The Onion once ran a spoof about a new expansion to World of Warcraft that lets your WoW character play WoW. If only it were ridiculous enough to be fiction.

The game Combat Cards was initially created as a virtual card game that you play within the online virtual reality world Second Life. Your character stands on the screen as you draw cards and then acts out the cards you play. Like real-world CCGs, you had to buy packs of combat cards to play. The mechanics are a souped up version of RPS.

Combat cards has now jumped into real life, and you can now get physical cards to play with. You can get them free print-and-play, or buy them in packs.

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The Guardian surveys what it feels are the ten best uses of Chess from the history of literature. Books:

• The Book of the Duchess by Chaucer
• A Game at Chess by Thomas Middleton
• The Tempest by William Shakespeare
• Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
• The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig
• The Waste Land by TS Eliot
• The Defence by Vladimir Nabokov
• From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming
• Murphy by Samuel Beckett
• Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone by JK Rowling

(source)

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Six new Lego board games were announced at the Toy Fair. Lego board games let kids build the board game and then play, making the board itself somewhat customizable.

Source implies this is Lego’s first foray into the game business, which is far from true (also here). Also, numerous classic games like Chess and Tic Tac Toe have been made from Lego pieces before, either as official sets or just from the minds of crazed fans. From the source:

One game, Rameses Pyramid, involves children building their own pyramid, complete with treasure buried inside and Egyptian sphinxes. Players have to collect crystals to climb their mini-Lego character up the pyramid and claim the prize – the king mummy.

(source)

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These articles are starting to come in every day now, so I’m thinking of just collecting them in a roundup format, similar to the criminal roundup.

• A Reuters story about the UK Toy Fair and families retrenching to play more board games was reprinted many times. The article implies that board games gain a boost due to nostalgia: people remember the games they played when they were younger and buy copies of those games. I.e. board games = thirty year old games.
• The Atlanta Journal Constitution ran a front page article on five places to play board games in Atalanta, including The Tower Games (Euros and CCG game store), Atlanta Card and Board Game Meetup (Euros), Play Date Atlanta (mainstream, attracts an urban crowd), Thinking Man Tavern (bar with mainstream games), and Kirkwood Bar and Grill (ditto).
• The Toronto Star talks about people ditching bars for board game nights, talking about mainstream games. The organizer of one of these events is looking for “new games to wow her guests with”. Bar are fighting back by stocking board and dice games, as you can see from the above Atlanta links.
• The Hard Rock Cafe in Niagara Falls is hosting a Scrabble fest, a kickoff for the Literacy Volunteers’ annual fundraising event. More Western New York scrabble events are listed here.

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