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Who are we? Splotter games is a young Dutch company, founded in 1997, which sets out to develop and sell original, amusing board and card games, mostly for a market of gaming enthousiasts. We also occasionally develop and produce games for special occasions, which are designed to fit the wants and needs of the customer. Around Christmas we're often busy assembling games packs for companies looking for an original Christmas gift. Splotter makes games in a wide range of varieties. We've got original, short and easy-to-play games which are intended for the family market (Tetragons, Kiek); but we also make elaborate thematic games appealing to a market of young people, who've discovered that "traditional" board games are a modern and exciting pastime. All games have been designed by the Splotter team, often in collaboration with other game authors from the Leiden students gaming society "Het Duivelsei". The members of this society and their families are also the principal play-testers of our games (thanks guys!). Our games are sold at the annual games fair "Spiel" in Essen, Germany, through dealers in Germany, the USA, the UK and Scandinavia, and to some extent by direct mail-order from our website. Splotter is run by four people, who have full-time jobs during the week and try not to spend all of their weekends playing games. Jeroen Doumen studied mathematics and physics at Leiden university, obtained his Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the Eindhoven University of Technology, and now works as postdoc at the University of Twente. His favourite non-Splotter games include 1830, Wheel of Time CCG, Babylon 5 Wars and most games he hasn't played yet. Jeroen has his own website at http://www.cs.utwente.nl/~doumen/. Herman Haverkort is a computer scientist, working on his Ph.D. at Utrecht University. His favourite activities include making music, studying law, and more relevant: drawing maps, making any kind of rules precise and giving them a nice lay-out. In fact, Herman is incapable of owning map-based games without starting to draw his own maps. At grammar school, Herman met Joris, which immediately had the well-known inevitable consequences (see below). The two of them would cooperate to do "papers" for school in the form of games or maps of imaginary landscapes or road networks, while Herman made sure that he got his parents and brothers addicted to home-made computer games. Herman has his own website at http://haverkort.net/herman. Tamara Jannink studied biology at Leiden University and got her teachers degree there. She is now teaching mathematics and biology at the International School of the Hague. Her own experiences abroad are useful in dealing with the pupils but she frequently has to resort to more creative measures to communicate. A dream: to teach by means of games. We all know that games teach important skills like strategy, team work and negotiation (but when will her colleagues find out?). Tamara tries mixing her two major pastimes the other way around as well: she tries to keep the Splotter gentlemen on task and warns them when it's breaktime and they have to quit playtesting. Joris Wiersinga studied biology, history and law at Leiden University and now works at McKinsey & Company in Amsterdam. His favourite non-splotter game is 1830. Joris has been designing games since primary school. His first game, "Job application" (1983) was about choosing the right form of transportation to ensure timely arrival at a job application. At the age of twelve it had gotten so bad that his friends would only come over on the condition that they would not design games, so he feels vindicated when he gets emails from people all over the world asking him if they can playtest his newest games (many of which are still about transportation). [entry page / guided tour] [order forms] [questions?]