Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

I don't play a lot of tactical games; it's just not my jam. Occasionally someone will ask me to explain why it's not my jam, and there are several reasons, sure. Even the simplest tactical games are still a little too complex for my taste. I'm also not a big fan of turns that take twenty minutes to play but represent five minutes on the ground. And then there's a tendency for the hexes to get overly congested: I have a stacking limit of two units per hex, but one or both of those units can be a vehicle which...

I was initially at a loss as to what kind of cover to do for Bitskrieg. Because one of the game's big selling points is that you can just as easily play it with a smart child as you can with a fellow adult-person, I knew I wanted something that would appeal to children. I knew what I didn't want, which was the "title done in a childish scrawl with random letters written backwards", because kids can smell that kind of baloney a mile away. I didn't want to be phony. I wanted something that was genuine, and would genuinely...

As I begin to write the thing you're presumably about to read, it's eight twenty-five post meridiem - eight twenty-six now, because it took me a moment to search for what "p.m." stood for, and another moment to decide whether or not I should use it, and yet another moment to decide if I should call attention to it or if that will come across as an affectation, and geez, now it's eight twenty-eight. The point is that it's late on Monday evening, and about twenty hours ago we started taking orders for my game For-Ex. The game sold very...

We were interviewed recently by Peer Sylvester for the German-language gaming website Spielbar. Through the kind permission of Mr. Sylvester and Spielbar, we are presenting the interview with our original English language answers.  1) Please introduce yourself and your company to our readers!  Hollandspiele is a small publisher owned and operated in equal partnership by Mary Holland-Russell and her husband, Tom Russell. 2) Please tell us a bit about your games!  Our products generally fall into two categories, wargames and weird games, and sometimes in both categories simultaneously. For example, Supply Lines of the American Revolution: The Northern Theater, 1775-1777...

One of the peculiar things about For-Ex that we've noticed over the years is that no one ever seems to remember how to play it until toward the end. I don't mean that players forget the rules, because the mechanisms are pretty simple and straightforward. What I mean is that no one seems to know how to use those mechanisms until the middle of the game. Mary and I were talking about the game over dinner recently, and that subject came up, and between the two of us I think that, at long last, we kind of figured out why...