Convention Preview News: Winners of the Bohnanza Fan Edition Announced

Lookout Games has announced the winners of the Bohnanza fan edition on its website. Lookout was going to choose 104 pieces of art—one for each bean in the original 3-5 player deck—but the company ended up selecting a few extra winners, using their artwork on the “3rd beanfield” cards.

Says Lookout’s Hanno Girke, “We received more than 400 entries. The entries were balanced to some degree unfortunately, so there were so many nice garden beans to be turned down (or made into 3rd beanfields), while the number of reasonable entries for stink beans was, well, relatively low—but we still had a choice.”

Ten people made up the jury: three game industry professionals, four graphic designers, and three Bohnanza fans. Says Girke, “When the artwork was chosen, names were excluded. There were several factors involved: not too many beans with a similar theme, no lookalikes, and so on. For determining the first and second prize in each category, each jury member had 3, 2 and 1 points to give. In case of a tie, the total number of votes for that bean was the tiebreaker (e.g., 1-1-1 beats 3).”

As I had mentioned in a June 2007 column, we held a bean-making party at my house earlier this year and it turns out that one of my wife’s entries will be included in the deck along with my interpretation of a fire bean. Linda has a Master’s degree in Slavic Linguistics, so perhaps her red bean reworking won’t come as a surprise:

Linda even bought a special Cyrillic font to match the style of the old Soviet posters that championed Lenin as a hero. The top line is the Russian word for “bean,” and the bottom line just says “Bohnanza.” Can’t wait to see it in print! My fire bean (for which I’ll have to rescan and upload the larger image) is a collage of magazine images, which is appropriate for a freelance writer.

Another development with this edition is that while it was announced as a limited edition of 3,000 copies, Rio Grande Games will release an English-language version of the Bohnanza fan edition at some point in the future. For now, though, it will be available only at the Lookout Games booth at Spiel.

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