The game sales arm of Steve Jackson Games has announced an amazing clearance sale.  Basically, you’re looking at products with discounts starting at 50%! There’s a good selection of Rio Grande Games and Atlas Games products, as well as a few gems from Days of Wonder and t-shirts.  Some of the items that are likely of interest to our readers are:

• Caylus (Rio Grande Games) for $27.50
• BattleLore (Days of Wonder/FFG) for $35
• Memoir ‘44 (Days of Wonder) for $25
• Fantasy Bestiary (Atlas Games) for $10
• Dork 20 Deck (SJG) for $2

Supplies are limited and these prices are extraordinary.

Update (9/11/2008): All of the titles mentioned above, with the exception of Fantasy Bestiary and Dork 20, are sold out as well as most of the board games that we didn’t mention!

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The “light comedy anime-themed RPG,” Maid, is now available for order in the US.  Maid is a new RPG from Japan where characters play maids who either are or live around traditional anime stereotypes and storylines.  There’s not a lot of detail around the mechanics, which seem to have more in common with indie-style storytelling RPGs than with a traditional RPG, but character sheets are available for download.  Here’s a bit from the teaser text on the site:

You are a maid, having worked dutifully for the Saionji family for several years. You are also a shy albino princess who does odd jobs for the yakuza, and train with the three-section staff. Your peer Maya is an outgoing young maid with freckles, a streak of being greedy for sweets, and who also happens to be a military cyborg.

Your master is a kind teenager who lives in the mansion alone, but is a bit of a train otaku. He is also a cursed werewolf. With amnesia.

Somewhere between doing the laundry and preparing lunch, the master is kidnapped by evil ninjas. They escape through the basement of the mansion, which contains a portal to the Netherworld. It’s up to you to get him back before dinnertime.

All in a day’s work for a maid!

Maid is available in both print and PDF ($26 and $8 respectively) directly from the Maid website.

Hat Tip: The fine folks at the OgreCave!

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Gypo logging is a term that describes logging without the proper tools, but still getting the job done. Instead you string together duct tape and haywire, and apply a lot of back and muscle power. Stricter governmental regulations meant the end of the gypo logger.

But you can still play the Gypo Logging board game. It plays like some combination of Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit, which you can see in the demonstration videos on the site.

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The third expansion map board for the Power Grid board game is reaching retailers in the United States. It has China on one side and Korea on the other. To reflect the electric power industries in those countries, when playing the Korea board, the resource (fuel) market is divided between North and South, and when playing the China board, power plant cards enter the market in a set order.

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Year of Ill Harvest and Year of the Fall collect the first and second years of Living Arcanis adventures. Both are designed for use with Codex Arcanis and the Player’s Guide to Arcanis, and are available now direct from the publisher, Paradigm Concepts. Year of Ill Harvest starts with the rescue of a young boy from slavery, but eventually leads to confrontation with the Sorcerer King. Year of the Fall, which debuted at Origins, is an adventure of intrigue set during the decline of the Alabaster Throne.

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This one is from Swedish designer Anna Johnsson. It’s called The Urban Jungle and it takes players on a shopping trip where they have to answer trivia questions about fashion, film, design, television, and music in order to earn the title of Urbanista.

Jonsson developed the game while working in a designer boutique in Sweden because she wanted to provide a forum for women interested in fashion to get together and put all the knowledge they had gained from reading glossy magazines to good use.

What more can be said?

Wait a minute! ₤50 ???

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It certainly seems we’re busy with Traveller news these days. The Freedom League, new from ComStar Games, is Traveller 1248 Sourcebook 4. That is, it details the successor state to the Reformation Coalition more than 100 years after the collapse of the Third Imperium. It’s not specifically a supplement for the latest version of the game, which is set much earlier in the history of the Traveller universe. Rather, it extends the timeline from Traveller: The New Era, the last version published by GDW.

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These dice are meant to be rolled. They’re the latest from specialty dice manufacturer Q-Workshop (in cooperation with Paizo Publishing)—Pathfinder Rise of the Runelords dice. Sold as a set of seven polyhedral dice, each one features one of the seven Thassilonian runes: envy, greed, lust, wrath, sloth, pride, and gluttony.

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