Ummmm....that trailer needed more pizazz.  If they were literally going for teasing they did it.  I wonder why more board games have not taken advantage of this cheap but powerful medium to promote board games. 

Are there any 1-2 minute previews of any board games that anyone would hold up as a good example that would ACTUALLY make a non board gamer buy the game?

Unless the subliminal message was to buy some windscreen defogger I’m afraid I am none the wiser and feeling decidedly unteased.

Why no cute creatures this time around. That was a real USP for the Fragor chaps.

Gordon Lamont explained over at http://www.spielbox.de why no miniatures this time:

“Thank you to everyone sent me an e-mail or posted to the earlier thread. My apologies again for my poor German and for posting in English. Apologies also if my post is inappropriate – I wished to simply give a bit more information to gamers.

One of the topics of discussion was the point being made about no animal figures in our game Snow Tails this year.  I thought I would give a brief explanation. Fraser and I are gamers at heart. It takes us all year to make one game for Essen. It is a huge amount of work but we do it because we love it. It is extremely important to us that our games look and play well. Last year, we were forced to produce 2,500 games. This was because the animal manufacturer said gave us no notice of imposing a minimum order of 10,000 animal pieces. This is too many for us – we are a small company who makes games for fun.

So this year we left the animal pieces out because :-

a) We would have needed to make at least 2,000 copies.
b) There was no piece readily available
c) The animal pieces were too big to go on the track – if the animal pieces had fitted you would have needed a room to play the game
d) They did not really have a use anywhere else in the game

However, you should note that the production costs of Snow Tails are the most we have spent yet on production ! It has a lot of punch out track and other pieces in it. It has 120 full sized cards.  Yet we have kept the price at 35 euros.

We know it is a risk making a game without the animal pieces but we think Snow Tails is a strong enough game to sell well without them. It has not slowed pre-orders either (http://www.fragorgames.com) – we took pre-orders for 33% of out print run of 1,000 in just over our first week. So, again, we may not have any left by Essen. However, it is always a pleasure to meet new friends and all are welcome to come and try the game out at our stand 9-19. Even when we are sold out we still continue demoing the game. As I said, we are gamers !

The game features an original movement mechanism – the rules are online if you wish to check them out.

Best wishes and hope to see you in Essen :-)

Cheers,

Gordon

Gordon Lamont
Fragor Games”