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A variety of articles about the world of boardgames from an equally varied mix of authors.

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Chris Kovac: 2010 Canadian Toy and Hobby Fair

As another January ends, it means a trip for me to the Canadian Toy and Hobby Fair. This year brought a few changes for the show, such as moving from downtown Toronto to near the airport (to accommodate out-of-town participants), tying the show to the much larger Toronto Gift Show (CGTA), and unfortunately moving the media day to Monday, meaning I miss getting my juice and cookies.

Ideally in the long run, the change in location will help the show, which has been shrinking for the last couple of years. The show had about 50 booths but since most of these distribute or manufacture toys rather than board games, hunting for games was much easier than at larger shows. Buried among the dolls, plastic models (flying helicopters seem to be all the rage right now) and plush toys this year, I found seven games which might be of interest to gamers. Please note some of these games might have already been released, but they are new to me and are most probably being distributed for the first time in Canada. The games are:

1. The Lazy Bowler, from Dory Dan

This was a beautifully crafted prototype for a five-pin, mechanical miniature bowling game, complete with pin setting and ball return. The Lazy Bowler was built by Dory Dan, a rather nice gentleman from Gander, Newfoundland, who has a successful business making musical spoons (over 100,000 sold). Whether this coffee table-sized design is viable as a commercial game is up to you dear reader to decide, but it is sure pretty to look at. If anybody is interested in producing or developing the game, please contact the game developer.

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Will M. Baker: Ten-for-Ten

Partly inspired by many lists on this site last year, my friend Eli and I decided that for 2009 we would select ten games to play together ten times each. This resolution followed hot on the heels of having played about thirty different games once each, and Eli commenting that it felt a bit like speed-dating, never being given the opportunity to really get to know a game. So our objective (other than reaching the requisite number of plays) was to build familiarity with the game so that we were well past needing to learn the rules and could just dive in to the fun.

We were fairly fluid in our game selection. We didn’t pick all ten games right away, and some games originally on the list were eventually pushed aside by other games we wanted to play more.

Games that got booted from the list:

• Knights (6 plays) – This game works well with two players, but it began to wear on me. There’s no sense of coming into the game with a particular strategy, and the dice-rolling, though fun, can become a bit monotonous.

• Hey! That’s My Fish! (5 plays) – A great game that always presents interesting choices, but it’s a bit of a brain burner, and we found ourselves not wanting to get too abstract.

• Aquadukt (5 plays) – A lot of fun with two players. The roll of the die keeps the tile placement varied, as does the placement of mountains. But, alas, Eli played this game quite a bit while away on a trip and returned burned out on it.

• Torres (4 plays) – An incredible game, with mind-bending choices on every turn. It fell off our Ten-for-Ten list because of its static beginning and brain-burning choices that left us exhausted.

• Stone Age (4 plays) – A heavy contender for the list, but we found it emotionally similar to Agricola, so we went with the latter. I’m looking forward to more plays of this title.

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Mary Dimercurio Prasad: BGG.CON 2009 Highlights

This was the fifth year for BGG.CON, the BoardGameGeek convention, held once again in the Westin Dallas Fort Worth Airport hotel on November 19-22. Aldie and Derk plan to add an extra day in 2010! This year’s attendance was around 925, up quite a bit from last year’s attendance of 700. In 2010, they plan to open up registration to 950, which will probably max out the current space. BGG.CON has pretty much taken over all the hotel conference areas – there were many side rooms of open gaming and even some Rock Band in the lecture hall on a giant screen!

The swag bag had some small treasures, including a metal miniature that may be used in place of one that comes with World of Warcraft: The Board Game. There were several different models, and since one isn’t really that useful, some trading has been going on in the BGG.CON forums.

Each attendee was given a blue ticket and a yellow ticket. The blue ticket was for the BGG.CON prize giveaway drawings on Saturday night, including stacks of games from their sponsors and a Crokinole board by the Hilinski brothers. This year there was a little hitch when one (freakishly tall) geek tried to claim the Crokinole board after just having won a stack of games. The crowd started to get ugly. It turned out that he was holding tickets for friends who had left for food. The final ruling was that a person must be present to win, so another ticket was drawn. Lesson to be learned: Attend the drawing in person or you may get nada.

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Cyril Demaegd: Strategic Advice for Assyria

Editor’s note: Ystari Games’ Cyril Demaegd offers advice on the company’s Spiel 09 release, Emanuele Ornella’s Assyria. If you’ve yet to play the game, you can download the rules in three languages – – which will make the following article far more comprehensible!]

Assyria is a subtle game. Even if it’s smooth and easy to understand, it requires a lot of tactical and strategic subtlety, and you’ll frequently have to deal with crucial choices to develop your tribe. By overcoming these difficulties, you’ll be able to compete for first place, and it is the goal of this article to help you choose wisely what to do when you play your first game...and subsequent ones!

As a complement to this article, you’ll find pieces of player-made advice on the net; I particularly recommend Thomas Cauet’s ”A la carte” – here are the Assyria-specific links – as Thomas helped us test the game in the first place.

Turn order: The first choice you’ll have to make in the game pertains to the turn order; to master Assyria, you must be able to juggle skillfully with it. Indeed, opting for first place allows you to position yourself on the board before your opponents and seize the areas which are essential to your strategy. However, if you play first, you generally have access to fewer goods and so, clinging to the first place is a bad idea as your huts are going to be disappearing massively from the board. The last places shouldn’t be neglected either because they allow you to “catch your breath” by yielding more goods. What is more, being the last player in the last turn of a reign allows you to control Assur and score points while spending fewer camels.

Goods: Obviously, goods are essential to your survival. Even if the object of the game isn’t to own as many huts as possible on the board, the worst mistake is to lack foresight! Good players will be able to keep cards between one turn and the next to ensure the tribe’s subsistence. For this you must remember that you choose the order in which you spend your cards; consequently you can play a joker or a plow earlier in the turn to “salvage” double or triple goods. What is more, redundant cards are powerful since they allow you to ensure some huts will survive for two turns. Finally, don’t forget to save a few camels to buy the goods that remain after the harvest or to buy your plow back if you feel the next turn is going to be tricky. The surplus of goods will be particularly useful for those who will play in first place.

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Designer Diary: The History of Cyclades

By Bruno Cathala & Ludovic Maublanc
October 13, 2009

Designers: Bruno Cathala & Ludovic Maublanc
Publisher: Editions du Matagot

Players: 2-5
Ages: 13+
Playing time: 60-90 minutes
Release date: October 2009
Langauges: English, French, German, Dutch, Russian & Greek
Links:

Ludo:

Cyclades, announced for release at Spiel 09, will be published by Editions du Matagot, for which Bruno and I had already produced the magnificent Dice Town earlier this year.

The genesis of Cyclades begin a long time ago – okay, not the time of the ancient Greeks but maybe 2004/2005. To be exact, at this time the game was not really Cyclades, but two separate entities that eventually merged. Initially, there was a telephone conversation in which Bruno exposed me to his theory of frustration. Basically, a good game must be frustrating – but without being so much so that it disgusts the players. The whole thing is finding the right amount of frustration.

After the call, I imagined part of a game mechanism for frustrating players: They would have action points, but to access the actions allowed by the game, they must spend those points during a bidding phase. Suppose that one action of the game is to advance his pawn on a track. (I had no theme at the time.) Then only one player at the table will have the right to advance his pawn – the one who has sacrificed more! So he can advance his pawn, sure, but only up to the points that he kept. The dilemma then: How many points do I sacrifice for an action to ensure that other players will let me take this bloody action, while still making it valuable to me?

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Tao Wong: Operating Costs for a Boardgame Store

Editor’s note: Wong’s previous articles for Boardgame News are ”Launching a Board Game Store in Canada” from August 2009 and ”Capitalization of a Boardgame Store” from September.

Operating expenses for an online boardgame store come in a variety of ways, most of them common to most businesses, but some unique to the industry. These costs will differ from what I discussed in the capitilization article as these costs are ongoing. In the first year, you’re not likely to cover these costs with revenue from sales, so you’ll need additional cash on hand.

All of the figures provided are based on professional quotes in Canadian dollars, but with personal connections and favors, they could potentially be lowered.

The Hard Costs

The costs below are fixed costs and are related to physical aspects of your business, such as your rental space or server bandwidth.

• Rent

Rental cost is obviously going to depend on the size of your business and how much stock you carry. Currently, warehouse space in Vancouver is about $1.50 per square foot and office space between $1.50 to $5. As a comparison, retail space can go from $3 to $10. These estimates all include taxes and other gross expenses such as heating and electricity.

While warehousing is far cheaper, keep in mind that you’re unlikely to find a warehouse with less than 1,000 sq. ft. while you could easily find office space of 300 to 500 sq. ft.

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Mary Prasad: The Spiel 2008 Racing Games

Several racing games debuted or made a splash at Spiel in 2008 – good news if you like this type of game, and I do! Here are the ones I was able to play: Formula D, Leader 1, Hurry Cup!, Powerboats, Snow Tails, and Worm Up!

Let’s start with the smallest member of this group, Worm Up! – which is literally the smallest as its box is approximately 5"x5"x1.5". The rules are only one double-sided page, making this race game one of the simplest as well. The game can be played with 3 to 5 but is better with 4 or 5 due to the “bidding” aspect of the game. (Although the rules describe the game mechanism as bidding, it is actually simultaneous selection.)

The game comes with four posts and a finish line strip with holes on either end. Two posts form the start line and the other two make up the finish line. (They are inserted into holes on a cardboard strip, see photo.) The rules suggest using about two feet between start and finish. For a longer game, I suggest playing on the floor and putting the finish line all the way across the room.

Each player starts the race with a worm made up of seven small half-sphere segments. Don’t worry, these worms aren’t slimy at all. Each player also gets a set of numbered tiles: 4, 5, 6, 7, and X. Turns go as follows – each player selects a numbered tile and puts it face-down in front of her. Once all players have made a selection, all are revealed simultaneously. Lowest bid starts the round, followed by the next lowest, etc.

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Tao Wong: Capitalization of a Boardgame Store

Editor’s note: Wong’s first article for Boardgame News, ”Launching a Board Game Store in Canada”, ran in August 2009. A third article will follow this one in October 2009.

One of the questions I get asked is how much it costs to launch a boardgame store. There are two costs that any entrepreneur should plan for: start-up costs and operating costs. This article focuses only on capitilization costs as this is the first step of the business; since I’m from Canada, everything quoted is in Canadian dollars.

A few major costs associated with any business need to be taken into account when considering adequate capitalization for launching your store. While our costs as an online business are somewhat different from a physical store, certain costs will be the same. In addition, costs will vary depending on your long-term strategy and your focus. In general, the major costs are:

• Incorporation, Business License, and other related costs
• Website Design and Set-up
• Payment Gateway
• Inventory
• Capital Equipment

This cost varies depending on whether you incorporate or go it alone as a sole-proprietor or partnership. If incorporating – our suggested avenue – you’ll spend at least $500 after taxes, and this is if you do the work yourself. If you go through a lawyer (e.g., you need changes to the Articles of Incorporation or need a rock-solid shareholder agreement) the cost will go up from there. Figure that with good solid legal representation, which is definitely a good idea if more than one person is involved in ownership, you’ll spend about $2,000. This amount includes your business license, which is cheap and easy to get, though that cost varies according to your municipality.

Range: $500 to $2000

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Mary Dimercurio Prasad: Origins 2009

The Origins Game Fair was held in Columbus, Ohio, June 24-28, 2009. If you are new to Origins, you may also want to check out last year’s article on Origins 2008. This is the second year that Wednesday was added to the convention schedule, and it seems to be gaining in popularity. Although the overall numbers were down from 2008, at just over 10,000, enthusiasm was high! [Note: The comparison number for last year is just over 12,200; the number I was given last year by the previous GAMA Executive Director was higher.]

This year, fair-only passes were offered for the entire show. They cost $3 per person or $10 per family. Fair-only sales increased by 18% over last year. These passes allow entrance to the exhibit hall, art show, auction and food vendors, but not gaming events. Due to the downturn in the economy, people who could not afford to attend the entire convention were able to enjoy at least some parts of it at a much-reduced price.

Fun Fact: It takes over 275 volunteers to help run Origins. “Without their assistance, the Origins Game Fair would not be possible,” says Andrea Krause, GAMA Communications.

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Tao Wong: Launching a Board Game Store in Canada

We thought it might amuse some of you to find out how a pair of geeks ended up owning and running an online board game store in Canada and the process that we took to get here. The following article could almost be used as a guide to launching your own store, though we suggest you do talk to others, too, if you’re considering this.

So let’s start at the beginning. What happened?

Fencing. We are both members of Academie Duello, a historical fencing school, and we went for some sushi after class – you have to love living in Vancouver – got talking about, well, geek stuff and ended up under board games. I can’t recall who commented that there weren’t many good board game stores in Vancouver itself; most were in hard-to-reach locations for those of us who don’t have cars. We started debating why no one had launched a store in a better, more convenient part of town and what it would take to put together a board game store. At a certain point, we realized that we should really just find out…

So what did you learn?

That we couldn’t think of a reason why no one had launched a better store at this time. Obviously, it was expensive – in fact, retail businesses are probably quite marginal at the best of times, and a retail board game store – especially in Canada – is not considered the best bet.

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Emanuele Ornella: Ludopathic Gathering 2009

This year, as usual, Bruno Faidutti organized his own gaming event called the Ludophatic Gathering – and this year, as usual, I attended. The first time I was invited was 2002, and since then I’ve missed only one (not counting the one year that Bruno didn’t hold the event). This should give you an idea of the fun I have there!

As usual, the Ludopathic Gathering was held in a small town in the middle of the France called Etourvy. Bruno frequently says that this small town is in the middle of nowhere, and for the most part I agree. To get there, I’ve tried all the possible combinations of transportation, as in a classic network game in which you try to find the best travel route to reach your target destination. This year involved a cheap flight to an unknown small airport in the north of Paris (80 km away!), plus a car rental solution.

This year, thanks to the first of May holiday, the gathering started at Thursday afternoon. I stopped in Paris during the morning to meet Ystari Games’ Cyril Demaegd (who was heading to a gathering organized by Sebastien Pauchon in Switzerland) before then meeting Friedemann Friese (who was already in Paris for the Salon du Jeu de Société that was held the weekend before). Can you imagine the scene that followed? One Italian and a German (with green hair) in a small Japanese car driving on the French roads searching for the way to Etourvy. I have to say, for the record, that we missed the right way only once, and Friedemann taught me the classic German U-turn! Finally we arrived and started to play. For the first evening the dinner was a buffet of French cheeses, and I played Jet Set and Valdora. I was exhausted from the travel and went to sleep early.

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Convention Report: The Gathering of Friends 2009: Reports from Around the Net

By W. Eric Martin
April 18, 2009

A number of attendees at the 2009 Gathering of Friends have written or talked about the games they played, with reports typically highlighting games that have been released within the past six months.

Geeklists
• Erin O’Malley wins the award for persistence by playing many days on little sleep. She twittered about the game during the event, and compiled thoughts on all the games afterward.

• Joe Casadonte posts his highlights and lowlights, focusing mostly on the high.

• Jeff DePseudonym catalogs his playlist.

• Zack Boatman does the same with his.

• Patrick Korner details his weekend in games, including a peek at the new version of Airlines that should be out within the next year.

• Randy Cox brings a statistical bent to his Gathering coverage: minutes played, people trounced, etc.

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Jackson Pope: So You Want to Be a Published Game Designer

It seems like everyone I meet these days has an idea for a game or has gone even one step further and already designed a game. What’s next if you want to make the leap and see your name in lights – or least printed on a box in your local games shop?

One route is self-publishing, that is, starting a company to make the game you’ve designed. Lots of the established companies started off down that path, and with a great game it’s possible to make yourself some money, but it is hard work, requiring skills in project management, sales and marketing, not to mention a large wad of hard cash for start-up capital. You’re taking the risk with your own money, which might not be what you’re interested in.

If you decide to go down the other route and try to get your game picked up by an established publisher, what should you bear in mind?

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John Farrell: BGG Extended Stats Needs YOU!

About three years ago I started a small project using Python to download and parse data from the BoardGameGeek XML API. The aim of that project was to determine for which games my personal rating and the BGG average most diverged. I blogged about it, and after Melissa asked whether I could run the program for her, I hacked it to generate the results for a list of users, uploaded the results to the web site provided by my ISP, and BGG Extended Stats was born. People I’d never met started asking to be added to the user list, and Aldie would eventually add that feature to BoardGameGeek for everyone.

I continued adding more features to the site, including the popular ”you should play this game”. Over the years that feature has attracted many new users who thought it was a recommendation algorithm, whereas it really just looks at games which you rate highly but haven’t played for a long time. I started a Yahoo! group to facilitate communication with the users.

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Eric Flood: The Physics of Candyland

Candyland is something of an enigma to me, a lurking frustration for many months now, a game that is simply confounding in nature. I do not refer to the question of why parents continue to relentlessly torture their children with such a device, as that is easily answered. (They do not know any better, much as the teacher yelling at her Linux-using disciples does not know of the world outside the Windows.)

No, here I refer to something much more puzzling, something that didn’t occur to me until I needed a frame of reference for the reviews that I write over at BoardGameGeek. Over time, I have attempted to come to a more precise definition of what I like and do not like about the games I am reviewing. One aspect of games I tend to dislike heavily is randomness because it almost always feels like laziness in place of a more precise solution to a mechanical problem. Some games are notable exceptions to this statement as they provide impressive instances of how to mitigate such luck, but that is not the point here. I decided to utilize a randomness scale from 1-5 stars in each review, and this scale would estimate how much random luck a game featured, a measure that would be reduced relative to how much the randomness is confined to the game opening or otherwise mitigated.

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Larry Levy: 2008 Designer of the Year

Belated greetings from the snowy DotY bunker!  As both of my loyal fans know, I usually post my annual Designer of the Year article in the first week of the new year.  I decided to delay it this time around because there were so many notable games released at the end of 2008 and I wanted some time to pass to let their ratings settle down.  Most of that has happened, so it’s time to make with the awards.

For those of you who haven’t read my previous articles on this subject, a few years ago I decided to present a Designer of the Year award to the games designer who, in my opinion, had the best body of work for the previous calendar year.  I know very little about hardcore wargames, so I deliberately exclude those from consideration.  But everything else, be they euros, Ameritrash, card games, dexterity games, whatever, goes into the pot.  My determinations are based on how I think the designs are viewed by the gaming world at large and how they will be viewed in years to come – as much as possible, I try to leave my own feelings out of it.

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Mary Dimercurio Prasad: Ludo Fact Tour – How Games Are Made

Have you ever wondered how board games are produced? This article will give you a glimpse into the making of many popular board games, including the products of Rio Grande Games, Kosmos, Abacusspiele, HUCH & friends, and Amigo Spiele.

After attending the Spiel game convention in October 2008, my husband Snoozefest (a.k.a. Ravindra Prasad) and I stayed in Germany to travel around. A friend of ours, Tom Hilgert, kindly arranged for us go on a tour of Ludo Fact GmbH and Ludo Packt GmbH, those being, respectively, a game production company and a logistics firm that manages the inventory and shipping of games. The tour took place on November 7, 2008, and our tour guide, Gertrud Geiger, sales leader at Ludo Fact, did a fantastic job of explaining how the factory works.

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Mary Dimercurio Prasad: The Essen Experience 2008 – Part 2

This is the second (and final!) installment of The Essen Experience video and article. Part 1 introduced Spiel and covered the basics of this game convention. Part 2 contains more specifics: booths, games, and the kids’ adventure area.

International Flavor
In the first part, I mentioned that 2008 was the most “international” year to date, with 41% of Spiel’s exhibitors coming from countries other than Germany. There’s not room to mention all of them (nor did I have enough time to visit every booth – did I mention the place is gigantic?), but here’s a taste…

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Andrea Meyer: Women Want to Gather

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in SAZ-News in September 2007, with an English translation by Sybille Whitehill; Meyer has updated the article for this publication.

Let’s start with data from 2006 from the Friedhelm Merz Verlag website: “To a crowd of 151,000 visitors, as well as hundreds of journalistic teams from press, radio and TV, 730 exhibitors from 31 nations presented their products in an exhibition area of about 43,200 square meters, and SPIEL ‘06 with ‘Comic Action’ proved again its unique position in the convention environment scene.”

Now a change of scene to the 2006 Computer Games Convention in Leipzig, which, according to Tagesschau.de, drew a record 185,000 visitors with 503 exhibitors from 31 countries. While that total was two thousand higher than in 2005, Tagesschau.de reported, “the fair organizers clearly missed their target of more than 200,000 visitors.”

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Roberto Flaibani: The Master and His VASSAL

Since the time I first connected to the VASSAL game engine – a Java-based open source program that gamers have used to play hundreds of different games online – I daydreamed about interviewing Rodney Kinney, designer and administrator of VASSAL, and jotted down a list of questions. New questions kept being added as I spoke with friends and colleagues, and I was finally forced to summarize them into the following short list. This interview was conducted by Roberto Flaibani and edited by Aaron Bell and W. Eric Martin.

Roberto Flaibani: Before we start with the questions, I’d like to know something about you, some biographical information like your age and job, and a little about your journey in the world of games.

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Paul Jefferies: Making Games Look as Good as They Play

I’ve been playing “German games” since 1988, and almost since my first introduction to them I’ve tinkered with the components. Perhaps it’s because I’m British, or because I have an artistic bent, I’m not really sure, but I know that when I play a game with great components it enhances my whole gaming experience. Obviously a zillion games out there with fantastic components are about as fun as having your teeth drilled, so it’s not just about which pieces are in the box. I’m interested in tinkering only with games that I consider to be “good” – and we all have our own definition for that, don’t we?

For me, a good game is one that I think will find a permanent place on my limited shelf space. For many years now, my collection has hovered around the 250-300 mark, and as new games come in, I weed out the games that have lost their charm (or just aren’t getting played any more) and sell them on. I’ve not done an inventory of how many games I’ve upgraded with different components, but I would guess it’s somewhere around 50-60.

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Mary Dimercurio Prasad: The Essen Experience 2008 – Part 1

What is it like to attend Spiel, the annual game convention in Essen, Germany? I hope to give you a flavor of what it’s all about in this two-part article, which includes a couple of short videos and photos from the 2008 event held October 23-26.

2008 Stats

Spiel in Essen, Germany, is the largest public game fair in the world, attracting around 150,000 attendees from 31 nations and it has been held annually for the last 26 years. In 2008, Spiel boasted 760 exhibitors with more foreign participation than ever before: 41%. In the past, most exhibitors came from Europe and the United States, but this year showed an increase in the number of exhibitors from Asia and Australia.

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João Marum: Playing in Portugal II

A few months have passed since I wrote my small report on the Portuguese boardgaming scene. Many things have happened since then, some quite excellent, so allow me to tell you all of what happened between that report and this small update.

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Francis K. Lalumière: Project GIPF 10th Anniversary World Championship

Ten years already!

It seems like yesterday that Kris Burm’s baby was taking its first tentative steps, still putting pieces in its little mouth wherever it toddled to. Now GIPF is a strapping young lad, already thinking about high school and ogling girls for the first time. And there’s no better way to celebrate a 10th birthday than a world championship.

The previous world championship had taken place in Germany and in the Netherlands in 2004, when only four of the Project GIPF games had been published. Four years later, the event would encompass all six games of the Project – a first which Kris Burm anticipated with trepidation.

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Arne Thomi: Behind the Scenes of Merchants & Marauders

[Editor’s note: The board game Merchants & Marauders has been sailing just over the horizon for several years now. Here, Thomi offers a personal take on the history and current status of the game.]

Twenty-eight-year-old Dane Christian Marcussen is familiar with the notion of time splitting out of control, not only from the work he did composing music for the video game TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, but also because of his many other ongoing projects. For one thing, he composes music in the computer games industry and for short films; for another, he is a student of philosophy with a major in communications who is wrapping his studies around his music-making career.

On top of that, he and his girlfriend take care of their two-and-a-half-year-old son Storm, a name that Christian says is very fitting. Perhaps those young gusts helped put the wind in the sails of another one of Christian’s ambitious projects, the creation of a board game titled Merchants & Marauders.

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