Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany
THE YEAR OF LIVING AWESOMELY PART 2 OF 4 (by Tom Russell)
The first time I met Cole Wehrle, at Origins this year, I was somewhat startled by his appearance. Not that, mind you, there was anything wrong with his appearance; there wasn't. But for years, I had known of him mostly through his presence on Board Game Geek, where his avatar is a Winsor McCay drawing of Little Nemo in an admiral's uniform. I'm not saying that I expected him to look like that, any more than I would expect Charles Vasey to look like Charlie McCarthy, or that I would expect myself to look like a hexagon with an "H"...
ON PUBLISHING THE SCHELDT CAMPAIGN (by Tom Russell)
In 2012, Brian Train's game Summer Lightning came on my radar. If you haven't played it, it's a game focused on the German invasion of Poland, and as you might expect, it's a tough game for the Poles to win. This, along with the unusual combat system, fascinated me, and I put it on a list of games I was interested in playing. I mentioned that I had heard that the game took an extraordinary amount of time to set-up. Brian stepped in to let me know that this was not true. Shortly thereafter, we arranged a trade by which...
THE YEAR OF LIVING AWESOMELY PART 1 OF 4 (by Tom Russell)
We have been in business for one year. We started taking orders for our first release, The Scheldt Campaign, on August 16, 2016, and a couple of weeks ago, we released our seventeenth title, Seven Pines; or, Fair Oaks. Seventeen games in one year - that's not bad! In fact, that's more than we had originally intended. But Hollandspiele has had a way of defying, and exceeding, our expectations. Seven years ago, give or take, Mary and I first started talking seriously about publishing board games. At that time, I was designing mostly euro-style games, and our intention was to...
THREE WAYS TO EVALUATE A DESIGN (by Tom Russell)
When we evaluate a design submission, the first thing we do is take a look at the rules to get a sense of the thing. If it captures our interest, we then proceed to getting the game on the table. I don't have hard numbers on this, but I'd hazard a guess that only about a third of the submissions that we turn down get to that second step. If we've taken the time to print up a copy of the game, or to ask the designer to go to the expense of sending us a playtest kit, then we...
BRIEF THOUGHTS ON TWO TRADITIONS OF WARGAME DESIGN (by Tom Russell)
I've been listening a lot lately to David Dokter's podcast Guns, Dice, Butter, in which he presents "conversations with members of the wargaming tribe". Several of his interview subjects were designers and developers for Avalon Hill and/or SPI. (Several of the SPI folks tell a story about Jim Dunnigan casually asking an underperforming employee if he was planning on coming in tomorrow? "Yes." Don't bother, quoth Dunnigan; you're fired.) One thing the illustrious Mr. Dokter mentions is a philosophical divide between the games produced by Avalon Hill and SPI. Avalon Hill designs were more about providing a balanced competitive experience...