Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany
ON THE CURIOUS ORIGINS OF TABLE BATTLES (by Tom Russell)
While Table Battles is a direct descendent of my earlier game Christmas at White Mountain, its existence can be better explained in the context of two apparently unrelated games: Richard Berg's multiplayer game Dynasty, and my two-player politics game Optimates et Populares. When we were publishing Richard Berg's Dynasty, we needed to get quite a lot of wood bits. We needed large cubes for armies and little cubes to demarcate control, black cubes for warlords, and wooden discs for home provinces and the Emperor's winter palace. And on top of all that, we also needed some long gray rectangular wood...
THE YEAR OF LIVING AWESOMELY PART 4 OF 4 (by Tom Russell)
March of 2017 marked the first month in my adult life that I was voluntarily self-employed. The next few months would determine whether or not Hollandspiele could be a full-time endeavor. Mary and I spent many evenings and afternoons discussing our strategy. One thing we definitely wanted to do was up our marketing game. This not only included the marketing for the individual games, but also the marketing of us as a "brand". As far as the latter was concerned, we hit upon the idea of starting a semi-weekly podcast, the Mary and Tom Show. In it, we would not...
ON PUBLISHING BERG'S DYNASTY (by Tom Russell)
THE YEAR OF LIVING AWESOMELY PART 3 OF 4 (by Tom Russell)
One of the worst parts about my day job was the commute. Even when I liked my job - before the company-wide re-org that transplanted me into a completely different department that was rapidly wearing me down to the bone - I still hated the two hours I spent on the road every day. One hour driving into work, one hour driving back home. It meant getting up before the sun came up and, back when I would have to clock in sixty-plus hours a week for seven months straight, it meant coming home after the sun went down. Like...
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"...