R&D Games to Release The BoardGameGeek Game
Richard Breese releases a new game once every two years or so through his R&D Games, and his title for 2009 is unlike any he’s released previously. For one thing, the game includes dice. For another, it has a marketing tie-in in that the game will celebrate the tenth anniversay of BoardGameGeek.com, the go-to site for game information, in both game play and artwork.
The BoardGameGeek Game, which will debut at Spiel 09 in October, has 3-6 players (not 4-6 as originally posted) taking on two roles. First, they represent one of six game publishers – Eggertspiele, Hans im Glück, Queen, R&D, Treefrog or Ystari – and they want to supply their games to game shops, selling them in order to earn Geek Gold (GG). Second, players control a team of three geeks who want to collect sets of games in order to satisfy the needs of their game groups. They’ll earn GG based on how well they do this, and the player with the most GG at game’s end wins.
Breese says that more than thirty publishers have granted permission to use their game images within The BoardGameGeek Game. The image above is a composite of the gameboard and BGG’s Ernie; click on it for a larger version, which will show off the game covers in more detail. Breese is also soliciting BGG users to post a comment and congratulatory note to BGG on a Geeklist; at least five hundred avatars of BGG users will be used to decorate the box bottom and sides, so if you want to be included, hustle over to the Geeklist and post a shout-out to Derk and Aldie.
Posted by W. Eric Martin on Jun 10, 2009 at 01:30 AM in Game News, The Industry at Large / 1761
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This is unbelievable. Posted by Jacob Lee on Jun 10, 2009 at 01:41 AM | #
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This is a game that you should preorder, I presume ;-) Posted by Peer Sylvester on Jun 10, 2009 at 02:17 AM | #
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Good that they didn’t announce this game on April 1st :) Posted by Surya Van Lierde on Jun 10, 2009 at 03:59 AM | #
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Peer, no word yet from Richard on whether preorders will be taken as he’s working to meet the publishing deadline. The game itself is no joke. I played a version of it in May 2008, and while it’s presumably changed since then, it’s both Breesian and non-Breesian in various ways. With Richard’s cooperation, I’ll publish a long preview of the game closer to Spiel. Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Jun 10, 2009 at 08:31 AM | #
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This kind of self-referential humor about a niche audience in a game has always kind of bugged me: often the game sells (or expects to sell) based on its theme and the inside jokes that make the game fun to its niche are totally lost on those outside of it. And my game groups tend to be outside “the hobby”: they know I have an account on this thing called boardgamegeek (and maybe even check my wishlist at gift-giving time), but beyond that I’m the one who brings games to the group and who has his pulse on the hobby. If a game like this isn’t GOOD, it’s not going to be interesting to them. So I guess I just worry when I see things like this: if a gimmick game about BGG is going to be published I want it to actually be good on its own merits, and my knee-jerk reaction is to be hesitant. Here’s hoping I’m wrong… Posted by Joseph Cochran on Jun 10, 2009 at 12:56 PM | #
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> I want it to actually be good on its own merits Well, it would be difficult to choose a better designer than Richard Breese if this is the objective. Possibly Martin Wallace, on current form, but there aren’t many. Posted by Tim Synge on Jun 10, 2009 at 05:51 PM | #
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> If a gimmick game about BGG I think this type of comment is unfair to Richard Breese. Richard is part of a longstanding tradition among British game designers that game designs are ‘theme-driven’ as opposed to having a theme plonked on them by the publisher as so often happens with German titles. This traditiona applied not only to all of my own games but also to those of my contemporaries like Andrew McNeil, Francis Tresham, David Watts, plus others. This continues today in the designs of Martin Wallace, the Ragnor Bros., Fragor and Richard Breese. So if Richard decides to publish a game about the boardgame market that is what inspired him and that is what it will be about - and it won’t be a ‘gimmick’. Posted by Derek Carver on Jun 11, 2009 at 05:21 AM | #
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Checking the calendar…
Posted by Silvano Sorrentino on Jun 11, 2009 at 09:02 AM | #
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Well, I certainly meant no disrespect to Mr. Breese with my comment and I hope that none was taken. But just as some people have a gut reaction to “another dice game” or “another card game”, I had such a reaction to the idea of a hobby-centric self-referential game. No matter who the designer, a game referencing an insider website is kind of niche. As I said, I hope that my initial hesitance proven wrong. But there was no ill intent in my honest reluctance. Posted by Joseph Cochran on Jun 11, 2009 at 01:14 PM | #
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Having played this quite a few times in prototype form, I can honestly say that it wasn’t about “boardgames” when I first saw it, but it was definitely about shopping to collect stuff (I think it was set at a car boot sale or something like that) and the mechanics haven’t changed appreciably in the meantime - it’s mostly been what seem like endless different scoring mechanisms! In other words, it definitely wasn’t designed as an “in-joke” game, and the fact that the first edition will have the BGG label really doesn’t affect what is a lovely middle-weight Eurogame that I’m looking forward to playing with my non-gamer friends. Posted by David Brain on Jun 14, 2009 at 08:27 PM | #
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