Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

When I was growing up, history was a list of wars. This was partly the fault of games. From an early age I played any game I could find and hunted for more. At yard sales I would rifle through stacks of Milton Bradley to dig up a tattered copy of Third Reich or Wooden Ships & Iron Men. These games shaped my understanding of history. At the school library I tended to ignore the books that didn’t concern armed conflict. History was a list of battles and all the rest was window dressing. Of course, this was also partly...

So, we've been in business now for a little over a month. For the most part, everything is going according to our diabolical plan: people are buying the games, people are liking the games, people are talking about the games. We've kept up fairly regularly with our social media obligations, updating Facebook a few times a week, checking BGG and CSW daily for questions and concerns and then answering them, and producing articles for this blog at a fairly steady pace. We're not yet in the black, but we're not that far in the red, either. Our profit margin is...

Last week, I discussed the long, stumbling process by which Agricola, Master of Britain was transformed into a solitaire game, and got into some detail about how and why the central cup adjustment mechanism works the way it does. Almost as central as, and spinning out of, that same mechanism is the game’s army-building and battle system. It likewise underwent a dramatic transformation as the game was transformed from two-player contest to solitaire design, though a couple of key elements remained the same. What’s strange is that, perhaps more than anything else, it was these aspects of the original two-player...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how time and space create meaning. That probably sounds really highfalutin, but it’s actually really simple, and boils down to the fact that differences in time and in space can profoundly alter your experience of something. To start with time, and an obvious example: I’ve been married for twelve years and some change, and that’s a lot different than being married for six. Affection and esteem are deeper; the happiness we share is happier, and our sorrows more heartbreaking. All other things being equal, or at the very least set aside, there’s a...

RIW recently moved into a new storefront (their old shop having been burnt to a crisp by the restaurant next door), which is less claustrophobic and brighter, but sadly lacks pics, so here is their logo. Before we discovered our Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS), RIW Hobbies in Livonia, we went to The Other Game Store. The Other Game Store was paradise if you were into minis, but rubbish if you were into board games, having a shelf dedicated to Munchkin, and another shelf where they squeezed in everything else, "everything else" being only the most popular of Euro-style games....