstrand (part of the Russo-Swedish War 1741-43). On the other end are battles for which maps and books in English are plentiful, such as Fontenoy and Culloden. Kesselsdorf lies between the obscure and the famous.  The first step is to read what I can on the battle. The number of books treating the topic in a super specific way is zero. There are...

Concluding our three-part look at what we've got planned for 2018, here are the games that didn't fit into either of the previous categories. Here we go!  The Big Push Renaud Verlaque, the designer of Age of Napoleon, created this strategic World War I trench warfare card game. We were really smitten with this one the moment it hit the table. There are plenty of agonizing decisions for both players as they contest control of six different areas. Each turn you'll draw a big ol' hand of cards equal to your production capacity, said capacity being diminished by the actions...

I like to say that my job is to get up in the morning and play board games all day, but that's something of an exaggeration. While I do sometimes spend a fair amount of time hunched over a table pushing counters through hexes, I'm just as likely to spend that time hunched over a table sorting out little wooden bits and putting them in little bags.  In that video, I joke around a bit about how monotonous it is, and sometimes it can be, sure. There are days where I'd rather do anything in the world but count out...

There's a growing market for solitaire games, something that was readily apparent to us with the publication of 2016's Agricola, Master of Britain. You would think that in 2017 we would have published a bunch of them, but we only managed to push Charlemagne, Master of Europe out the door. This wasn't for lack of trying; once Agricola turned into a surprise hit, we immediately started seeking out more solitaire games. The thing is, of course, that designing and developing games takes time. And so while work started on some of these titles early this year and late in 2016,...