Mutant City Blues is a supernatural police procedural roleplaying game with a couple of special features. First, it’s built on the Gumshoe system, which bypasses the typical dice rolls for searching a crime scene. Instead, detecting clues at appropriate moments is automatic. It’s what you do with them that’s in question. Second, the game’s setting assumes a portion of the population (and, therefore, a portion of the criminals) have developed mutant powers. But rather than the expected free-for-all, this game dictates that mutant powers manifest in strict categories with scientifically mapped relationships—detailed in the Quade Diagram.

Mutant City Blues should just be arriving at your FLGS and to celebrate Pelgrane Press is running a contest with a top prize of $150 in vouchers for Pelgrane products, copies of all Pelgrane PDFs, and a signed leatherbound Trail of Cthulhu. All you need to do to win is solve the mystery presented in a series of articles on the Pelgrane web site. The deadline is March 1st.

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Privateer Press has just announced that they are revising their bread and butter, the Warmachine and Hordes games. The Mk II rules (and why oh why did they go with a versioning scheme identical to the one used for Space Marine armor???) will be released to the full public in 2010 (first Warmachine with Hordes following later in the year), but an open testing period will begin in April. PP has posted a FAQ with a smattering of hints as to the rule changes, with a few concrete items that players need to be aware of:

• All existing units will continue to work in the revised game
• The combat card format is being completely re-done, so players will need to purchase new cards (the FAQ seems to indicate that this will be a requirement)
• Every model will have a point cost change
• No Quarter will begin providing coverage of Mk II in issue 23

I was a huge fan of Warmachine when it first released, and I’m still fairly fond of the game even though its fallen out of favor in my area. The rules changes that are hinted at in the FAQ seem to mess with the things that I thought made the system unique, but we’ll see how they shape up. At a bare minimum, we should all thank PP for giving so much notice on the changes and starting with an open test period.

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Now shipping from Dan Verssen Games, Down in Flames – Aces High is a new version of the air combat card game first published 15 years ago. This one includes cards for around 50 different World War II aircraft and covers both dogfights and bombing campaigns. An action-reaction card-countering system accounts for the dynamic nature of air-to-air combat, and the advantage of altitude is modeled by having diving players draw extra cards and climbing players discard cards.

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Last we heard, Spyglass Miniatures closed up shop, citing the high cost of metal for one reason, and planned to return as a resin miniature company.

Here it is, and it’s called Eolith Miniatures.

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I Can Do That couped a Dr Seuss license last year, and now adds a Curious George license to its portfolio.

Curious George games include Hide and Seek Zoo (find hidden objects), Discovery Beach (find the hidden objects), and Super Helper (luck based), all exclusive to Target stores.

New Dr Seuss games include Super Stretchy ABCs, Grinch Christmas Bingo, and Classic Cards (Crazy 8’s, Go Fish, and Memory).

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Starlit Citadel, a Canadian game retailer[1], is offering major discounts to registered Canadian schools, PACs, or community institutions, when games are purchased for the goal of raising funds or providing educational learning or community outreach.

Head over to their information page and get people rocking to games right away.

[1] And one of our supporters

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The Shanghai Daily covers the modern board gaming scene in China in general, and Shanghai in particular. Interestingly, it starts off contrasting the hobby not only to video games (such as the Wii) but also to traditional games (such as Mahjong). The implication being that the traditional board game scene in China is still active.

The article mentions board game clubs, game bars, BoardGameGeek, and the games Killers of the Three Kingdoms (like Bang!), Uno, Puerto Rico, Modern Art, Axis And Allies, Race for the Galaxy, Power Grid, A Game of Thrones, Diplomacy, Monopoly Electronic Banking, The Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Blokus.

(source)

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Performance statistics are easy to find for the large public companies, such as Hasbro and Jakks. A recent Bloomberg article indicated that proprietary board game sales were up six percent to almost $800 million (US only, supposedly includes all board games bought online or retail; I don’t know if that includes generic game items such as poker sets and chess boards).

So how did the privately-held mid-sized companies do in 2008?

I asked several private companies – Eurogame retailers and publishers – how 2008 was for them compared to 2007, indicating that I would aggregate the results rather than associate a result with a particular company. Many didn’t respond, while some wrote back saying that they declined to answer. A few indicated that any comparison numbers wouldn’t be helpful, because they started operations, or did major acquisitions or sell-offs, in 2007.

Eight retailers and four publishers answered.

Q4 2008

Earnings ranged between -20% to +58% over Q4 2007. Four reported losses, while seven reported at least 20% higher earnings (some didn’t specify an amount, but indicated “higher” as opposed to “slightly higher”).

2008

Earnings ranged between -13% to +50% over 2007. Two reported losses, while eight reported at least 20% higher earnings (some didn’t specify an amount, but indicated “higher” as opposed to “slightly higher”).

Curiously, one company said that 2008 was higher than 2007, but Q4 2008 was lower than Q4 2007. All the other companies performed at least as high, or higher, in Q4 2008 as they did for the year overall.

Top Sellers

Six retailers provided their top selling games for the holiday season. The following games were on more than one of their lists:

5 of 6 top lists: Ticket to Ride (2004), Agricola (2007)

4 of 6: Carcassonne (2000), Pandemic (2008), Dominion (2008), Race for the Galaxy (2007)

3 of 6: Citadels (2000), Race for the Galaxy Expansion (2008)

2 of 6: The Settlers of Catan (1995), Bohnanza (1997), Stone Age (2008), Galaxy Trucker (2007), Battlestar Galactica (2008), Qwirkle (2006), Ticket to Ride Europe (2005), Wasabi (2008)

Answerers

Retailers

• Starlit Citadel (CAD)
• German Board Games (CAD)
• TimeWellSpent
• Gamers Armory
• BoardsandBits
• Fairplay Games
• DragonTalon Games
• Boulder Games

Publishers

• Rio Grande Games
• NorthStar Games
• Steve Jackson Games
• Looney Labs

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Business of Games (BoG) is our regular series looking at the business of games from the perspective of the gamer.

The NPD Group has released the year end sales results for the board game industry and their really quite encouraging. In a year where the overall toy segment was down 3%, board games were up 6%. This has led to a rash of opinions indicating that this is part of the continued rise of board games and that they are now ready to overthrow video games or some such. Before we completely disabuse this notion, its worth pointing out that we’re all very pro-board game around here, just not at the expense of actual facts.

The fact of the matter is that the board game industry had its best year in 2006, with sales of $802.2MM – a solid 13% increase over 2005. Then, in 2007, sales slack off significantly, dropping over 9%. This is the data point that everyone seems to miss – in a year that many consider to have been one of the best in board gaming history, overall sales went down. To be honest, I have no idea what to make of this event – while it certainly corresponds to the beginning of the economic downturn (the publicly visible part at any rate), it makes the 2008 increase fairly surprising – an increase of 6% (just shy of the $800MM mark) [for those who are curious, there aren't actual numbers for the board game market prior to 2005 as far as I can tell, just the occasional estimate, as low as $400MM in 2003].

Read on for our analysis of the board game market

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