LARP
At Gen Con 50, the winner of this year’s Diana Jones Award for excellence in gaming has been announced as… Gen Con itself! First organized in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin by Gary Gygax himself, Gen Con has grown to become an annual gaming mecca and affirmation of the gaming hobby, currently raging onward in Indianapolis. Other nominees this year were The Beast, a single-player card & journaling game; End of the Line, a hybrid LARP combining Camarilla-style Vampire and Nordic LARP; the fantasy board game Gloomhaven, which was a huge hit on Kickstarter; The Romance Trilogy, a group of relationship-themed RPGs by Emily Care Boss (the first of which, Breaking the Ice, made it onto OgreCave’s 2005 Christmas Gift Guide); and Terraforming Mars, a resource management board game. As always, OgreCave congratulates all the nominees, and Gen Con, “The Best Four Days in Gaming,” for its win this year.
Archive for the ‘LARP’ Category
OgreCave Audio Report 2.0 – January 2015
Thursday, March 5th, 2015
In our first show of the new year, we’re already covering a lot of ground. In just the first half of the podcast, we go from Allan’s first impressions of Dungeons & Dragons: Fifth Edition to Mike’s obsession with space games, and back around to enjoying Magic: The Gathering after many years of abstinence. Then we drag out a pair of surprise gaming artifacts, speak of upcoming conventions, and more.
Click here for show details and to listen to the new episode. As always, share and enjoy. We’ll have a report on the happenings at DunDraCon 2015 in our next episode.
Gaming News Update podcast – Free RPG Day (KublaCon 2012)
Friday, June 8th, 2012
We’re getting the last bits of KublaCon 2012 out of our system at OgreCave by posting a podcast episode about Free RPG Day 2012. Since it’s coming up in just over a week on Saturday, June 16, you may be wondering what to expect from the annual event (now in its sixth year!). In this Gaming News Update interview, Aldo Ghiozzi of Impressions Advertising & Marketing (and Free RPG Day) talks about the influence of Kickstarter on this year’s giveaway offerings, how Queen of the Demonweb Pits nearly got reprinted, melting candy dice, and more. Nearly twenty companies – from Catalyst Game Labs and Fantasy Flight Games, to Goodman Games, Paizo Publishing, and Wizards of the Coast – are contributing free goodies this year. Wouldn’t you like to hear more?
Don’t forget to visit OgreCave’s Facebook page to check out our KublaCon 2012 image gallery, and while you’re there, become a fan of OgreCave to hear everything that echoes forth from the Cave. Also, we’ve been podcasting off and on for quite a while now – check out our other KublaCon interviews, or scroll back to even older episodes we barely even remember anymore.
Come Out and Play ’09 came and played
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009Another June, and once again, I’m somewhat annoyed that I didn’t get myself out to New York City to participate in Come Out & Play, the annual weekend festival of city-wide games that strike an odd balance between LARP, sport, and flash mob. Sprawling throughout Times Square, Central Park, Brooklyn, and even venturing into Grand Central Station (as you can read in this article), CoaP organized dozens of game events that ranged from board games with live pieces (players, not pigeons) to iPhone-enabled hide-and-seek games and scavenger hunts. Similar to some ARG events or certain LARP events at RopeCon in Finland, CoaP is the sort of event that could be set up in multiple cities nationwide, or worldwide even. If anyone made it out to CoaP this year, let us know how it went in the comments.
Weisman gets new gig infiltrating physical world with old-timey modern-fantasy mecha
Friday, December 7th, 2007“Jordan Weisman, founder of FASA, has licensed the rights to MechWarrior, Shadowrun and Crimson Skies from Microsoft to his latest startup, Smith & Tinker.” S&T apparently aims to draw on the lessons of ARGs, the medium Weisman helped pioneer at his company 42 Entertainment, and carry them into the realm of Internet-connected real-world objects (in the form of games and toys). No announcement has yet been made that gets more specific than that. But if you put CS, SR and MW in a blender and poured the resulting paste all over a website, it would indeed look like Smith & Tinker’s.
True Dungeon gets yet more competition: get your Aliens on at Origins
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007And now here’s TerrorWerks, “a fully immersive event” set in “the immersive enviroment of a massive space station.” Also, it’s immersive. But I kid! I am psyched to see more attempts at this. I don’t think I ever posted properly about this other thing at Gen Con, either: “Guardian 6 is an immersive live-action event in which you take on the mantle of an agent working for a secret agency. As a secret agent you will be sent on missions that will take you to different locations where you will interact with mysterious individuals.” Different locations, eh? It’ll be cool to see if distributing the event makes it more immersive or less… and my ARG experience tells me to bet on more.
Attention motorists: Perplex City is closed
Monday, June 11th, 2007Yeah, 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)
Perplex City season 1 really, really over
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007Yeah, you know the Cube, right? The one that’s worth 200 grand? Some English guy found it.
[This exciting account of the find doesn’t quite explain how the general area to search in was deduced, but once it was, the solve essentially came down to one card. A common, even. Also, cards for Season 2 have been solicited to retailers.]
True Dungeon truths for ’06
Tuesday, April 4th, 2006The lowdown on True Dungeon‘s gameplan for 2006 has been announced, along with a video peek of the enhanced adventure for this year, Escape from the Spider Cult. The massive live dungeon-crawl event will benefit from increased volunteer training, improved props and environments, and 5.1 stereo surround sound. Other adjustments and improvements are in the press release (below), but one that may bite them in the ass is giving “dead” players the option to hang around and watch. Oh sure, you’ll heal her, but you wouldn’t heal me two rooms ago! Find another ride home, buddy!
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True Dungeon to expand at Gen Con Indy ’05
Saturday, November 27th, 2004Easily the most lavish LARP-like game in the industry these days, True Dungeon is preparing for its west coast appearance at Gen Con SoCal next weekend. In an email update sent yesterday to fans of the game, Jeff Martin, president of True Adventures Ltd., said “The finishing touches are being put on an agreement where True Dungeon will greatly expand at Gen Con Indy 2005. The event will more than double in size, and it will move to the Grand Ballroom in the Marriott Hotel which is directly across from the Exhibit Hall.”
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