The kingdoms of Hyperborea, Aquilonia, Turan, and Stygia compete for the support of Conan the Cimmerian as players guide the barbarian on a series of adventures in this new board game by Fantasy Flight. Though success of the board game doesn’t look like it will get much help from the Age of Conan MMORPG, I’m still excited to give it a try.

Know, O Prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars… Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.

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Little Tikes is attempting to prove that you’re never too young to know the sweet addiction of collectible gaming. With their new game, your three year old too can know the high of opening a package and hoping for that uber-powerful miniature. In Number Busters, your toddlers can face off with miniature monsters with a single number underneath the foot – compare the numbers and the highest value wins! There are variants that leverage the trading cards (which also have a number) to teach addition and subtraction. A bit simple, but the figures do look cool – I may try this out with my younger children as an experiment…yeah…that’s it. An experiment…       

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Save Heroclix announced today that they’ve reached an agreement where a newly formed, unnamed company has nearly completed a deal with Topps to transfer the venerable miniature game to the new company and resume active development. A more formal announcement is expected in the next few days – as well as details around the group’s acquisition of several other former WizKids product lines. The first new release from the rebooted line will be “Hammer of Thor” and the hope is to release the new set soon after the deal is completed.

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Bridge Troll is a game from Alf Seegert of the Utah Board Game Designers Guild.

You get to throw boulders at travellers and eat them, but try not to eat too many, or there won’t be enough left to cross your bridge and pay you money for repairs. It’s primary mechanic appears to be blind bidding on traveller cards using boulder cubes.

You can read the entire rules at the above link.

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The Chess world is buzzing after Chessbase was forced by the Bulgarian Chess Federation to stop reporting on an event from the World Chess Challenge 2009. The argument used to stop the broadcasts was “copyright violation”, by which the BCF meant that they held the copyright to the, uh, … event? List of plays? Broadcast rights? I’m not entirely sure.

Commenters on the above linked sites come out for and against this copyright application, and now even Techdirt has weighed in on the discussion. As usual, a lot of the comments are plain silly (please note that I am not a lawyer).

• Some commenters complain about the ridiculousness of copyrighting chess moves. What, once someone plays 1e4, no one else can? That’s not a very strong argument; it’s akin to claiming that a poem can’t be copyrighed  because a single word or phrase can’t. Copyrighting a Chess playback is meant to protect reproducing an entire event. Obviously a single move isn’t claimed as copyright.
• Some commenters complain about whether asserting this copyright is good or bad for the organization, or Chess in general. This argument is not entirely beside the point, but more of a side point when the law is concerned.
• Some have pointed out that other organizations, such as MLB, have tried to copyright sports scores and reporting, and in the end the court throw these attempts out since scores are simply facts, which can’t be copyrighted. This may or may not apply for a Chess playback, since it is exactly representational of the game itself, whereas the scores in a baseball game are not really a substitute for the game.

On the other hand, the argument for, which is that people should be allowed to make money from the gameplay, is also not much of an argument. Or, not enough of one to allow the full weight of the law to trump freedom of the press and speech. Copyright is a limited monopoly to provide incentive to promote the arts and science as a benefit to the public. I’m pretty sure that no one is going to stop playing, or investing in Chess, without this copyright: it hasn’t stopped them so far. And if it does, I’m sure the public will survive.

The biggest confusion is that the argument seems really to have been over the “simultaneous broadcast”, which is more of a licensing issue. All sorts of companies have taken to the idea that paying for the exclusive right to broadcast an event means that they can sue to shut down anyone else from speaking about it, so as to protect their business investment. The question is whether this is a copyright issue.

And if you can copyright Chess sessions, what about other games?

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When I heard about a game that simulates fishing, I imagined something where you sit around while someone throws salt water at you over the course of a few hours and then nobody wins.

Turns out that it’s a roll and move game called Fish On. When you land on a Fish On space, you pick a disk which adds to your score. The source also says something about selling lures, but it didn’t describe the mechanics.

(source)

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There’s not much on the Watchmen tabletop gaming scene:

In the late 1980s, three Watchmen supplements to the now defunct, but still well-regarded, DC Heroes RPG were released: “Who Watched the Watchmen”, “Taking Out the Trash”, and the Watchmen Sourcebook. These included adventures and scrap material from both Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. There was also a complementary set of metal minis. (source)

Aside from this, you can find a few novelty game accessories, such as these Watchmen playing cards.

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Looking for something a little different in playing cards?

Here’s the Tragic Royalty Playing Cards from Bicycle. The faces run the gamut from sinister to scared, and the aces have cobwebs.

Oh, and all the cards glow under a blacklight.

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