Sababa Toys, makers of toys and games including several licensed UNO games, Front Porch Classics, Pirateology, and others, has filed Chapter 11.

Their assests will be sold to Omni Commercial LLC, who will then pass on most of the assets to University Games, unless someone coughs up more money at an auction this September 13.

The source was a bit hard to figure out, as it kept misspelling “Sababa” as “Sabada”.

(source)

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The International Stratego Federation organizes international and national tournaments, promoted Stratego in various countries, and liaisons between national Stratego clubs in different countries.

They just had a World Championship this week in Kiev, and a Dutch woman, Roseline de Boer, took the title (first time for a woman). Her brother won last year.

(source)

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There’s a trailer for the Halo DVD Interactive Board Game.

It’s a modular 3D board which looks like it plays like a standard combat game. Only it comes with an “interactive DVD” for those who are too scared to wean themselves completely away from the digital breast.

The trailer is here.

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Competing with MotionX from Fullpower is Mach Dice, another application for your iPhone that realistically simulates dice rolling.

You can select different dice with various numbers of faces. I don’t know if you can select a die that wouldn’t roll fair in the real world, such as a d13, but it would be cool if you could, and there’s no reaon why you shouldn’t be able to.

Anyhow, one cool thing about Mach Dice is that if you tilt the iPhone, the top down view of the dice tilts with you, giving a full 3D effect.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugoq8M2XxVE]

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The Sanibel Captiva Islander has an article up on one of its residents, game designer Jack Elias.

Don’t recognize the name? His games include Barrel of Monkeys, Perfection, and a deluxe version of Aggravation. They are by Milton Bradley, which doesn’t feature the designer’s name on the box.

(source)

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Tabletop Gaming News got wind of the following note from Games Workshop that’s making the rounds to their various trade partners:

Dear Valued Customers,

There is an old curse you might know: “May you live in interesting times “

I would be very surprised if anyone could look around our tiny world today and not ponder the truism of such a simple remark. There is very little doubt that these current days would certainly qualify as interesting.

Among many other concerns the world has been struggling with the rising cost of energy, transport, and materials. These rising costs have ultimately affected not only the price of gasoline that we put into our tanks, but the price we pay for milk, eggs and cereal. It has also, not surprisingly perhaps, greatly affected the costs for producing miniatures.

Today we are contacting all of our Trade customers globally to announce that due to these rising costs, we too will be raising some of our prices.

We do not do this lightly. We fully understand that the timing of the price rise directly conflicts with our annual July price review and for that we deeply apologize. I hope that you understand that this price rise is not something Games Workshop Global desires to do, it is something we have to do.

That being said, we wish to approach this change with the same dedication to customer service that we do for every endeavor. So for clarity and fairness I offer the following points:

We are contacting our Trade customers this week to prepare them for any questions they may have.

On Monday August 25th a message informing end hobbyists will be placed on all of our websites.

Prices will change September 29th.

A message will appear in our October White Dwarf.

The price increase will affect part of our paint and hobby ranges, as well as a large portion of our metal models and printed materials.

Even with the pressure of rising costs we are adamant that we will not at this time raise prices on any plastic model kits. Providing high quality, great value kits is fundamental to our corporate strategy and will continue to produce and distribute them at the current prices for as long as we are able.

Sincerely,

Games Workshop

Rumors from sources generally trustworthy on these things put the price increase at 25% on supplies and most metal miniatures.  The interesting part of the announcement is that plastics have been saved from the price increase.  This price increase follows an announcement by Privateer Press that saw a 10-20% increase in their own miniatures (most of which are metal as well).

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