» Card Games
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
WizKids releases Star Wars PocketModel TCG
WizKids has let slip the dogs of Star Wars with their release of the Star Wars PocketModel Trading Card Game. The company is definitely pushing the multigenerational angle, as the press release (below) quotes WizKids president Lax Chandra (which was a character in Episode 1, wasn’t it?) as saying it’s “easy enough for children but with layers of strategy for adults”. So, rule the tabletop as father and son, yeah? Got it. A coupon for free samples is available through the WizKids site, StarWars.com, or CartoonNetwork.com, so now you have no excuse not to get your force on.
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Monday, June 11, 2007
Attention motorists: Perplex City is closed
Yeah, I saw the news and didn’t post because it just made me unhappy. (Especially when people started asking, right there on the goodbye posts from the story team, if this was all a setup to the start of season 2. For some reason the jackassery of which the Internet is capable keeps surprising me.) Mind Candy has put the second season of the Perplex City ARG on indefinite hiatus, and everyone on the story team has left the company. Stony silence about the issue on Mind Candy’s corporate site, which is always a wwwwwwonderful sign, but there are various messages and discussions out there, and the PXC-focused sites do all have some in-story bits about the end.
So what’d we learn, kids? That tying your product to a $200K prize is a good way to have to keep doing it over and over, even if the product improves? (Wave 2 of the Season 2 puzzle cards will still be released, BTW.) That even a sucky story is a better purchase motivator than a delayed (and suckier) story?
(Postscript: Mind Candy is allegedly looking into doing an online-hybrid product in the vein of Webkinz and, yes, Bella Sara. I WARNED YOU)
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Star Wars PocketModel CCG rules are online: definitely the most 3D card game ever, or something
Here’s the lo-res PDF of the rules (still not necessarily something you wanna choke down if you’re on dialup). I’m classifying this one in “Card Games” now because there appears to be no component of miniatures or positional play, or indeed any gameplay-based reason for the models to exist at all. Hey, at least this one gets around the patent!
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Audio Report: one GTS 2007 wrapup, partial
OgreCave lackey Steve Kani got himself out to GTS ‘07… for one day. What jumped out at him while doing his rounds as a retailer? Listen to our GTS post-show show and find out. Also, a question for roleplayers: how has party unity been a factor (or not) in your games? Let us know in the comments, folks.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Origins Awards nominees announced for 2007
Though underannounced and hard to find (as usual), the 2007 Origins Awards top nominees are decided. ‘Tis an interesting batch this year, with many expected titles (Ptolus was a no-brainer), and some surprises as well (Shear Panic? Really? Huh). The list also contains a few endangered or extinct products, such as Paizo’s Dragon Magazine and the defunct MSM publication Games Quarterly Magazine. Click below for the full list of nominees.
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Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Fantasy Flight announces 2007 releases at GTS
Timed to reflect news from GTS, Fantasy Flight has announced (most of) the rest of its planned releases for 2007. Note the Mutant Chronicles CMG teaser predicting a September release, the StarCraft boardgame due in August (big GenCon title, no doubt), and Descent: The Road to Legend which will add campaign rules to the game.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Map of Perplex City replaced with something interesting
Curse my distributed-story-loving soul, but I am starting to get my hopes back up about Season 2 of Perplex City. The website is demonstrably worse, unless you need a constant supply of alterna-Sudoku puzzles from Japan (which I kind of do… I loves me some Ponturu), but if your local vendor has some of the new cards, cop a few and check out the card backs. Putting fragments of their immersive fiction onto the cards, in combination with isolating the web-LARP component of play onto one site (check the goofy video… kinda YouTube-ish for a company with $7MM in venture capital), may make ARG play a little more inviting and less of a pain in the ass for the masses. The puzzle side of the cards, of course, remains fun and lovely. Two bloody stumps up from the Ogres.
Friday, November 10, 2006
What happens when people stop being polite and start making up Magic cards
For all the fun of a reality show with more Magic card design geekery and fewer hair-pulling catfights (or maybe I just haven’t found that forum yet), hit up the Great Designer Search. Fifteen would-be designers compete in a series of absurd challenges for an internship with WotC R&D. I barely understand the game anymore and I’m still enjoying reading it. Somebody design an artifact called Immunity Idol!
Friday, September 8, 2006
WizKids shuffles product releases
Though some circles still report the Battlestar Galactica CCG simply hasn’t taken off, WizKids is still planning Betrayal, the game’s first expansion set. A popular TV show tie-in, autographed cards (Crewman Cally cards, signed by actress Nicki Clyne), will be adding to the expansion’s lure. However, the 165-card set’s release date has shifted from October 11 to November 8 “due to unforeseen production issues.”
Meanwhile, WizKids says it has sold out of the initial print run of HorrorClix (see the full press release below) - just in time for Halloween. Actually, the company plans to have a reprint in hand by the end of September, which should be plenty of time, and distributors still have stock available. So this could be a sign of success, one that WizKids needs. We’ll have more to say about this in next week’s Audio Report, but for now, let’s just say this is an interesting time to be a retailer stocking WizKids products.
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Monday, August 14, 2006
The only thing cooler than a helicopter is two helicopters: Perplex City in San Francisco
Information concerning the big Perplex City live event in San Francisco this past Saturday is frustratingly scarce on our friend the internet. The perplexcity tag on Flickr has a paltry few photos so far, and even the normally hopping Unfiction forums just have a few dribs and drabs. It looks like it really was a mistake on Mind Candy’s part to schedule this event concurrent with Gen Con… or at least to promote it the way they did. But here’s what I’ve gathered so far.
A few days before the event, the existing link between Earth and Perplex City was severed - we got email to that effect - and the celebration of a new connection was redubbed an emergency rescue mission. Once the event was on, a new website appeared with two progress bars: one for onsite progress towards reestablishing the link, and one for online progress. Online players could help nudge progress forward by answering questions about PXC trivia and other puzzles, as well as simply hitting certain pages a lot. Players on the ground in SF… well, it isn’t clear, but we know they were advised to have transportation ready, so maybe their challenges involved info gathering throughout the city. In the end, the link was established with minutes to spare, and players were rewarded with a video message of congratulations from the cube hunt’s head honcho (obviously posted to Google by someone who can’t spell under pressure). However, players watching the video in SF were interrupted by a phone call from baddies The Third Power (here’s another variation that some got) just before they got buzzed by not one (as in a previous event in London), but two (oooohhhh) black helicopters.
So there’s a lot missing here. I had a couple of friends present but they haven’t reported in yet. Mind Candy might be thinking that documenting their live events incompletely or slowly incentivizes people to show up and participate, but I think the history (short as it is) of ARGs so far shows that not to be the case. You need to make room for a passive audience, especially when your sense of urgency is already a little bit lacking. They will probably get some nice details up on the official site eventually; we’ll let you know when.
(Incidentally, some of the most interesting talks I had at Gen Con concerned the ways in which RPGs and story games could benefit by making more explicit room for a “home audience” that doesn’t participate directly. More on that soon, maybe.)
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