He first thought of the concept of the word game 20 years ago.

Mr Chambers said, “Following reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking I woke with an inspirational idea - to design a board game which would be fast open play scrabble on a monopoly type board. I named it Blackhole.” ...

“When we moved two years ago the original board fell out of a cupboard at Christmas. The family played the game and my boys, now aged 36, 35, and 31, said, ‘Well Dad, it’s not as bad as we thought’.”

These sorts of “new games” really hurt the hobby.  I remember when I was young (in the 80’s), hearing about games like “Don’t Go To Jail” (a monopoly card game), and thinking that a new board game was coming out (!), and that new board games were only coming out very rarely, and did things like vary upon Monopoly (there being no other ideas present to me at the time other than those “traditional” games and the plethora of children’s games that populated the large stores).  I never knew of games existing beyond these uncreative modifications, and never tried looking beyond due to the passive idea that if they existed, the media would then report upon it.  When I first encountered Settlers in 2002, I had a similar response ("oh, they came out with a new board game - cool!"), saddly.

If this sort of game propagates this myth and is successful due to media attention, there will be another generation with similar ideas on gaming as a whole?  That everything outside of traditional games are kid’s games?

There will always be games from people who “have a great idea” and are spurred on by their family/friends. I don’t think this hurts the hobby all that much...it just doesn’t lend itself to increasing the number of people who are aware of quality games. “Black Hole” will never be carried by major retail outlets or even hobby-style online/B&M retailers, and it won’t be sold via word-of-mouth. How 250 copies of the game have been sold is somewhat of a mystery (though there’s no reason to believe that this is really the case, especially since there’s not one single copy showing up on BGG as “owned").

I doubt the writer of this article has any clue as to what the boardgame industry is like, nor does the retired professor/inventor of the game...the article closes with the statement, “Mr Chambers plans to pitch his product in Europe next year and sell up to 150,000 games worldwide by 2009.” It sounds to me like Mr. Chambers knew someone at the Eastbourne Herald Gazette and they wrote the puff piece as a friend.

I guess the better question is why Eric (Martin) decided that this was newsworthy for the Media Watch section here, as the readers of BGN certainly can’t respond in any other way than with some contempt and eye-rolling. The credibility of having something appear on BGN seems to far outweigh a local paper article.

I did like the “tactics” page on the site (http://www.blackholegame.co.uk/tactics.php) which starts with “Blackhole can be enjoyed without any thought of tactics.” And then goes on to list several specific suggestions of those tactics you don’t need.

I’m curious as to what appears in print on the topic of games and feel the urge to share stories with BGN readers, even if the stories aren’t about Eurogames. Maybe readers can contact the author with suggestions of good games, however someone chooses to define that. Maybe a game designer can learn how to pitch his or her own game to the media.

I could link only to success stories of designer games, but who wants to read article after article about Wits & Wagers?! (Although if anyone wants to learn about getting publicity, North Star Games would be an ideal company to contact.)

Yeah, I guess...but if you look at all the other items in the “news” list, there’s all sorts of good info there about new games, expansions, events, etc., and then this thing from a weekly small town paper about a game which is clearly not going to be of interest to readers here.

On the positive side, it’s a good reminder to stay aware of the rest of the world’s oblivious nature relative to our hobby.

I’m sure the game’s designer is quite proud of his game, and truly believes it to be a giant step forward for boardgames. The only purpose in contacting him would be to steer him away from investing his life savings in producing those 150,000 copies, and to crush his spirits, of course....

And I think Dominic has done some amazing things with W&W...reading about his success with Target and struggles to achieve that success gives me the warm fuzzies. And I *like* the warm fuzzies. If you were to have a BGN spin-off called “Wits & Wagers News” I would probably read it regularly.

Reading about Black Hole I was forced to keep bile down where it belongs. I *don’t like* bile.

Ted, I meant that readers could contact the author of the article (not the game designer) in order to whack him with a clue-by-four.

And yes, awareness of how most people perceive games interests me. I pitch articles about games to various magazines — read my suggestions for active games to play in winter weather in Parenting New Hampshire soon! — and I’d encourage others to do the same. I’m sure some Bay Area paper would love to write about a tall handsome fellow who designs and self-publishes games, especially locally themed games like Seismic and AoS expansions…