Larry Levy:  Gathering Memories—Trends

Well, it was another wonderful visit to The Gathering of Friends.  I’ll get to my impressions on the games I played in a day or two, but first let me relate what I thought were the two main trends for this year’s con.  2008 was

The Year of the Dice
Dice get a bad rap because of their role in Roll ‘n Move games.  But lately, we’ve been seeing more and more games that include clever and original ways of using dice.  And this year, the concept seemed to hit critical mass.  The dice were everywhere!  Recently published games like Stone Age, Shanghaien, Six, Jamaica, Risk Express, and Airships used them in interesting ways.  (By the way, I was very pleased to see Airships getting lots of play throughout the week.  Maybe now that the RGG version is out, this game will start to get the attention I feel it deserves.) And dice were even more prevalent in the prototypes.  I helped playtest some games for Alea and two of the three games I played featured dice in central roles.  Dice in an Alea game—what a concept!  Then there was Matt (Pandemic) Leacock’s dice game that was getting a huge amount of play; just about everyone is certain this one will get published.  Brian Yu showed me one of his designs that was a lot of fun and will probably be appearing in a Mattel box sometime soon.  Even Friedemann Friese had a dice game prototype and it was also very enjoyable.

Most people think I’m anti-dice because I like games with less luck in them.  But when the dice are used in innovative ways or when they promote probability management, I’m all for them.  In fact, I love dice games!  So I find this a very welcome trend.  But whatever your feelings about dice are, you’d better get ready for them, because I think we’ll be seeing more and more innovative uses for the rolling cubes in the next year or so.

2008 was also

The Year of the Prototype
There’s always a ton of prototypes at the Gathering and this year was no exception.  But I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many good ones from the non-professionals.  And not only good games, but finished games, both in terms of rules and graphical presentation.  Several of them were indistinguishable from published designs.

You’ve probably already heard about some of these.  One of them, of course, is Game X, the design that Valerie and Dale are developing for Jay (there seems to be little doubt that it will be published soon).  Peter Hawes of Australia had a gorgeous design that he created for Eggertspiele; it was getting raves throughout the con and several publishers were checking on its availability (Peter Eggert had the inside track, but for a while there, I thought we’d have a bidding war right on the floor of the Gathering!).  I’ve already mentioned Matt Leacock’s wonderful dice game.  Greg Daigle (full disclosure:  my Gathering roommate) had a terrific design that we playtested for Alea and it looked as good as it played.  James Miller won the “Game of the Afternoon” competition with a wonderful deduction game; it wouldn’t surprise me if some publishers weren’t inquiring about it.

There were others, but I’ll stop here, because it’s no fun reading about games when I can’t go into details.  The point is, we will be seeing some of these games, possibly quite soon.  I’ve always been impressed by the creativity and talent we continually see in the gaming community, but it seems to have taken a quantum leap at the Gathering this year.  Naturally, if and when we get word that some of these excellent designs will be published, I’ll share my impressions of them with you.

Those were the two broad trends that really impressed me at the Gathering this year.  We also played a few games.  In my next posting, I’ll give you my brief impressions of the new ones I played.

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