Convention Reports
BGN editors, columnists and readers report back from game conventions and industry trade fairs, with coverage of games played, celebrities spotted, and displays photographed. In some cases, the reports are completed daily, directly from the conventions themselves, while at other times they're filed after the show is complete to allow more time for introspection – not to mention time for playing the actual games! This section includes coverage of the following events:
- FallCon: 19 (2006) & 20 (2007)
- GAMA Trade Show: 2006 – 2007
- GAMECON-1: 2005
- The Gathering of Friends: 2006 – 2007 – 2008
- Gen Con: 2006
– 2008
- New York Toy Fair: 2006 – 2007 – 2008
- Origins:
2006
- Spiel: 2006 – 2007
- UK Games Expo: 2008
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Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2010 – Hasbro, Bucephalus, Asmodee
By W. Eric Martin
February 25, 2010
Okay, time to bring an end to this Toy Fair madness. The show has been over for nearly a week, yet I’m still plodding through the vast pile of material that I assembled in a single day’s visit. Even at a show like Toy Fair, when the dedicated booths for game companies fill only two segregated rows on the lower level of the vast Jacob Javits Center and other game publishers are scattered about the convention floor like Hansel’s trail of vanishing bread crumbs in the woods, you can still be overwhelmed by the vast number of games being presented. Hence, these reports, now mercifully drawing to a close as I tackle the biggest beast of the game industry…
Hasbro has a terrible reputation among gamers: They put out too many spin-offs; they’re not innovative; they don’t credit designers; they hog the market and undersell competition; and so on. So why cover Hasbro? First, because the company is part of the game industry and what Hasbro releases does have an effect on the larger market, especially with the 95% of the population that doesn’t consider themselves gamers, yet does play the occasional Hasbro title. Second, because Hasbro does embrace the new on some occasions, as with its introduction of Siftables to the general marketplace.
In case you’re not familiar with the term, Siftables are small, block-sized computers that recognize one another and interact in various ways. Here’s a short video demonstrating how Siftables could be used in a word-formation game:
Siftables word game from Jeevan Kalanithi on Vimeo.
And here’s how Hasbro will present this “SmartLink Technology” – as it’s referred to in the press release – in Q4 2010: Read more...
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Feb 25, 2010, 12:30 AM • Comments (1)
Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2010 – Playroom, University Games, North Star Games
By W. Eric Martin
February 23, 2010
Every year at Toy Fair you run across game designers and publishers that leave you thinking, “Really? You thought that was a good idea?” Often these folks vanish after a year, having garnered no sales or receiving no encouragement from buyers, but sometimes they surprise you.
The guys with the cricket trivia game, for example – a game that so disinterested the rep that he kept looking around the room while explaining it to me – came to Toy Fair for two years, but they took a pass in 2010 for whatever reason. Maybe next year. Other games that I would be less than enthusiastic to bring to the table include:
• Chinese Revolution, an “innovative” take on Chinese Checkers that I covered in an earlier Toy Fair 2010 report
• XYMYX, an “evolution of chess” in that the players make their moves simultaneously, whether by playing online or through the use of an electronic device that stores a player’s move and reveals it only when both players have moved. Why make this change? As described in the promotional material, “after analyzing the results of over one million chess games, we can conclude that the white piece player has almost a 10% more probabilities [sic] of winning the game.” This game is available for licensing.
• TDC Games, publishers of such fine games as Deluxe Dirty Minds, Sexy Secrets and Man Laws and Woman Rules, had a new card game called Chaos in which players lay down rule cards as players infringe on the rules in their hands. Thus you’ll need to sing when you do this, and make fart noises in your armpit when you do that, and so on.
• Royal Chess is described by the publisher as being “like playing a game of poker and chess at the same time,” but it’s more like playing war than poker. While playing a regular game of chess, each player has a hand of five cards from her own fifty card deck. To move a piece, you must first discard a card that shows that piece; you then refill your hand to five cards. Capture the opponent’s king and queen to win.
Okay, enough with those oddities – let’s look at some of the other game publishers at NY Toy Fair…
Read more...
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Feb 23, 2010, 12:30 AM • Comments (12)
Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2010 – Out of the Box, Summit, Ravensburger, Winning Moves
By W. Eric Martin
February 21, 2010
Despite being at my fourth Toy Fair and attending other conventions as well, I’ve still never gotten the hang of taking photos at these events. And I don’t mean that I take bad photos, although that is sometimes the case – I mean that I flat out forget to take them. I listen to the description of the game; I ask the rep questions about what’s on the cards or gameboard, I take notes about the game play and other details – then I move on to the next item or company, forgetting that a photo shared with you, the reader, would make all of this far more clear and comprehensible. My apologies.
Take, for example, the first item listed for the company below…
I’ve already written about Out of the Box Publishing’s 2010 line-up in two news items – one item in Dec. 2009 that covered the company’s five games, and a second item from Jan. 2010 with more details about 10 Days in the Americas. Here’s a brief description of this game for those unfamiliar with the 10 Days... series:
Players have to assemble a valid journey through North, Central and South America and the Caribbean. For a journey to be complete, a player must have ten travel tiles that connect with one another, whether adjacent countries are placed next to one another or two countries are properly connected via an airplane or ship card.
What would have completed this description and clarified what’s unique about 10 Days in the Americas? A photo of the gameboard. What can I not offer you, the reader? A photo of the gameboard. Some day I’ll perhaps train my brain to think visually rather than textually, but that day has yet to arrive.
Read more...
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Feb 21, 2010, 02:00 PM • Comments (2)
Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2010 – LEGO, Goliath, Family Games
By W. Eric Martin
February 20, 2010
After talking about a few games at Toy Fair, a publisher rep suddenly stopped and said, “Who are you again? I know you’re not a retailer because you’re asking too many questions and taking too many notes.”
That’s the mental framework running behind the scenes at Toy Fair. Retail buyers rarely care about the game play of the products they purchase; they care about cost, availability, target market, shipping terms, marketing dollars behind the line, ease of demonstration, and all sorts of other non-factors from the gamer’s point of view. It’s interesting to see this dynamic play out when you ask a rep for an explanation of a game, and he talks mostly about how easily you can sell the item to customers since it will already be familiar to them.
Not that this is the case with the publishers mentioned below, mind you – just an anecdote that came to mind while writing this segment of my 2010 NY Toy Fair coverage…
LEGO was my first stop of the morning on the one day that I spent at Toy Fair, not because I expected to be blown away by the games on display but because I was already familiar with all of them – or at least I thought I was. In 2009 LEGO launched its game line in Germany and the UK with ten titles – Monster 4,
March 2010
- Monster 4 (2-4 players, ages 7+, 15-25 minutes, $15)
Lava Dragon (2-4 players, ages 7+, 15-25 minutes, $15) - Pirate Code (2-4 players, ages 8+, 15-25 minutes, $20)
- Minotaurus (2-4 players, ages 8+, 20-30 minutes, $25)
- Creationary (3-8 players, ages 7+, 30-60 minutes, $35)
- Ramses Pyramid (2-4 players, ages 8+, 20-30 minutes, $30)
- Race 3000 (2-4 players, ages 7+, 20-30 minutes, $20)
- Robo Champ (2-3 players, ages 6+, 10-15 minutes, $10)
- Magikus (2-4 players, ages 6+, 10-20 minutes, $10)
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Feb 20, 2010, 01:00 AM • Comments (1)
Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2010 – Queen Games, R&R Games
By W. Eric Martin
February 17, 2010
While walking to Toy Fair this year, I passed the huge white tents set up in Bryant Park to house the runway shows of Fashion Week, which – as Project Runway fans know – is a huge event in the fashion industry.
In many ways, Fashion Week is akin to New York Toy Fair: designers spend months or years moving from concept to prototype to preproduction to finished product, while the potential buyer will frequently spend no more than two minutes deciding whether the product should be shooed aside or blessed with an order. The designer or fashion house will kowtow to expected market trends or emerge with a unique twist on existing products or try to anticipate where the market is headed or work from an individual perspective that stands apart from the rest of the industry – which is precisely what game players observe in their industry, although we’d never agree on who’s kowtowing and who’s standing apart. (Fashion buyers feel the same way, of course.)
With that in mind, here’s an early look at the spring and fall line of two fashionable gaming houses:
Queen Games is now distributing its own titles in English instead of having them distributed by Rio Grande Games. Thus, Rajive Gupta, the head of Queen Games, was attending New York Toy Fair for the first time to introduce the company’s existing and upcoming titles to U.S. distributors and retailers. Asked for an impression of how the show was going, Gupta said, “Ask me again next year when I have something to compare it to.” The games on display were:
• New York, which has the same game play as Dirk Henn’s Spiel des Jahres-winning Alhambra, but with the Spanish architecture being replaced by the skyscrapers of Manhattan. As in the original game, players collect four types of currencies and use those funds to purchase tiles that they assemble into their own mini-metropolis, connecting the paved street edges on the tiles to create a coherent network of roads. The building tiles come in six colors, and players score for their holdings three times during the game, earning points for having the most of a color as well as for their longest road.
Aside from the theme change and the associated new artwork, the gameboard is now larger with spots for both face-down and face-up tiles and a scoretrack that circles the edge of the board instead of zigzagging back and forth. (Thank goodness!) Note that this game is listed in a number of places as Alhambra: New York, but the Alhambra name doesn’t appear on the box front, as seen below. (2-6 players, ages 8+, 45-60 minutes, $50)
• New York: The Card Game, aka Alhambra: Das Kartenspiel, which is effectively New York/Alhambra but with cards instead of tiles and no street/wall building. Players still use four currencies to buy colored property, being able to take another turn immediately when paying the exact price, but the property cards are piled in front of their owners by color rather than being arranged in some manner. The game lasts only two scoring rounds. (2-6 players, ages 8+, 45-60 minutes, $25)
Read more...
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Feb 17, 2010, 11:00 AM • Comments (7)
Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2010 – Mayfair, ThinkFun, More
By W. Eric Martin
February 16, 2010
So my first encounter with games during this year’s trek to New York Toy Fair came when I stopped in Rite-Aid to buy a small spiral notebook as I had forgotten to bring one of the many that I already own. (I also forgot my camera, a print-out of my appointments, a snack, and many other things. Taking a page from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, however, I did bring a change of socks, a boon to any traveler who plans to walk ten hours. With socks in reserve for the train ride home, everything else seems manageable.)
The game in question turned out to be barely a game at all: Rite-Aid Pharmacy’s The Game of Life Collect & Win contest. True to Life‘s storied game play, Collect & Win requires you to open random ticket packs randomly, then place the random image segments on a grid to complete some random product sold at Rite-Aid.
Well.
Hardly an auspicious start, but thankfully things picked up from there. Here’s the first of umpty-um reports on the publishers and games on display at Toy Fair 2010:
Let’s start with the most mainstream Eurogame company, Mayfair Games, which continues to find new markets for Settlers of Catan in the U.S., making it the most well-known, obscure game in the country.
In June 2010, Mayfair and designer Klaus Teuber will branch the Catan line in new directions with Settlers of America, part of the Catan Histories series. The essence of the game is that players initially populate the East Coast of the U.S. with their depots and use the resources they generate to build railroad tracks to the west, building new depots along the way. As you build, goods are made available to you from your personal display, and these goods must be delivered to depots owned by the other players. Thus, you need to both build and deliver in order to win. Yes, Mayfair has crossed the streams of its two main product lines to deliver what might be referred to as “The Catan Train Game.”
One other interesting aspect of the game is that – somewhat in the manner of The Settlers of the Stone Age – as a player builds west she may build a depot in a hex that has no resource number. When this happens, she takes a number chip from one of the existing hexes in the east to place on this hex, with the old hex having its production value degraded, mimicking deforestation or land going fallow.
As this point Settlers of America will be available only in English from Mayfair Games. (3-4 players, ages 10+, 60-90 minutes, approx. $55)
Read more...
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Feb 16, 2010, 12:00 PM • Comments (1)
Convention Report: Spiel 2009: October 22, 2009 – Day 1
By W. Eric Martin
October 22, 2009
As usual, I was already exhausted before Spiel even opened due to long days and late nights putting together the Spiel preview, uncomfortable airline seating that keeps tall people awake for eight hours, and a late dinner and chat session that pushed the sleep meter even further down. That aside, let’s focus on the positive: the new titles at Spiel 09 and what’s coming down the pike for 2010:
- First, the games played: This list is short as I spent much of my time talking and asking questions of designers, etc., but I did play Havana, Tobago and Psycho Pet today.
Havana sounds like a light card game – collect resources, build buildings, score – yet our initial three-player game felt a bit like roaming in the dark. You can’t well anticipate who will play which role when, and you need a grasp of the “I know that you know” double-think to better plan for what to do. In brief, you play one new role each turn after the first, and the two roles in play create a two-digit number; the order of the numbers determines who goes first, with the lower numbers having weaker powers. The powers give you money, resources and workers, with those components being required to build buildings. Seems fine.
Tobago is a treasure hunt, with the players laying down clue cards to narrow where the treasure might be. Once a single location remains for any of the four types of treasure, you divvy up treasure cards among those who contributed to finding it. Since those involved late in the discovery process get an earlier pick of the treasure, you have an incentive to narrow a treasure’s location, even if you can’t pick up the treasure yourself. Fun and thinky at the same time. There’s a bit of weirdness during play as the game suggests marking possible treasure locations only after narrowing the field to 10-15 possible locations, which means that you have to recall that black is still up for grabs – but not, say, within two spaces of a palm tree or not in the forest – despite black not being visible on the board. I want an online version to take care of this tedious task for me.
Psycho Pet has you collecting therapy points through a push-your-luck mechanism, but since you need a lot of points to cure all but the healthiest of animals, you must spend points marking bonuses that will pay off under certain conditions, such as a cat being in the cards turned up at the start of a round. Problem is, the number of these spots is limited, and even with only four out of six possible players, one person became locked out of these bonuses and could only crawl along each round, clearly out of the running in a game destined to last much longer. We were likely undervaluing action cards and their abilities, but we seemed to be making less progress toward the finish line than we imagined we would and decided to move on to something else.
Oh, I also looked at Priests of Ra, the new Reiner Knizia title from Rio Grande, and after a quick read of the rules, we put it back and headed to Tobago. The game play is Priests of Ra is identical to the original except for two small changes: The game doesn’t include god tiles, so your only options on a turn are invoke Ra or draw a tile, and some of the tiles are double-sided, and you decide which side will be face-up and auctioned when you pull such a tile. The real difference is in the tiles you collect and the scoring system, and while I admit that such changes could be significant in terms of the choices you’ll make during the game, given the short amount of time available at Spiel, I thought it best to move on to something less familiar.
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Oct 22, 2009, 07:30 PM • Comments (10)
Origins 2009 Report from Ted Cheatham
Ted Cheatham was at Origins 2009 this past weekend, checking out the new games on display and talking with designers and publishers about upcoming releases, and he’s filed this report.
Posted by Ted Cheatham • Jun 30, 2009, 02:30 PM • Comments (1)
Andrea “Liga” Ligabue: Italian fairs are growing bigger - Ludica
Game events in Italy are quickly growing both in size and number. Together with our flagship, Lucca Comics & Games, other fair are finding places and audience. First of all PLAY: the Game Festival, the event that inherits the tradition of ModCon, the gamers con, scoring more than 10,000 visitors in the first edition (next edition is scheduled for 13.14 Marco 2010).
Despite the fact that big cities usually have problem arranging big events, both Torino and Milano seems to climbing up the slope. Ludica, Milano, scores 7,500 visitors in the first edition and much more better in the second edition, 27-29 March 2009, thanks to the concomitance with Cartoomics, the Comics, Cartoons, Collecting and Games Exhibition. Last edition of Cartoomics got 45,000 visitors but only thanks to the concomitance with the Beer Hall. This year Cartoomics and Ludica started an adventure together. Go on reading to see the official Ludica press release ...
Posted by Andrea Liga Ligabue • Apr 23, 2009, 04:36 AM • Comments (0)
Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2009 – Gamewright, MindWare, FRED and Hasbro
By W. Eric Martin
March 11, 2009
Sure, the 2009 New York Toy Fair ended almost a month ago, but seeing as I still have unprocessed notes in my notebook, there’s more to talk about from the show, starting with…
Gamewright had its standard mix of colorful kids’ games, along with a single title directed at older players, that title being Funny Business, a concept-driven party game for 4-8 players. On a turn, players need to think of a name for the business combination presented on two cards drawn from a deck of 200. What would you name an aquarium/home supply store? How about a taco shop/massage parlor? Everyone votes on which name they prefer, with the winning entry scoring two points and everyone who voted on it – possibly including the writer of said name – scoring one point. Whoever has the most points after a certain number of rounds wins. Read more...
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Mar 11, 2009, 04:00 AM • Comments (7)
Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2009 – North Star, Looney, Asmodee, More…
By W. Eric Martin
March 4, 2009
Another week, another summary of what was shown at New York Toy Fair in February 2009. Let’s get to it…
Satish Pillalamarri announced that an expansion pack for Wits & Wagers – expansion pack #1, mind you – is on the calendar for a July 2009 release, although it will likely debut at the Origins Game Fair in late June. The expansion will include one hundred new cards with a total of 700 new questions and retail for $15. Wits & Wagers has also been licensed for an iPhone application.
Press materials note that Say Anything, which North Star Games released in mid-2008, sold 15,000 copies in its first seven months on the market.
Looney Labs was present at NY Toy Fair for the first time in three years, showing off various flavors of Fluxx and Pink Treehouse and other pyramid items in a long-haired blur at their busy booth. Promotional material notes that 23,000 copies of Monty Python Fluxx were sold in the game’s first two months on the market, while Fluxx itself has racked up a half-million copies sold.
One new item on the agenda is Are You a Traitor?, a name that should clue you in to this game’s lineage if you’re familiar with Are You a Werewolf?, Andy Looney’s take on Werewolf. This new game is designed for 5-8 players – that is, for those times when you lack a quorum for Werewolf.
In Are You a Traitor? players take on roles that consist of a traitor, a key holder, two wizards (one good, the other evil), and a bunch of guards. The key holder is trying to identify the good wizard in order to deliver the key, the traitor is trying to get the key to the evil wizard, and the guards want to catch the traitor. Looney Labs is aiming for a June 2009 release at Origins, although that date’s not set in stone.
Read more...
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Mar 4, 2009, 03:00 PM • Comments (2)
Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2009 – R&R Games, Out of the Box, and Educational Insights
By W. Eric Martin
February 25, 2009
While walking from Grand Central Station – a destination in its own right, with tourists pausing to stare at the astronomically-detailed ceiling and take picture after picture that won’t come out properly – to the Jacob Javits center, where New York Toy Fair is held each year, I found myself rediscovering the wonder and paradoxes of New York City all over again. The city is filled with contradictions after all – the shiny with the grimy, the enticing with the stomach-turning, the new with the not-so-new – and the best way to see the city is to walk the streets and keep your eyes open, even when you’re walking down a sidewalk covered with enormous bricks of dirty clothing on which apparently homeless people are sleeping and drinking and getting sick. One person throws trash on the street or inadvertently drops an empty water bottle, and you imagine the consequences of seven million other people doing the same thing and turning that tiny island into an instant wasteland.
On a block near the Jacob Javits center, stands a church of some sort, its roof panels Statue-of-Liberty green and its walls boarded off in what appears to be a permanent state of restoration. You picture the church as an historic object tucked inside an earthy crust that both protects it from the elements and preserves its beauty, out of sight of those who might soil it with their human presence – then you realize that the toy vendors you’re about to see hope to duplicate that combination with their own products, creating objects of such wonder that children and adults will tuck away extra copies unopened for future generations and an imagined, hoped-for resale market.
A few blocks from Grand Central, my legs scissoring quickly as I found my pace on the city streets, I passed a dishevelled woman who was calling out to passersby, “Excuse me, are you important? Excure me, are you important?” No, ma’am, not necessarily important, but I do have a few thousand readers who want to know more about what was on display at Toy Fair, so let me get on with it…
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Posted by W. Eric Martin • Feb 25, 2009, 11:00 PM • Comments (3)
Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2009 – Mayfair, Playroom, Winning Moves
By W. Eric Martin
February 18, 2009
Another February, another trip to New York for Toy Fair, the event at which you see whether any limits exist to the number of scooters, dolls, electronic learning devices, and books about the value of sharing that can be created and foisted onto retailers and distributors. So far, I’ve seen nothing to indicate that we’re even close to such a limit as there always seems to be a new head of hair and a new way to explain how this particular device hits the seven critical developmental touchstones in an infant’s brain.
The games keep coming as well, of course, some of which promise to be good and some of which merely promise to make promises to be good. Given that you can’t play anything at Toy Fair that takes longer than 30 seconds to complete, it’s sometimes hard to know the good from the bad. Sometimes.
With that said, here’s my first report from Toy Fair 2009, with more to follow in the coming days…
The Mayfair booth offered little in the way of visual teasers of upcoming releases other than a proof copy of Catan Geographies: Germany, which is due out on March 12, 2009 – but since that looks little different from the Kosmos edition of Catan: Deutschland that debuted at Spiel 08, I refrained from taking a pic.
Steam, Martin Wallace’s new version of Age of Steam, is still on the schedule for early April. After that comes the following handful of titles:
Read more...
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Feb 18, 2009, 02:00 AM • Comments (8)
Chris Kovac: 2009 Canadian Toy & Hobby Fair
On a very chilly morning your intrepid reporter made his way downtown for the 69th Canadian Toy & Hobby Fair to see what new boardgame stuff I could find and to get my free juice and cookies. The Toronto-based toy fair is a relatively small national toy fair – 87 booths in total – that’s mainly for toy and game buyers across Canada. Here is who I visited and what I found:
This Quebec-based company specializes in gorgeous coffee table abstract games along with various wooden puzzles. Among its best known games are Stratum, Inversé and Make 5.
Two new games were on display this year: One was a travel-sized dice game call Battle of the Sixes in which each player rolls his set of dice, then each player eliminates any pair of sixes between him and his opponent. Any remaining points are added to the player’s score. The other game was a big, wood, pattern recognition game called Gobsmacked. The person explaining the games seemed to be a bit inexperienced, so I did not get a very good explanation of this game.
Read more...
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Feb 5, 2009, 07:00 PM • Comments (0)
Convention Report: Spiel 2008 – Catch Me If You Can, Street Paintball and Plimil
By W. Eric Martin
December 28, 2008
Okay, time to cover three more lesser-known games that appeared at Spiel 08 and clear away some of my guilt for taking so long to finish this convention coverage. (Perhaps I should look on the positive side, however – at the current rate I have enough material to keep posting these reports until April!)
Let’s start with a game from Dutch designer Lieven d’Hondt, who assembled a limited print run of fifty copies for his first design. Catch Me If You Can combines elements of Stratego with, well, other elements of Stratego.
Read more...
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Dec 28, 2008, 06:00 AM • Comments (0)
Convention Report: Spiel 2008 – Kimaloé and Colors
By W. Eric Martin
November 18, 2008
Is anyone still interested in Spiel reports? I’ve been somewhat distracted since returning from Germany, but as no one else has reported on these games, it’s time to translate some of my notes into print, starting with a new game from two-thirds of the crew behind Animalia and Jamaica.
Sébastien Pauchon and Malcolm Braff are the main forces behind GameWorks, a Swiss design company that creates custom games for clients. The two games listed in the opening paragraph were both commissioned by an insurance company, for example. GameWorks’ newest release – with Dominique Ehrhard on board as co-designer – is Kimaloé, which was designed for Terre des Hommes, a Swiss non-governmental organization that focuses on children’s rights. The game will be released on November 20, 2008 to coincide with Universal Children’s Day, and the game will be distributed by Asmodee.
Read more...
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Nov 18, 2008, 01:30 PM • Comments (2)
Convention Report: Spiel 2008 – Codename: Ancient and Valdora
By W. Eric Martin
November 9, 2008
One of the reasons I attended Spiel 08 was to get a first look at titles coming out in 2009. No, I’m not bored with this year’s releases – I just want to keep track of what’s coming out when so that I can report such things here on BGN. Jackson Pope at Reiver Games, for example, showed off a design from Dirk Liekens, whose just-released Wind River from Argentum Games was getting decent reviews at Spiel.
Read more...
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Nov 9, 2008, 05:00 PM • Comments (2)
Convention Report: Spiel 2008 – 24 Hours
By W. Eric Martin
October 28, 2008
After spending far too many hours on the final day of the Spiel game convention punching, bagging and stacking (and restacking) my cardboard treasures in order to fit everything in my two suitcases – a challenge that failed, leaving me to tote three games in a plastic bag in addition to my weighty computer bag – I grabbed a few hours of sleep before waking at 6 am to eat, shower and prepare for the long trek to Düsseldorf airport and, eventually, home.
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Posted by W. Eric Martin • Oct 28, 2008, 11:00 AM • Comments (33)
Convention Report: Essen 2008: October 25, 2008 – Day 4
By W. Eric Martin
October 26, 2008
Spiel 08 is over, so let’s start the final summary report with one bit of news from the closing moments of the show:
• FRED Distribution will release a new version of Richard Borg’s Battle Cry, which has a working title of – wait for it – Richard Borg’s Battle Cry. Borg mentioned that some elements of the game will be updated, but the release will remain the same game and not be a sequel. No helicopters will be included, and marshmallow guns have also been nixed.
Read more...
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Oct 26, 2008, 05:00 PM • Comments (1)
Convention Report: Essen 2008: October 25, 2008 – Day 3
By W. Eric Martin
October 26, 2008
Saturday happenings from the Spiel game convention in Essen, Germany:
• Here are the Fairplay standings as of 18:15 Saturday:
- Dominion
- Machu Picchu
- Nefertiti
- Comuni
- Diamonds Club
- Pandemic
- Im Schutze der Burg
- Age of Empires III
- Chicago Express
- Wind River
- Cavum
- Space Alert
- Snow Tails
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Oct 26, 2008, 04:00 AM • Comments (3)
Convention Report: Essen 2008: October 24, 2008 – Day 2, Part 2
By W. Eric Martin
October 25, 2008
Items from the Spiel game convention in Essen, Germany:
• The Fairplay rating chart, which tracks how gamers are rating new titles, has been fluctuating rapidly as first impressions pour into the voting box. At 15:00 on Friday, Oct. 24, the second full day of Spiel, the chart read:
- Comuni
- Diamonds Club
- Machu Picchu
- Dominion
- Fauna
- Im Schutze der Burg
- Lungarno
- Borneo
- Flussfieber
- Pandemic
- Nefertiti
- Le Havre
- Powerboats
Read more...
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Oct 25, 2008, 03:00 AM • Comments (10)
Convention Report: Essen 2008: October 24, 2008 – Day 2
By W. Eric Martin
October 24, 2008
Time to continue the quick hits from the Spiel convention:
• The Kingsburg expansion, the title of which is still in the works, should be released in early 2009, and it consists of five expansions that can be used singly or in combination, such as 24 governor tiles – with players choosing one of three to keep throughout the game, with a special power associated with each – and tokens to be used during the winter battles. Instead of having a random number of troops assigned to you, each player will have a set of six tiles numbered 0-4 (with two 1s). You choose one of these tiles for each round, and the remaining tile at the end of the game gives VPs equal to the number on it. Kingsburg has been extremely well-received and will even appear in a Russian-language edition before the end of 2008.
Read more...
Posted by W. Eric Martin • Oct 24, 2008, 07:00 AM • Comments (1)
Convention Report: Essen 2008: October 23, 2008 – Day 1
By W. Eric Martin
October 24, 2008
Rather than cover everything I’ve seen, heard or played in depth at Spiel, then die due to falling asleep in the middle of a busy German roadway while walking to the Messe, I’m sticking to a few quick notes from day 1 in Essen:
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Posted by W. Eric Martin • Oct 24, 2008, 03:00 AM • Comments (8)
Andrea Ligabue: PLAY 2008 – Friday, Sept. 26
Hi gamers, here is my report from PLAY 2008, although I was busy most of the time as the organizer and coordinator of the event, so unfortunately I didn’t have too much time for playing, anyway enough to be able to talk with the designers/publishers about Magnifico, Leader 1, Ventura, Age of Conan and MotoGrandPrix.
PLAY 2008 was the evolution of ModCon, the gamers convention. More than 10,000 people attended this first edition, with the usual crowd of gamers sitting side-by-side with a lot of families, kids and other visitors. PLAY has its accent on gaming: everything from the editors’ booths to the associations area was devoted to grabbing people and sitting them down for an opportunity to play, both for hardcore gamers and new ones. Board games, role-playing games, live-action games, wargames, card games, abstract games and video games – they were all present, along with events, demos, free games and tournaments. In the coming years, we think PLAY will be the ideal plaza for Italian publishers to show their new realeases.
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Posted by Andrea Liga Ligabue • Oct 3, 2008, 03:00 PM • Comments (0)
Matt Carlson: Gen Con 2008 Photo Report
Four years ago, I was hired as a public high school science teacher here in Indiana. My very first week on the job, I took Friday off. Why? Because Gen Con was happening and it was only an hour away. I’ve returned to Gen Con (taking the first Friday back at school off of course) every year, and this year I’m one of three folks reporting on the convention for Boardgame News. I’ll write more details in my postings over at GamingWithChildren.com later this week, but to tide you over here is a photo diary of my weekend in Indianapolis.
Posted by Matt J. Carlson • Aug 21, 2008, 02:00 AM • Comments (6)
