Board Game Madness 10/25

Fun:

• Essen fair is this week and Board Game Geek is all over it. They have their usual GeekBuzz list of what is hot at the convention. Seems like civilization/city builders are the order of the day with Colonial: Europe’s Empires Oversees, Antiquity and Quebec. Stalag 17, a war game, tops the list. Other games are Wilderness (Exploration – the Bear Grylls way), Top A Top (kids card game), Pergamemnon (ancient army deck building battle game), Takenoko (Japanese farming game), Ascension: Return of the Fallen (expansion to the deck builder) and Dungeon Petz (worker placement spin-off of Dungeon Lords)
• Board game pieces spring to life – Gem sperm
• Pimp my Game: Thunderstone custom dungeon
• Check out the money shipping in the new Puerto Rico 10^th anniversary edition
• Die of the year (in my opinion)
• Giant Cthulumeeple
• A couple of fans have developed an expansion to Settlers of Catan called Oil Springs. There you can have access to another resource, Oil, that greatly improves your productivity, but can cause disaster for the island of Catan. I read through the PDF and it was really interesting. 

New Games:

• Space Bastards: This one wins for name of the year. Alien races, coming together, making babies, eating other aliens, mass mayhem, fun to be had. Best quote on the description on BGG is, “Space Bastards is a game in which you can enjoy and observe the picturesque aliens as small animals in an aquarium – while siccing them on your opponents, of course...”. Released at Essen, US availability TBD.

iOS:

• Tabletop Army Manager released – manage your miniature armies with this tracking aid
• Imperial released, then pulled – apparently it didn’t work and they are offering refunds.
• Ticket to Ride updated to choose AI, review the board after the game and iOS 5 capable
• Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization postponed to Feb ‘12
• LeHavre postponed to Jan ‘12
• Tigris & Euphates any day now!
• Controversial game War on Terror is being ported to iOS at some point in the future
• Android update – BGG App updated to read forums

News:

• Any fans of The Dice Tower know that one of the hosts, Eric Summerer, is completely obsessed with the old space-themed Avalon Hill game Merchants of Venus. A friend of mine, Gil Hova (designer of the game Prolix), did a small write-up on NerdNYC about a problem with rights to the game as two publishers, Stronghold Games and Fantasy Flight, have both announced reprints of the game. Purple Pawn also wrote about the unfortunate situation.
• Also in the iOS world, Playdek has announced that they are working with a bunch of new publishers including Eagle Games to bring their games to the digital environment
• Kickstarter, the site that gives inventors and small companies that much needed seed money to finish their projects, has raised $1.1 million for board and card games so far in 2011. Last year Alien Frontiers set the board game world ablaze with their game funded by Kickstarter.

Happy gaming!

Board Game Madness 10/18

Fun:

• Tom Vasel has begun releasing his annual Top 100 games of all time. They’re fun to watch. If your tastes lean a little towards thematic games, you’ll love this list. Oh, and his daughter has her own list of kids friendly games too/
• Purple Pawn put together a few gamer videos on Settlers of Catan and D&D

New Games:

• Village: This one seems interesting in that you are taking your family through a number of challenges to gain notoriety and fame as time goes on. Prominent members die and other ones take their place. Possible release later this year.

iOS:

• I have not upgraded to iOS 5 yet, there’s some people I know who have had difficulties. But apparently there’s Game Center improvements including recommendations to other players with the same games from friends.

News:

• Games Magazine (which I am a HUGE fan of) released their top games to purchase in 2012 (basically a top games in separate categories of 2011). I’m not such a huge fan of the list, but in defense of the publisher, it really is one reviewer’s viewpoint I believe. And I have no problems with his tastes differing from mine. Tikal II was #1 by the way. Oh, and one other thing on this, it was really interesting to note that board game sims dominated the list of electronic games. You can’t see that by the above link, but you can if you view it in the Games Magazine December edition this list is from.
• Shocker in the Scrabble world as an Australian tournament saw a cheating scandal with hiding letters and strip searches!

Happy Gaming!

Board Game Madness 10/13

Late this week due to an offsite meeting I’m at this week.

Fun:

·         Love the enthusiasm and it’s consistent with the overacting of the TV show…

·         Again, some people just do incredible work with minis for their games

·         New game idea – 7 Wonders meets Settlers of Catan. Oh wait – this is a real expansion!!!

·         So these “inspirational” posters are always good for a laugh

·         When in the alps, climb mountains play board games!

·         Kenny’s not to old to get this bib!

·         Bad sportsmanship after a win, who’s gonna clean up???

New Games:

·         City Tycoon: A city building economic game where you place tiles building the city and invest your own funds and resources into building up the city. Sounds interesting, release later this year in Europe, hopefully next year in the US.

·         Drako: So it’s dwarves vs. dragon in this two player game card/miniature game. Interesting thing about this one is it’s asymmetrical, similar to some war games. The dwarves are able to overpower the dragon, but must win before running out of cards.

iOS:

·         Starbase Orion – 4x space civ game a la Twilight Imperium – available NOW

·         Imperial – released

News:

·         International Catan Day is 11/15. Maybe we should have a game.

·         Days of Wonder has finally put Memoir ’44 on the computer, a long anticipated move. They’ve decided to use Steam as their multiplayer engine.

Happy gaming!

Board Game Madness Hits the Blogosphere

At the recommendation of a friend of mine, I have moved the Board Game Madness weekly mailing over to Blogger. In theory this will get it out to more people and also stop annoying those on the NBGA mailing list who don't want to see these.

 

Now to just figure out exactly how to get the last 2 years or so of emails into the blog and maintain posting dates...

 

Happy gaming!