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Thursday, August 19, 2004
Live at Gen Con ‘04: OgreCave T-shirt Throwdown
So, it all started at last year’s Gen Con Indy when both Steve and I, through random acts of fate and generous game companies, both ended up with six free t-shirts apiece. At Gen Con SoCal a few months later, we both actively tried to outdo each other in t-shirt accumulation, but despite our best efforts, we tied again at four shirts apiece. At the GAMA Trade Show, we tied once more at three free shirts each. This Gen Con, right here, right now, the tie will be broken and a winner will be decided. Oh yeah, it’s on, buddy. You’re going down.
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Wednesday, August 18, 2004
My Life With Master takes Diana Jones (award, that is)
The prestigious Diana Jones Award For Excellence In Gaming for 2004 goes to the experimental narrativist RPG My Life With Master. In other news, someone forgot to renew a domain. [UPDATE: The new website for the Diana Jones Award is www.dianajonesaward.org. The host company fouled up the domain renewal, and a squatter has taken roost at the old URL.]
Live at Gen Con ‘04: Prowling for promo minis
The WotC booth is nearly set up now, with mostly chairs and product displays to piece together, and a guy fiddling with a mixing board to get the booth’s music just right. Over next to a large robot-like statue (10′+ tall), a few sealed boxes caught my eye. Apparently containing D&D Miniatures Game promo figures, half said “Rhek” and the other half said “Half-Illithid Lizardfolk.” A source said these were from the upcoming Aberrations expansion set. They must be mine.
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Live at Gen Con ‘04: Scoping things out
Not much going on yet, but the storm that will be Gen Con Indy ‘04 is about to break. I’ve wandered through the exhibit hall to get a sense of where companies will be. Miniatures company Rakham has a fairly large booth near the front of the hall with a huge Confrontation banner suspended above it. Upper Deck has gone for a more realistic sized booth this year, without the huge monstrosity of metal gangplanks that discouraged booth traffic. Wizards of the Coast has about the same area as last year, and was still unpacking when I passed through, but I took note of a nice G.I. Joe TCG banner. Over at the Hyatt about an hour ago, True Dungeon was ready to go, but True Heroes was still frantically being set up. Overall, the show will be ready to go very soon, and this is the last, frantic push to get everything up in time.
Monday, August 16, 2004
I accuse Professor Betrayal, in the house, with the hill
Finally, some more details about Avalon Hill’s most original release of the year. Betrayal at House on the Hill is still a tile-based game in which one of the players turns against the others, but we now know that each individual character will have attributes, strengths, and weaknesses. The article suggests there are more subtleties in the victory conditions and such, which is good, because if we didn’t know that, this would sound like a When Darkness Comes variant. And hey, if you like When Darkness Comes, more power to you, but when the company that owns hundreds of long-out-of-print game designs, some of them classics, sounds as if its original game for the year is a When Darkness Comes variant, I think it’s fair to say that there’s trouble. I understand both the desire and the occasional practical necessity to keep the finer details of game play out of the press, but it’s been particularly frustrating in this case. So I’m relieved to see these details and am looking forward to the full release.
If you want to control information, putting your email archive behind a password is a pretty good idea
Self-exiled GAMA BoD president Treasurer Ryan Dancey says he didn’t “hack” into anything - rather, he found that GAMA’s internal communication email list archive was available for all to see on an un-password-protected web server. He claims he made someone at GAMA aware of this situation, and when he didn’t hear back about it, he just shrugged his shoulders and kept reading. Given my direct experience with disorganization and lack of web-savviness in the industry, I’m inclined to believe Dancey’s claim.
My BS detector starts to stir back to life when I read about his motivations for saving GAMA, however. He says that “[i]f GAMA fails, and the ORIGINS Awards fail with it, a dozen individuals will create separate trade associations and Awards programs, each with different charters and objectives, and each will aggregate a small, vocal minority of participants and none will ever be as successful or have as much chance for future success as GAMA does today.” That is certainly true if your criteria for a successful industry awards body is one in which the majority of voters understand little about the majority of categories. Balkanizing the awards doesn’t seem like a disastrous idea to me - the ENnies have demonstrated that a more focused awards program doesn’t have to mean a drop down to amateurishness. I could certainly see a world in which separate trade groups for D20 publishers, board and card game publishers, and miniatures companies could more productively serve the industry as a whole - after all, when it comes to doing market research, how much do, say, Privateer Press and Looney Labs really have in common?
Dancey has likely heard this kind of talk before, and it likely gives him a nightmare vision of the industry steadily dwindling down to nothing. Well… I think that might happen no matter what we do. But that’s another post.
[Update: for those who need still more drama in their gaming life, the remaining GAMA board has some more to say too.]
Saturday, August 14, 2004
Winter is… still coming
The rules to the expansion set for A Game of Thrones board game, A Clash of Kings, has been posted at Fantasy Flight’s website. Highlights include adding a sixth player via a modular board, siege engines, new house cards, new combat rules and rules to plan for the Westeros cards. Not included are rules for misnamed sequels or delayed fourth books.
Friday, August 13, 2004
The eternal struggle continues online!! Because that’s what eternal things do!! They continue!!
Back when we first posted about CCG Workshop, I wasn’t sure things looked good for them, and announcements of subsequent additions to their roster frankly didn’t make them look much more like they had a promising future. Well, that’s all changed. White Wolf has announced that Vampire: The Eternal Struggle will be playable online, using CCGW’s engine, both in the existing CCG Workshop setting and through WW’s own servers. Development has already started on the online version, and something will be in beta sometime this year. It’s good to see this. Press release below.
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Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Brigands, bazaars, and the king of the old school
A replication of the germinal proto-electronic board game Dark Tower, executed entirely in Flash, playable in your browser by one to four players. Featuring original box art and sounds. I’m going to go ahead and say it: it is perfect. You owe us a drink for finding you this one.
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