Author: Mike Sugarbaker

So I was scanning for news, thinking how strange it is that there aren’t more big Earth-shattering kabooms in press-release-land on the week of Gen Con, when I ran across a note from Pinnacle that casually notes that they’re finally doing a Deadlands: Lost Colony core book. Everyone but me

Also from ICv2, an uncharacteristically long article about a statement signed by 52 retailers, officially compaining about GW policies. I’ve always been surprised that Games Workshop gets away with as much as it does, and, well, I don’t expect anything to change – WotC’s been the target of retailer ire

The redoubtable ICv2 has a little more background. Garfield isn’t on the design team, but several WotC R&D longtimers are. This story seems to suggest that this game will be pitched more as geek bait than as mainstream crossover material, which may be appropriate for the audience the show has

At the talk Reiner Knizia gave on game design (I told a couple people I’d post my notes from his talk here, but he made a joke about how he didn’t have notes to give out himself, and if he did, he’d lie about it – that made me believe

Played it. Tried to figure out how it used the booster minis, as we hoped that would alleviate the slow-as-snails, isolationist game that came in the core box. Turns out that the minis are either supposed to get brought in when you happen to draw a card that depicts the

BrettBoard points us to this interview with Villa Paletti designer Bill Payne. Damn Canadians!

“Hey – that promo die – it’s huge!”

While at Origins, visit the Giant Ball of — by which I mean, while at Origins I looked at Mystic Eye’s Giant Monster Rampage as well as Firefly’s Monster Island. Both are slim 8.5×11″ books with giant monster combat games in them, whose rules are more or less sourced out

I was feeling kind of low Saturday morning, and then I realized: I have made no purchases! This is obviously the problem! Three games and a one-inch hex mat later, I had no more troubles and my life was perfect. Got to play MechWarrior for a couple rounds at WizKids.

To wit: Green Ronin has Hammer and Helm and the two Pocket Grimoires at the show. Hammer and Helm, a tasty-looking dwarf sourcebook, is the first book with the OGL Interlink logo. Chris explained this to me as a selling point – gamers will like knowing that this book is

Not really Origins news, but the two games that gamers I hang out with considered frontrunners didn’t take it. They (Puerto Rico and Transamerica ) were on the short list of three, but the award went to Villa Paletti, a block-stacking dexterity game with an interesting new mechanic. Everyone told

Specifically, I thought I could skip the actual awards ceremony and just pick up the poster – the poster that lists all the winners and that, last year, was set out on free-stuff tables throughout the con halfway through the presentation. What I forgot, of course, is that WotC isn’t

More random bits: Chronopia is coming back into print. When I first started looking into miniatures games, some friends recommended Chronopia as a good, fast and fun set of rules – but it was out of print. But lo, I have seen a printer’s proof of the “five old books”