Temples is an LDS (aka Mormon) CCG of battling temples and priestly points. It plays for 2 to 4 players.

You activate temples by playing genealogy cards on them (I wonder what the designers are trying to say here). I honestly didn’t grasp how the combat system works, but something like whomever draws the highest powered cards wins. The loser trashes his temple (I wonder what the designers are trying to say here).

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The Twin Cities Pioneer Press profiles Spy Alley Partners, a small company with one hit and a few other games. Barnes & Noble used to carry their flagship game, Spy Alley, but that ended and now they’re looking for more partnerships.

Revenue is down to $150k from twice that in 2006, but they’re still selling games.

(source)

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Ready to retire that character sheet or campaign map but don’t want to clutter the house or throw it out? Consider The Play Generated Map and Document Archive (PlaGMaDA).

PlaGMaDA’s mission is to preserve, present, and interpret play generated cultural artifacts, namely manuscripts and drawings created to communicate a shared imaginative space.

The Archive will accept home-made maps, notes, sketches, player hand-outs, character sheets, illustrations, and other materials from your roleplaying games, and preserve them for study by future academics. Don’t think that likely? Then you haven’t seen the International Journal of Role-Playing.

The aim of The International Journal of Role-Playing is to act as a hybrid knowledge network, and bring together the varied interests in role-playing and the associated knowledge networks, e.g. academic research, the games and creative industries, the arts and the strong role-playing communities.

Its editorial and review boards include representatives from University of Gotland (Sweden), Macquarie University (Australia), University of Oregon (USA), National University of Singapore, Northwestern University (USA), Nokia Research Center, and other august institutions.

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Franklin Electronic, The New York Times, and SET Enterpriss have all teamed up to create a handheld version of the game of SET.

It’s hard for me to understand why anyone would buy a standalone dedicated portable game at this point in history, when electronic versions of of the game are sure to be available on the iPod/iPhone/DS/etc sometime soon, but then I’m not as smart as the people at Franklin, the NYT, or even SET.

You can download from SET’s site a series of discussions on how to integrate the game of SET into the math classroom [PDF] in ever-increasing complexity.

(source)

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Ruth Tearle works to navigate companies to successful strategies in today’s economic collapse, just as she did 15 years ago when her country South Africa experienced another major upheaval: a change to democracy.

Her tools are a series of puzzles and board and card games, all of which are more team cohesion exercises than games, per se. Cards include problems that must be overcome on one side, and possible approaches on the other.

(source)

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Leaves is an environmental trivia game by sggc EOS, or Earth Operating System. When asked a trivia question about the environment, you can also choose to roll a die or use collected chips to bypass the problem. There’s also a cooperative element.

So, uh, “operating system”? “Leaves is a focal point, or operating system designed to transform multiple sources of information into inspiration through gameplay.”

Yeah, I have no idea what that means, either. I think it has something to do with the included cards (150 of them) being called a “starter deck”.

(source)

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An upcoming version of Candy Land called “Sweet Celebration” offers an advantage over the standard version: The path is entirely customizable, allowing you to arrange forks and other decision points, and, most importantly, vary the length of the game.

In addition, new characters and 3-D pieces are included. Available later this year.

(source)

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Mattel will be introducing Uno Moo as a children’s version of the game Uno. Heh. By which they mean pre-schooler’s version.

In Uno Moo, you match the color or face of the cow last placed in the barn with one your own. The Toy Guy explains:

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Using a self-created variant on the game of Go called “Coupon Go”, Elwyn Berlekamp, author of the seminal book series Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, deconstructs evaluating a Go position at a lecture in Berkeley. In Coupon Go, players may opt to make a move or take the top of a series of descending valued point coupons. This helps evaluate the actual point value of moves made on the board.

It’s fascinating, while a little sad to realize that someday, Go will also be just one more math problem. Here’s the first of four videos:

(source)

Update: and a few hours later, I find out that yet another Go professional has fallen to a computer playing Gowhich learned using something called the Monte Carlo algorithm. (source)

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