Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

It's January of 2012, and I've just found a publisher for what would be my first published game, Blood on the Alma. The publisher is very impressed with the design. He's excited; I'm excited; Mary's excited; everyone's excited, except perhaps our cats, who react with typical indifference. There's one hitch, though: the game has too many counters. Including all the variant scenario counters and status markers, there's 210 of them, and to fit in the magazine, I need to get it down to 120. Many of these are step counters - the way the game works is that each unit...

Many of the games we publish have a "small footprint". Partially this is because my own designs tend toward being compact, the result of working habits I developed over the course of a dozen-or-so games designed for magazines and ziplocks. I try to get as much game as possible out of as few components as possible. The venerable Bruce Geryk once said of The Grunwald Swords that it "punches above its weight", and that's a rather nice bit that I'm eager to use in our advertising copy. So for a long time, I've designed reasonably compact games, though of late...

Agricola, Master of Britain was by my count my fifteenth wargame to be published. As is always the case, I hoped that the game would sell well, and that it would be well-received. But I had been through that process fourteen times previously, and none of those sold as well as I had hoped (a couple even lost money for their publisher). The people who actually bought and played them seemed to like them, but there wasn't any kind of buzz around them that would translate to people recommending the game to their friends, or talking them up online. The...

The decision to publish For-Ex was not one that was made lightly. I knew from the start, from the very first prototype, that this was a really weird game, with a really small audience. Part of why we started Hollandspiele of course was so that Mary and I could publish really weird games with really small audiences, but even so, I was very hesitant about putting For-Ex out into the world. Mary always believed it in, though, and in October we finally started taking orders for it. And we were pleasantly surprised when it became our fastest-selling game. We were...

  When it comes to traditional abstract games, Chess is arguably the King (and Queen, and Bishop, and Rook). Only Go rivals it for popularity and fanaticism. Backgammon is older than both of them, and I actually find it more dynamic than Chess, but it hardly has the same following or the same kind of serious attention afforded to it. Only hardcore abstract enthusiasts have time for oddities like Nine Men's Morris or Fox and Geese, and even children get bored with Tic-Tac-Toe pretty rapidly.  And then there's Draughts (or Checkers). Draughts gets a bad rap. At least in the...