[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5XVeENmLMk]

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The Hartford Courant has a puff piece on game designer Hank Atkins, famous for the 1981 game Razzle from Parker Bros, as well as dozens of other games from some of the big companies such as Milton Bradley, Fischer Price, Hasbro, and Educational Insights.

It’s a 40 plus hour workweek for a $100k a year salary, making 10 to 12 new games each year. And you have to get used to rejection.

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If you want to upgrade from paper triangles for tabletop football, take a look at Zelosport.

They’ve got finger-flicking Football, Golf, Baseball, and Soccer on sweet-looking table pads. The game includes a ball-bearing inside a plastic disk arrangement which some of you may be familiar with if you ever played Rebound.

The football game comes in dozens of branded fields, such as LSU, and also includes a foam football for kicking.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbG9a7r04-A]

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It’s sad that when two companies work out their differences without public accusations or legal maneuvers that this seems to be newsworthy. Nevertheless, it’s nice to see.

TOG Entertainment came out with Shattered Sword, a tabletop card driven war game. Several players contacted Chad Ellis of Your Moves Games and told him that some of the design and layout of Shattered Sword looked similar to his game Battleground: Fantasy Warfare, also a card driven war game.

Chad maintains that he’s happy to have competition, but was concerned about consumer confusion, and therefore he:

1. publicly berated TOG on use forums? No
2. sued TOG for breach of copyright? No
3. called Jim Mauro of TOG, explained his problem, and together they worked out a solution? Yes

Why is this so difficult for other companies?

(source)

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“Good Game” is a roll-move-pick the card type game which teaches Islamic principles, for lack of a better description. Each space is a good or bad moral, netting you good or bad points. I’m not sure how the game ends or the winner is determined.

I’m hoping that Islam’s principles don’t involve the idea that fate entirely determines success or failure, that beating everyone else is the goal of life, and that, through no fault of your own, you can pick a card, go straight to Hell, and lose the game.

(source, via, via)

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Cortex RPG is a system authored by Jamie Chambers and released by Margaret Weis Productions.

It’s supposed to be a quick system to learn with simple math that focuses on the characters. And the preview available at the above link isn’t much help, either.

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The game “What Would You Do?” is designed by Warwickshire police community support officers Peter Nash and Caroline Taylor.

The game won the official back of the Warwickshire Police Dept (surprise) as an effective tool in raising awareness in kids concerning safety issues. Pupils and teachers called the game “new”, “bold”, “eye-catching”, “educational”, “pertinent”, and “fun”. Aw… you had me at “pertinent”.

Play it at Abbots Farm Junior School, Abbots Way, Rugby, CV21 4AP, at 10 am on Thursday 16th October.

(source)

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