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Aaron Lawn: Trade Show Ramblings
Ah, lateness. This column was written two weeks ago, just missing my Thursday appearance… Hooray!
I’ve just wound my way back into California after a three day stint at the GAMA Trade Show in Las Vegas. As you may or may not know, GTS1 is the trade show for the Hobby Game Industry2. As far as board games, especially Euro-style board games, it’s an odd show to report on. Why odd?
Well, first off, there’s no Rio Grande booth. Rio Grande imports, translates, and releases the largest number of board games in the hobby, but it doesn’t usually run a booth. Over the past eight years3 of attending the show, I think Rio Grande ran a booth once. Maybe twice – but not this year.
This means that wandering the show floor leaves about one-fourth of the year’s domestic board game releases not present – a larger percentage of the Eurogames. That’s odd. Also, most of the games shown aren’t ready for production. We aren’t looking at the newly released games like at Essen, Gen Con, or other consumer oriented shows. I saw lots of production proofs, several spiffed up prototypes, and several completed games.
My own focus while at GTS is on our store, so I don’t spend much time playing games. I also don’t spend much time listening to rules or how to play games. I mostly ask questions about price points, critique potential box presentations, talk to other retailers, and do other sundry business stuff. I played one full game this year, which is more than usual.
So… was there anything interesting to note?
- Cooperative is the new black
Fantasy Flight is in final development of its Battlestar Galactica game, which is cooperative with one or more traitors, so it’s really more like a many-against-one game. Perhaps the most interesting bit is that halfway through the game, loyalty cards get dealt a second time and you can find out that you are a sleeper agent… a cylon despite your intentions.
Another addition to the field of cooperative games, Days of Wonder’s Merlin’s Company
- Fantasy Flight has tons of games coming
In addition to the title above, Fantasy Flight has the two Nexus big box games (Battles of Napoleon and Conan), plus another Descent expansion (Ice Caves), plus their .5 revision of Talisman4, plus, plus, plus. We’ll see how many actually make it out this year.
I was especially impressed by the packaging for the relaunch of the Game of Thrones, an ex-CCG which is now a Living Card Game5 that contains four balanced decks packaged with a board and some additional bits. It looks like a great standalone game that will have the gameplay of a multiplayer CCG-style game. It’s packaged in a Kosmos-sized big box. Very nice.
- FRED has tons of games coming
FRED Distribution is launching a full line of lighter games, which include reprints of Money, Worm Race, High Society and more. They are pretty far from production, so there wasn’t much to see. The fix-it packs for Through the Ages were available.
- Z-Man Games has lots of games coming
Pandemic is finally coming back. Neuland is apparently now the most family friendly brain-burner ever. I think Zev said something about releasing 22 games this year. You can probably find the total over at Gone Cardboard. He had printouts of the Z-deck for Agricola on which to gaze.
- I failed my reporter duty
There was some strange company called Bucephalus Games6. Ahem, I mean a new company. They had about a zillion board games. Ahem. I mean, at least ten new in-development games. I avoided them all week. I didn’t like the look of them. I completely failed. I apologize. When they release the best game ever, I will apologize even more profusely. The will is weak.
- Steve Jackson might actually release a game that isn’t Munchkin
There are two potential non-Munchkin games this year: One is a full box, modern production of Ogre; the other is a full box production of Tribes, which was an odd little negotiation-centered game that had a Ziploc black-and-white edition several years ago. You can play the game as a single tribe or as several multi-player tribes trying to gain the most children. I like odd games, and Tribes is certainly odd.
- The World of Warcraft miniatures game wasn’t bad
Delving outside Eurogames, I was favorably inclined towards the WoW miniatures game, which is basically a board-based character combat game. It was a bit better than okay, and sounds like it will be playable with only a couple figures, thus keeping the cost in check. Upper Deck also has a real-time card game with the Call of Duty license. And Bandai is publishing an abstract game7.
- My personal jury is out on Ticket to Ride: The Card Game
This was the one game I played. There’s a strong memory element, plus the game flow appears to change significantly when playing with four instead of three8. I am undecided about how I feel and will definitely have to play with four. It certainly isn’t a carbon copy of TtR.
- I still don’t like the redesign of Titan
I’m not a fan of the Bejeweled edition of the Titan masterboard. In person, I like it even less. The battleboards and the monster counters were pretty nice though. This was a proof copy, so there are still some color changes to be made. Plus, my camera skillz are poor.
- Worst game theme award
The reality game of Traffic USA.
1Abbreviation of Gama Trade Show. Cunning.
2Defined as those game stores, on-line and off-line, that carry games which are not in the mass market. At one time, often called the Adventure Game industry, but that has faded as Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer have become merely two aspects of the larger product mix within a hobby game store.
3I’ve attended the show seven times. Whee…
4Mostly component upgrades. There will be an upgrade pack available to convert your Black Industries edition into 4.5, which is necessary to use the expansions that Fantasy Flight plans to produce.
5With “Living Card Game” being essentially a CCG minus the random packs. About as collectible as Runebound. Zev, if you are reading this, do this for Shadowfist.
6And the company doesn’t even have a website. Or if it does, my Google-fu cannot find it. This is almost inexcusable. [Editor’s note: Aaron filed this report upon his return from GTS, and Bucephalus Games has since launched its website. Very curious titles there...]
7As a relatively business minded person (at least while on the trade show floor), GTS inspires a bit of depression in me. I dislike the failure that I can sometimes get from companies. Can you see where this is going? I show up at the Bandai booth because a friend mentioned that Bandai was publishing a board game. I was surprised since, after all, the Bandai booth is covered with Dragonball Z CCG and Naruto CCG banners. Lo and behold, three green and black boards are set up on a table, with double-sided pieces (one side marked, one side not). One Bandai booth person mans the table. There is another Bandai person, but he is at the other end of the booth (which isn’t small) showing off one of the CCGs. I ask what the game is and get a short description: It’s a five-in-a-row game, with each piece starting off the board, and later moving like a rook until it jumps an opponent’s piece, when it flips and starts moving like a queen. There might be more that I missed. I then ask what the box looks like (since there isn’t one there). She looks puzzled, then says she doesn’t know if it has one yet. I ask how much the game will cost. She looks puzzled, then goes to a podium, where she flips through a printout of a Japanese website that is obviously about this game. It doesn’t answer her question, so she tells me she doesn’t know. I then ask what the name of the game is. She flips through the printout and answers the same way: “I don’t know.” I left barely better informed than before.
8Which is how many people were playing. Counting me.
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Two Week later Update?
Bucephalus games is at http://www.bucephalus.biz/news/list
Ticket to Ride the Card Game is still on the jury list. I’ve played with four though.
Comments:
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Aaron, So what can I do to show you that we are not quite so strange as all that? ;) Most of us with Bucephalus have been around for a while (take a look at the designers for our games at boardgamegeek.com/publisher/8309) and have had a whole lot of game ideas rattling around in our heads for the past 5 years, so we decided that we’d actually publish a few of them! Hopefully we’ve managed to get a few things right that we got wrong at prior companies, and hopefully you’ll find some of the games we’ve got as fun as we do. I’ll throw up some artwork and rules to here sometime in the next two weeks, once the get edited with the comments we got from retailers at the GTS show. Feel free to email me with any questions!
-Dan Tibbles
Posted by Bucephalus Games on May 8, 2008 at 01:31 AM | #
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9. You missed by favorite footnote about Tribes: it was codesigned by SF author David Brin. Posted by Shannon Appelcline on May 8, 2008 at 02:11 AM | #
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Aaron wrote: “Perhaps the most interesting bit is that halfway through the game, loyalty cards get dealt a second time and you can find out that you are a sleeper agent… a cylon despite your intentions.” So how long will it take before someone suggests this as a variant for Shadows Over Camelot? LOL! Posted by Diane Close on May 8, 2008 at 09:17 AM | #
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I have to say that I don’t find a whole lot of humor in “The Suicide Bomber Card Game,” the title name that jumped out at me from the list at the Bucephalus website. In fact, I missed the humor by enough of a factor to not bother with the other titles. Posted by Paul Sauberer on May 9, 2008 at 07:13 AM | #
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There isn’t enough detail up at the Bucephalus website to really get a sense of how the games will actually play, but I think it would be a mistake to write off an entire catalog just because one title is in questionable taste. If nothing else, the themes are fresh: There’s nary a wizard or medieval anything in sight! If only they had some Omelets of Infinite Power. Posted by David Lund on May 13, 2008 at 09:10 AM | #
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There are more games that have been/will be made than I can either play or buy in my lifetime. I have to make decisions about which ones I will not try. If I can go ahead and write some off because their publisher shows poor taste, then that makes it so much easier to move on to others. The chances of this particular publisher having a game that is so spectacular that I will suffer from avoiding them is infinitessibly small, especially since they already show evidence of being incompatible with my preferences due to choice of subject matter. I’d rather spend my game searching time.money with other publishers where I have a better shot at encountering a better fit for me. Posted by Paul Sauberer on May 13, 2008 at 01:45 PM | #
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