Adventureland Games is no longer a sggc. We described their first game, Cannonball Colony, as “Settlers of Catan With Cannons”.

Their newest (and third) game is Caption if You Can, a pretty formulaic party game: show a picture, each player tries to create a funny caption, vote on the best. 160 photos, which seems to me to be un-replayable.

Their sophomore effort was Archaeology: The Card Game, published by Z-Man Games, an interesting-looking set collecting filler game.

All the games are designed by Phil Harding (aka Adventureland), who also contributed to the design of Cursed, an expansion for the game Small World.

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Nestor Games has several new “scrunchable” games for sale:

• The aztec market is a game by Victor Melo for the whole family, in which each player controls four buyers who have traveled to the market of Tlatelolco in order to buy commodities from the local vendors, trying to match the capricious tastes of the king.
• Rebel Moon Defense is a board game for 2 players by Cameron Browne and Stephen Tavener. The Imperials have discovered the last Rebel outpost on a moon colony surrounded by an asteroid belt, and launched a devastating Chaos Bomb to destroy it. Will the Chaos Bomb reach the moon and annihilate the Rebels? Or can they destroy it and evacuate their base?
• Battle for Olympus is a strategy board game for 2 players by Reiner Knizia (surely he must hold the record for a designer published by the most publishers). Battle for Olympus is a two-player game where the heroes and creatures from Greek mythology battle for control of the gameboard.
• Cross is a two-player abstract board game designed by Cameron Browne in 2008. A player wins by connecting three non-adjacent board sides with a chain of their pieces. But a player loses by connecting two opposite board sides with a chain of their pieces (without also connecting three non-adjacent sides).
• Querni is a board game for 2 players by Enrique Fernández Alcázar. The goal of Querni is to remove all of your pieces from the board, by forming chains of consecutive numbers of your color.
• Mutton is a game of deduction and farmyard intrigue for two players. All is not well in the farmyard. The cock crows, the farmer wakes and sees another sheep eaten in the night. Grabbing his trusty gun he takes careful aim… but at which blood-spattered suspect? Can he shoot the wolves in sheep’s clothing before they eat all his sheep?
• Tritt is a two-player abstract board game, designed by Néstor Romeral Andrés in 2009. Tritt uses a special piece called Tritton, consisting in 3 aligned dots colored blue-orange-blue or orange-blue-orange. The goal of Tritt is to place three dots of your color in a row without making three dots of the opponent’s color in a row at the same time.

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Kasparov just played Karpov in an exhibition rematch dating back to their last major meeting.

After a few months and numerous games of quick and speed Chess, Kasparov has been declared the winner. (source)

(image)

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Fantasy Flight has released Penny Arcade The Card Game to the general public after early sales 3 months ago at Gen Con. It’s an “attacks and hijinks” card game based on the extremely popular and gamer friendly web comic Penny Arcade.

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Another of Louis Porter Jr. Design’s product lines for the Pathfinder RPG is Lost Classes of Fantasy. So far, the series delivers the Illusionist, Thief Acrobat, and Blooded Noble in 7-10 page PDFs for $1.50-1.75. Actually, I’m not familiar with Blooded Noble, but Thief Acrobat sure brings back memories of when an alternate class out of Dragon Magazine was a radical idea.

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The Times Online asked its readers for short story submissions based on the game Cluedo (Clue, for you Americans). It got over 100 entries.

The winning entry was posted online here.

Miss Scarlett danced on to Mike’s lap. The chants of “going down, going down” stopped abruptly and Jack started to apologise.

In his haste to gulp back his drink and get the glass on the table he’d managed to scatter the pieces everywhere. Reverend Green was now swimming in a puddle of alcoholic communion wine and Miss Scarlett was living up to her reputation.

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A helpful timeline:

Late 2007: Mattel and others busted for high levels of lead in their toys and games, force to issue numerous recalls.

Feb 2008: The Consumer Product Safety Commission passes a law that threatens to shut down every second-hand and small business that manufactures or sells items directed at children, with a law that blanketly forces everyone to pay for expensive lead tests on every single one of their items. The law gets delayed, and clarified, and delayed again.

Aug 2009: Mattel secretly finds a way to exempt itself from these tests, claiming that their own internal testing is now really good, and no way could that ever happen to them again. Meanwhile, all the little people will still have to pony up for the expense (not second hand sellers). Other companies clamor to also be exempted.

Oct 2009: Mattel settles the lead fiasco from 2007. Thank goodness that’s all behind them!

Nov 2009: High levels of lead found in some Barbie and Disney products (Barbie Bike Flair Accessory Kit and Disney Tinkerbell Water Lily necklace). (source)  (To be fair, the Barbie product is manufactured by someone else under Mattel’s Barbie license.)

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Blox is a clean abstract game of demolishing and re-building towers on a grid. It’s designed by Hans Raggan, Jürgen P. Grunau, and Wolfgang Kramer, and published by Ravensburger.

The towers are made from blocks of four different colors. Using a hand full of cards, each in one of four colors. Each turn, you:

• Play a card and move your piece.
• Play one card of each color in a tower to remove it from the board and gain points equal to the number of blocks removed.
• Play one card of each color to rebuild a tower from blocks you’ve removed to rebuild an incrementally higher tower, gaining you points for the size of the tower.
• Toss cards and gain a new hand, re-activating your personal “wild” card that can be used for any color.

There are restrictions for moving, demolishing and playing that change over the course of the game. I played it at BGG.con, and recommend it for the same audience that likes Blokus, though it’s slightly more complex.

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Here’s an excuse to mix some roleplaying in to your family gathering for Thanksgiving. It’s the new Plymouth setting book for Colonial Gothic. The $1 PDF from Rogue Games includes 50 pages of maps, background information on the Pilgrims, and adventure hooks for the landing place of the Mayflower.

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Time to clear out the post queue …

San Fransisco Chronicle pimps the Just Awesome board game store (these guys seem to press about an article a month). (source)

4TNZ pimps the designer of the Twilight New Moon Board Game. (source)

Chicago Tribune pimps Darryl Hannah, Liebrary, and a brief mention of CHITAG. (source)

WGN TV pimps Tim Walsh, toy suggestions, Jishaku, Blurt, and CHITAG. (source)

Auburn Pub pimps Analog Hobbies toy and game store. (source)

RC2 pimps itself by renaming itself “Learning Curve”. The re-branding will take place over the next few months. (source)

The Village’s Sun (FL) pimps Euchre, (source) while The Buffalo News pimps Bridge. (source)

The Friday Morning Show on 91.7 KAXE pimps board games. (source)

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