Game News

On a site called Boardgame News, you expect to see – oh, I don't know – news about board games. Surprisingly enough, BGN does indeed publish such information. Everything related to games both newly published and still to come can be found in New & Upcoming Games. All other game-related news is included in this section, divided into the following categories:

• The Industry at Large – News about game publishers and designers, sales reports, and other items of interest to gamers.
• From Cardboard to Digits – Coverage of digital conversions of analogue board and card games.
• Media Watch – Game-related readings from the mainstream media.

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Dominion Wins 2009 Japan Boardgame Prize

Here’s a news item I missed last week: Japanese gaming site U-More.com has announced that Donald X. Vaccarino’s Dominion, published by Hobby Japan, has won the 2009 Japan Boardgame Prize. Dominion received 716 points from more than 300 voters in this annual competition of games sold in Japan from October through the following September. Voters list five games, with the first place game awarded five points, the second game four points, and so on.

Matt Leacock’s Pandemic took second place with 419 points, while Uwe Rosenberg was in both third and fourth place with Agricola and Le Havre, despite the Japanese version of the game not even being available until March 2010.

Let’s Catch the Lion – an introductory version of Shogi from designer Madoka Kitao and publisher Gentosha Education in which each player has only four pieces – won the “U-More Award” for best game for beginners and families.

For a list of all the winners and links to their publishers, head to the Boardgame Prize 2009 page on U-More.com.

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Yehuda Berlinger Asks, Can You Judge a Game by Reading the Rules?

Yehuda Berlinger, designer of It’s Alive! and editor of Purple Pawn, asks the question above in a March 2010 blog post, noting:

For the typical abstract, roll-and-move, or trivia game, you’ve seen everything the author put into the work the moment you’ve read the rules, and sometimes the moment you’ve read the back of the box.

Barring the author having you consult external media during the game, if you have imagination and experience with similar games, you can do a fair job of envisioning what the experience with the board game will be like. The dice may be screwy and you may pick all the wrong cards, but a trivia game is a trivia game, an economic game is an economic game. The other players will be the main unexpected factors in the game.

However, there are exceptions to this. Games like Go or Chess look and initially play like simple abstract games. However, there are depths in these games that reveal themselves after several plays, depths that you could not have expected or understood from simply reading the rules.

Hmm, the fudge word “judge” in the question makes this difficult to answer, but in general I’d say, no, I can’t judge a game by reading the rules. Plenty of other people apparently can, based on the rules previews they write (even on this site) or the opinions they project about games they haven’t played, but even after playing hundreds of different games I find that I often don’t have a clear idea of how the game plays, much less how I would judge or rate the game. Sure, I’ll understand how a game functions – that is, what players are allowed to do and which game functions are handled automatically – but that’s vastly different from getting a feel for how action A affects your standing in the game three turns later or why you’d want to draw cards instead of moving or how letting player X claim that area restricts your growth down the road.

What say you, fellow gamer?

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Klaus Teuber Interview on Tric Trac

French website Tric Trac has posted an interview with Settlers of Catan designer Klaus Teuber filmed at the Cannes game festival in March 2010. Sophie Gravel from Canadian publisher Filosofia – which releases the Catan titles in French, including the upcoming new version of the Catan Card Game – serves as translator from French to English and back.

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Media Watch: King Philip’s War News Again After 300+ Years

Protests continue against John Poniske’s King Philip’s War, currently on preorder from Multi-Man Publishing. An excerpt from an article in the March 20, 2010 Cape Cod Times:

“It’s pretty disturbing to think that they would actually make a game of a very horrific history that started with the King Philip’s War,” said Jim Peters, executive director of the Massachusetts Commission on Indian Affairs and a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe who has also recently waged a battle against the Indian symbolism in the state seal. “It’s just an ongoing insult to the indigenous people of this country.” ...

“I don’t think (Poniske) took into consideration that the descendents of the people that he wishes to exterminate in his game are still here,” [Julianne] Jennings [a Nottoway Indian and adjunct professor of anthropology and Native American studies at Eastern Connecticut State University and Rhode Island College] said.

“It’s an awful idea for them to do,” said Ellie Page, historian for the Pocasset Wampanoag tribe of Fall River. “To make a game out of it is to diminish the sacrifice that these people had to go through at that time.”

Unlike the article in The Providence Journal that I linked to on March 16, this piece seems more balanced in how Poniske’s game is presented, but it still gives the impression that people have no idea what they’re really protesting. Do they think King Philip’s War will be like Yahtzee, with players rolling dice and yelling, “Yay, I massacred half a tribe!” when they get three-of-a-kind? Have they looked at the Multi-Man website to see what these games are like?

What’s the real issue here: the depiction of Native Americans as killers? As victims? Their mere presence in a game because “game” = “trivialization” or “mockery”? Amazon.com lists dozens of books about King Philip’s War, and I’ve seen no protests directed at those authors because they wrote about the historical situation covered in Poniske’s design.

Games have taken stuttering steps towards being acknowledged in the mainstream as something beyond child’s play – which is similar to what happened with comic books in the mid-1980s thanks to Maus and The Dark Knight Returns, decades after underground comics for adults had already appeared from Crumb, Shelton, Stack, Wilson, Williams, et al. Of course comics are still regarded as children’s material by most people, so games obviously have a long way to go, too.

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Steve Jackson’s 2010 Report to the Stakeholders

While Steve Jackson Games Incorporated has but a single stockholder – namely Steve Jackson himself – Jackson has published an annual “stakeholder report” since 2004. As Jackson explains in the current report, “It’s a useful exercise for me, and I’ve gotten favorable feedback from all levels of the hobby. So here it is again.”

Jackson notes that the company’s gross sales for 2009 increased slightly over the previous year, falling just short of $3 million. One of the main reasons that gross sales did rise is that for the most part SJG kept Munchkin and its multitude of spin-off titles in print throughout the year. As he notes later in the report:

The Munchkin line, including the Munchkin Quest boardgame, accounted for nearly 80% of our revenue in 2009! It is now available in 15 languages, with one more licensed.

Wow.

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Catalyst Game Labs Regroups, Releases Two Titles

Catalyst Game Labs, which releases RPGs for the Shadowrun and BattleTech properties, has posted a press release from Randall Bills announcing the discovery of financial irregularities within the company’s accounting:

[B]usiness funds had been co-mingled with the personal funds of one of the owners. We believe the missing funds were the result of bad habits that began alongside the creation of the company, which was initially a small hobby group. Upon further investigation, in which the owner has willingly participated, the owner in question now owes the company a significant balance and is working to help rectify the situation.

Bills goes on to note that Catalyst has restructured its accounting procedures and is investigating back payments that might be due to freelancers and others.

Despite this turmoil, Catalyst has shipped two card games to U.S. distributors in the past week, the revised High School Drama: Varsity Edition, which designer Boyan Radakovich self-published through Shifting Skies Games in 2006, and Merchants, an English language version of Pegasus’ Handelsfürsten from designer Reiner Knizia. These games have been updated on Gone Cardboard.

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Premio Archimede Design Competition Opens

Studiogiochi, an Italian company that designs games and organizes game events, has announced the Premio Archimede 2010, a biennial game design competition that legendary designer Alex Randolph oversaw for the first seven outings. The competition is open to designers from around the world, either singly or in groups, with the stipulation that the designers are “non-professionals” – meaning their primary occupation can’t be the inventing of games and they must be relatively unknown on the international gaming scene.

The winners of the Premio Archimede receive support funds of €3,500 in the form of research trips, funds for publication, and so on. The jury will also award a few special trophies, such as the Carta Mundi Special Trophy for the best card game, with the prize being 1,000 copies of said card game produced for free by Carta Mundi.

The deadline for entry is July 30, 2010. Visit the Premio Archimede page on the studiogiochi website for a participation form, entry fee information, and other details.

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Academy Games Partners with Mayfair Games

Academy Games, publisher of the Conflict of Heroes series, has entered into an agreement with Mayfair Games in which Mayfair will provide sales, marketing and fulfillment services for Academy. As Mayfair notes in its press release, “Consolidating these functions through Mayfair Games will allow Academy Games to focus on developing additional titles for the award-winning Conflict of Heroes game series and to publish other games in development.”

Such agreements have become more common in recent years, with German publisher eggertspiele signing a similar agreement with Amigo earlier in 2010 and French publisher/distributor Asmodee now serving as the logistics partner for GameWorks and Libellud, among other companies.

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Guess the 2010 Spiel des Jahres on Spielbox

Each year Spielbox.de holds a “guess the winner” contest for the Spiel des Jahres, Germany’s Game of the Year award, and the 2010 contest opens on March 20 at 10:00 am (CET) sharp. Each contest participant can enter one guess for SDJ and one guess for the children’s game of the year; if your guess(es) are not on the list of nominees that the juries announce on May 31, 2010, you can revisit the site and enter a new guess.

The first person to submit the game name that subsequently wins each award will receive prizes from Spielbox. All other individuals who submitted the correct names will be entered into a random drawing, for prizes to be announced later. Complete details of the contest on Spielbox.de.

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Media Watch: Doggone Grief Board Game Helps All Ages

From the “Really? They have a game for that?” category comes this article that ran in the Akron, Ohio Suburbanite:

Whether you are a child, teen or adult, the loss of a special person hurts a great deal. The pain affects us physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, behaviorally and spiritually. Aultman Grief Services has created Doggone Grief – a board game to help people of all ages verbally communicate their mixture of grief emotions....

“Most kids’ first loss is their pet, so it seemed natural to develop a dog-themed game to assist in the communication process,” said [director Brenda Brown], “and dogs show emotion really well too.” ...

Matt Gagnon, the counselor at Oakwood Middle School in Plain Local Schools, said, ”Doggone Grief is a great concept because there are not many fun activities relating to grief on the market.”

For more details on the game, head to the Doggone Grief page on the Aultman Grief Services website.

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Green Ronin to Release New Book – Family Games: The 100 Best

In 2008 Green Ronin Publishing released Hobby Games: The 100 Best, a 400-page book of gamers and designers each writing about one game they feel is among the best published in the past fifty years. By the end of March 2010, Green Ronin will release a companion volume, Family Games: The 100 Best. ($25) This book follows the model of the earlier release – with one hundred short essays, almost all of them by a different writer – but this time the games can be up to 100 years old. Perhaps it’s tougher to find worthwhile family games…

The list of titles included in Family Games: The 100 Best, along with the gamer or designer writing about them, is posted on the book’s webpage. Some of the interesting combinations include:

• James Ernest on Candy Land
• Corey Konieczka on For Sale
• Matt Leacock on Go Away Monster!
• Jason Matthews on Gulo Gulo
• Alan R. Moon on Hoity Toity
• Peter Olotka on Risk
• Richard Breese on Rummikub
• Andrea Angiolino on Survive!
• Steve Jackson on The Great Dalmuti

Mike Gray, Senior Director of Product Acquisition for Hasbro, wrote the book’s forward.

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Amun-Re Leaving SpielByWeb

On March 17, 2010, SpielByWeb’s Mikael Sheikh announced that the online gaming site’s license to Reiner Knizia’s Amun-Re would not be renewed. As a result, after March 22, no new games of Amun-Re can be started, although all games that have begun by that time can be played to completion.

Knizia designs have been disappearing from a number of online gaming sites of late, with Ra being removed from BrettSpielWelt and Samurai from MabiWeb. At the same time, many Knizia designs have been released as iPhone apps over the past six months, so don’t be surprised if Amun-Re and company show up there, too.

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Media Watch: Tim Holland, Backgammon Master, Dies at 79

From the March 16, 2010 New York Times:

Tim Holland, who was widely considered the world’s greatest backgammon player during that ancient board game’s modern heyday, in the 1960s and ‘70s, died on March 10 at his home in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 79…

Mr. Holland won the World Backgammon Association championship in 1967, 1968 and 1971. (No championship tournaments were held in 1969 or 1970.) Besides retaining the title, he pocketed more than $30,000 in prize money for each of those championships. By the early 1970s he was averaging $60,000 a year in tournament money, and that did not include significant earnings from bets he had placed on himself or his percentage from the winnings of the highest bidders at tournaments where the best players were “auctioned off.”

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Marcus King on Why Game Store Owners Seem Like Greedy Doofuses

For his first column on ICv2.com, game store owner Marcus King talked about how he defines success in the game industry. His second column explains how relationships have changed between publishers, distributors, retailers and customers over the past two decades. An excerpt describing the current situation:

Retailers are usually “outgunned” in the information on any given product – by the consumer! The consumer who likes Magic: The Gathering will read and learn about his one passion. while the retailer has maybe 2,500 products to keep track of, and over 200 new release titles every month to consider…

This has changed the relationships of all parties involved.  Where the retail store owner used to be revered as a guy with the coolest possible job, they are now often looked at and viewed – by consumers – as some poor doofus who is hopelessly misinformed on all things gaming, and who is akin to a money-grubbing greedy guy who charges “full retail price,” when only dummies pay full retail.

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Study: Social Gamers Will Pimp Themselves for Virtual Money

In early March 2010, I posted a video of Carnegie Mellon University professor Jesse Schell in which he talked about unexpected gaming successes – Club Penguin, Farmville, Wii Fit – and how he expects gaming to become even more integrated into everyday life in the future. Part of his prediction involves players watching ads or otherwise letting companies market to them in exchange for points, credits or some other type of gamerly interaction. With that in mind, here’s part of a press release on just that subject:

While most game developers struggle to monetize even three percent of their users through direct payments for virtual currency, new numbers released today by Offerpal Media at the Game Developers Conference show that alternative payment methods enable developers to monetize significantly larger portions of their user base. Derived from a study conducted by comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, as well as from Offerpal’s own network-wide monetization performance, the numbers verify that social gamers are enthusiastic about alternative, or indirect, payment methods as a way to earn virtual currency for free rather than having to pay for it directly.

According to the comScore study, 53.3% of the total respondents reported that they would be “very likely” to complete a marketing action such as filling out a survey, watching a video, shopping at online retailers or signing up for a subscription in order to get points for the games they play on leading social networks. By comparison, only 22.8% of the respondents reported that they would be willing and are able to buy the points using cash payment methods such as credit cards, PayPal, bank transfers or mobile billing.

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Media Watch: Game based on King Philip’s War angers Native Americans

From The Providence Journal:

A new board game that pits 17th-century Colonists against New England’s Indian tribes is sparking a 21st-century skirmish between the publisher and Native American leaders.

The game, called King Philip’s War, allows players to defeat Colonial or Indian forces in “a momentous example of New England frontier savagery,” says Multi-Man Publishing, a military game company in Millersville, Md.

That quote comes from the opening paragraph of Multiman’s webpage for King Philip’s War, which is designed by John Poniske, and the full paragraph makes clear that the “savagery” took place on both sides of the battle:

King Philip’s War 1675-1676 was a momentous example of New England frontier savagery. A loose coalition of angry tribes inspired by King Philip (the Wampanoag sachem, Metacomet) burned and sacked settlements throughout the colonies of Massachusettes, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and the then separate colony of Plymouth. Ultimately, more than 2600 Colonials were captured or killed. Twelve Colonial settlements were completely destroyed and six more heavily damaged. Boston itself very nearly came under attack. At the same time, countless Indian villages were burned and 6000 Indians were slain or captured, and sold into slavery. In all, 1,200 homes were burned, and vast stores of food destroyed. Metacomet himself was eventually ambushed, beheaded, and quartered.

For more details about King Philip’s War – which is currently in preorder status – visit the Multiman page linked to above.

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Hippodice Announces Winners of 2010 Game Design Contest

Hippodice Spieleclub has announced the winners, finalists and special award winners for its 2010 game design competition. First through third place goes to:

1. Camel Drive, by Hans Reinhard Gottwald
   
2. Die Staufer, by multiple Hippodice finalist Andreas Steding
3. Midgard Marauders, by Yort Watson

The other finalists, in alphabetical order by game name, are:

• Archipelago, by Brett J. Gilbert
• Babylonische Träume, by Monika Lehmann & Dr. Georgios Nomikós
• CALC-IT by Jörg Domberger
• Jukers, by Brett J. Gilbert
• Monster, by Tobias Thulke
• Takla Makan, by Bernd Eisenstein

Hippodice listed two designs as recommended: Panorama, by Heinrich Glumpler and Tierpfleger & Co., by Stefan Risthaus. The club also awarded a special prize for best two-player game to Stefan Kiehl for Moeraki – Kamu and a special prize for best full-length game to Louis and Stefan Malz for Altiplano.

Given that a number of the winners and finalists have self-published in the past – Steding, Eisenstein, Glumpler, Risthaus – and given the strong representation of established German publishers in the jury – Ulrich Blennemann (Phalanx Games), André Bronswijk (Pegasus Spiele), Moritz Brunnhofer (Hans im Glück), Stefan Brück(Ravensburger/alea), Peter Eggert (Eggertspiele), Thorsten Gimmler (Schmidt Spiele), Wieland Herold (Jury “Spiel des Jahres"), Uwe Mölter (Amigo), Walter Scholz (Zoch) – don’t be surprised if one or more of these titles appear in print down the road. That’s one of the goals of the competition, after all!

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Another Ride on Brenda Brathwaite’s Train

I tweeted about designer Brenda Brathwaite in April 2009, linking to an article in The Escapist that described two unusual games that she had created. An excerpt:

The first game came about after a discussion with her ten-year-old daughter about an elementary school lesson on the slave trade. While her daughter had all the facts memorized, Brathwaite was dismayed to learn that she didn’t grasp what the Middle Passage was like for the Africans who were kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic. So she did what any game designer worth her salt would do: She made a game out of it.

Brathwaite assembled a collection of tiny wooden figures, then had her daughter group them into “families.” After her daughter was finished, she picked them up by the handful and placed them on a makeshift boat. Her daughter was confused: Why would she take the parents but leave the baby? Why wouldn’t brothers stay with their sisters? “No one wants to go,” Brathwaite explained. That’s when it started to click.

The second game, titled Train, had players moving people tokens from point A to point B – only to discover midgame that they were sending the passengers to Nazi concentration camps.

BGN’s Jeff Allers wrote a bit about Train in his June 2009 Postcard from Berlin, saying: “Although Brathwaite’s idea is well-intentioned, it has not convinced me that it works successfully as a game. Not only would the determinism of the theme (i.e. lack of choices) be frustrating, but I could hardly imagine a player wanting to continue once their role as the Gestapo was clear and the pawns suddenly took on human faces.”

Anthony Burch at Destructoid expressed similar reservations about Train, but his opinion changed after attending a talk by Brathwaite, as he describes in a March 2010 article. An excerpt:

Read more...

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Web of Power Now Playable Online

Michael Schacht’s Web of Power can now be played online through Schacht’s own website, MichaelSchacht.net.

The online version of Web of Power – which is turn-based and not real-time – was implemented by MaBi, the programmer behind the online gaming site MaBiWeb and the online versions of Schacht’s Hansa, Patrizier and China. The English rules are available on Schacht’s site for those not familiar with the game.

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Peter Struijf Talks about Kraków 1325 AD

Designer Peter Struijf published Kraków 1325 AD in 2008, releasing the game through his own company Geode Games. I published a preview of the game in September 2008, with comments from Struijf on the game’s design and development.

In December 2009, Struijf appeared in Google’s New York office to give a 30-minute talk that he dubbed “a creative journey” which covered the game’s three-year-long development cycle. Well, the YouTube description says “30 minutes,” but the video actually lasts just over an hour. What is Google learning from game designers? Take a listen to find out…

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Registration Open for Protospiel 2010

Protospiel is an annual get-together for game designers, both published and aspiring, that takes place July 9-11, 2010 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In the words of organizer David E. Whitcher, owner of PyroMyth Games and designer of Cannon, “For those unfamiliar with Protospiel, we focus on improving unfinished game prototypes through communal testing. It’s a ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ event, with designers helping designers with a few of our friends from the industry lending a helping hand.”

Whitcher goes on to write, “Besides our usual playtesting, we will have Alex Yeager of Mayfair Games presenting a game design exercise on Friday, and on Saturday Ben Clark of ImagiGrafx will speak on short-run game production for those interested in self-publishing.”

For more information on Protospiel, a history of the event from past attendees, and resources for game designers, visit the Protospiel website.

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Piatnik Increases Sales in 2009

The Austrian publisher Piatnik doesn’t get a lot of attention from the BoardGameGeek crowd, but every so often you get a reminder that the world of games extends far, far beyond the borders of BGG. Take, for example, this press release, which states that Piatnik increased sales in 2009 by 5% over the previous year for a total of 26 million Euros, with about 80 percent of those revenues come from sales outside Austria. Break down the numbers by titles sold, and that equals 10,000 games and 100,000 cards sold every single day of the year.

What’s more, the party game Activity – a game nearly two decades old, with fewer than 200 registered owners on BGG – has now sold more than five million copies. That’s an amazing amount of activity going on under the gaming radar!

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Media Watch: Game Designer Welcomes Anomia

In February 2010, Ron Fletcher posted a Q&A in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine with game designer Andrew Innes, who self-published the word/party game Anomia in 2009 (3-6 players, ages 10+, 30 minutes, $20):

Has the recession affected your venture?
There seems to be a growing audience for affordable parlor games. And I remain surprised that it took only seven weeks to network and raise the $20,000 needed to self-publish the game. I pre-sold 500, manufactured 2,500, and have sold over 900, mostly through the website. I’m in a few independent, local stores. The next goal is to find a distributor and get into more retail stores.

As Innes explains on the Anomia Press website, “In the spring of 2009 I started Anomia Press and set out to raise enough money to pay for the first printing of Anomia. I used Facebook, Twitter, email, and this website to appeal to the hundreds of people who had attended play-test sessions [since 2004]. I asked everyone to pre-purchase copies of Anomia to help subsidize the first printing.” In-your-face marketing at its finest.

Oh, and as for how to play the game, here’s a description from the publisher:

Draw a card from the center pile and flip it over. Does the symbol on your card match one on another player’s card? If so, you must quickly face-off with the other player by giving an example of the person, place, or thing on their card before they can do the same for yours. [Categories include restaurants, radio stations and shampoo brands.] If you blurt a correct answer out first, you win their card and drawing continues. Sounds simple, right? Wrong!

Wild cards allow unlike symbols to match, increasing the number of things you must pay attention to. Cascading face-offs can occur when you hand over a lost card revealing a new top card on your play pile.

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McDonald’s Pimps Catan, Jungle Speed

Air Le Mag is a monthly custom publication with a circulation of 280,000 that’s produced by Textuel for Mac Donald’s – as the fast-food restaurant is called in Canada – and the March 2009 issue features a three page article on games that lists three titles as “must haves”: Monopoly (no surprise there), The Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow and The Settlers of Catan.

Small World, Ca$h’n Gun$ and Time’s Up are also mentioned in the article, and Bruno Faidutti, Tric Trac’s Monsieur Phal, and Jungle Speed co-designer Thomas Vuarchex are all quoted. The article mentions that Jungle Speed, which was introduced in 1996, has annual sales of 200,000.

(The “golden arches over Catan“ image comes from Filosofia, which publishes the French edition of Settlers for Canada and Europe. You can download this article from a news link on the Filosofia website.)

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Mayfair Games Wants Your Help

Mayfair Games has launched a new volunteer program and is searching for gamers who want to demo games at the Origins Game Fair in June 2010 and Gen Con in August 2010. “Interested gamers not attending these shows are also welcome to apply, as Mayfair Games will be looking for volunteers to demo games at other conventions and game stores,” wrote Bill Fogarty, director of marketing, in a press release announcing the program.

For more information on the volunteer program, or to request an application, email Bill Fogarty. If you plan to attend Origins or Gen Con, mention this in your email.

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