Savvy readers will recall “The Goblin Game”, now titled Uncivilized: The Goblin Game and hitting public beta in about another month. Promo materials for Uncivilized name all four factions in the game (the League of Tyrants has a snazzy recruiting poster), and a few words about the world: “familiar fantasy races and monsters with a gobliny twist – elves are foppish, trolls are pimpish, dwarves are bikerish[…]” Um, trolls are pimpish? Something tells me that isn’t going to end well for our friend WotC.
Also! At the GameStorm convention here in Portland where he was guest of honor this past weekend, Reiner Knizia announced that he has completed a game design for the Nintendo DS handheld platform. He added that he has seen the completed game, so he guesses at a fall release but that’s only a guess. No, he didn’t say anything else about it, except that his name will indeed be on the cover of the box.
Woo hoo! I’m glad to hear that the Goblin game is actually going to appear. I’ve been obsessively refreshing the Web page every day, wondering when I’ll get to play.
I’ve been on tenterhooks too, although you may have me beat as far as reload frequency. I worry, though, that this is going to end up disappointing me the way Fantasy War did. Fantasy War was a Greg Costikyan design that may just have been ahead of its time, but… well, I’ll let y’all read about it. Suffice it to say that it’s similar in a lot of ways, including the play-by-mail model where you make one big (and I mean big) move every day. There was just so much in the game that it felt like work, which is probably the same reason more people don’t play PBM games to begin with. Hopefully WotC R&D has a more accessible experience in mind.