Reid Hoffman, one time board member at PayPal and financer of Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Six Apart, and Mozilla, to name but a few, bought himself a bigger house just recently.

Why? “To make room for friends to watch movies or play an addictive German board game, Settlers of Catan.”

Reid is considered the most connected man in Silicon Valley. And he’s helping to spread the word.

(source)

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As reported earlier, having conquered Chess and Checkers, Poker became the next battlefield for computer programmers in AI. To that end, a computer named Polaris played against the top players last weekend at the Gaming Life Expo of the World Series of Poker. This was it’s second attempt, having done well last year, but not having won.

This year Polaris won, with 3 wins, 2 losses, and a tie. It’s victory was said to be due to this year’s new ability to switch tactics mid-game in order to match the tactics employed by its opponents.

For complete details on Polaris, see the site at University of Calgary.

(source)

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If you’ve been stymied with the regular avenues of breaking into the games business, here’s a fresh new opportunity to come at it from a new approach.

Hasbro will relaunch its Operation game on National Underwear Day. I bet you didn’t know Hasbro was relaunching its Operation game. Or what relaunching actually means, come to that. Or that there was a National Underwear Day.

Anyhoo, they’re looking for someone to play “Cavity Sam”, the iconic guy featured on the Operation board. All you have to do is lie around on a strecher, imrpovising aches and pains, while in your underwear. It’s two days work, five hours a day, $750 a day.

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Warcosm is a new downloadable PDF game from Precis Media.

WARCOSM is an easy-to-learn and quick-paced tabletop game that simulates fleet-based space battles using either miniatures or flat counters.

Maneuver the enemy so that you can bring more weapons to bear on them. Find an enemy craft’s weaknesses to maximize the effectiveness of your attacks. Warcosm’s game mechanics encourage such tactics without overwhelming you with endless rules. This permits each player to control six, ten, or even a few dozen ships for scalable battles. Once you get the hang of the rules with the included battle scenarios, use the ship construction rules to build your own fleets. Decide how to arm your ships, the degree and types of hull protection, the types and power of drive systems, and whether or not to equip them with a number of other subsystems.

It’s for “2 or more players”.

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