Bwana Bill on the Tabletop Wargames Blog recently caught sight of Richard Borg testing out an English Civil War version of the Commands & Colors game system (also used in Commands & Colors: Ancients, Memoir ‘44, BattleLore, and Battle Cry). While I already have nearly every expansion for each one of these existing versions, I’d really love to see the system applied to a greater range of historical periods. Oh, I’ve already got C&C:A expansions 3 and 4 on preorder from GMT. But something historical other than Romans would be very welcome. Here’s hoping!

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Adding to its line of air war games, Dan Verssen has acquired the rights to Air Leader and Down in Flames Jets from Decision Games. Air Leader is a series of solitaire games where the player takes control of a squadron of fighter planes. Down in Flames Jets updates the company’s existing Down in Flames card game from World War II to the modern era. Plans for printing both are being developed.

In a bit of diversification, Dan Verssen Games is also working on a board game version of John Wick’s Houses of the Blooded RPG. No word yet on a schedule for that.

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It this game still going? Seriously? At any rate, TC Digital Games, the makers of the Chaotic CCG/online card game (which had a whopping $500,000 in sales for the entire 4th quarter) have announced that they are establishing a tournament structure that will ultimately end in a world championship. The ladder is a bit odd, with Regional Championships in April, Battledrome Qualifiers in June and a subsequent Battledrome Championship that will act as a world championship qualifier. There will also be a set of Perim Tournaments that will act as qualifiers. For those who aren’t familiar with it, Chaotic is a Danish CCG that was expanded globally two years ago with the addition of an online counterpart to the game in addition to various merchandising contracts (including the mandatory children’s cartoon). Chaotic is currently considered the third most popular CCG in the US by its parent company, 4Kids (not that this seems even remotely possible…does anyone have hard numbers on TCG/CCG sales in the US?).

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Nottingham’s Crime and Drugs Partnership has helped finance a student anti-marijuana game called Spiffs and Ladders. Joints replace snakes on the board.

The board game squares, and a leaflet that comes with the game, provide factual information and warnings about smoking cannibis.

I don’t do marijuana, but if I did I think I would find the game more amusing than off-putting.

(source, source)

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The Sacramento Bee pimps board game family nights, although the writer sounds somewhat sarcastic and makes a number of errors in the names of the games. Commenters correct her. Games puched are mostly in the Cranium family.  (source)

Delaware Online pimps an after school church program that provides board games and other activities for children. Most of the kids come from broken homes. (source)

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I’ve mentioned this before on my own blog, and I wasn’t the first to do so. Now Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal joins the fray about tile values in Scrabble.

The issue: ever since the fourth edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary added the words Za and Qi, the 70 year old tile values for Q and Z now no longer seem to make as much sense as they once did. Even before these additions, the regular use of two-letter words with J and X, such as JO, XI, and XU, also seemed to make playing these letters a tad easy compared to the score they give.

That makes the game luckier: the tile scores are supposed to offset the difficulty you will encounter in getting them out (and forming seven letter words with them). Without this difficulty, players who draw the bulk of the higher-valued tiles simply have an advantage, slightly offsetting the advantage that skill (anagramming and memorization) should be providing.

Carl notes that other games sometimes have similar imbalances, and that these imbalances are sometimes only noticeable to professional players but not amateurs, and therefore hard to change. Notwithstanding nostalgia for the original ruleset.

He also points to additional reading on the subject.

(source, source)

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Steve Fikki is aiming to publish Trader of the Street this  fall, an educational game which teaches about the stock market and dividends.

Source ballyhoos over the patent Steve has acquired for the game. The board looks something like a Monopoly board, but you get dividends when you pass your own company.

It’s unclear how much decision making is involved, and there’s no web site for the game, yet, but Steve has registered the domain name “ushare.biz”, so I expect that will be its site.

(source, image from Julie Scheidegger/The Examiner)

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Beatriv is a trivia game about The Beatles.

Like other trivia games, it comes with a superfluous board, as well as 2000 questions, half of which are supposedly easy, and half harder.

The game was created by Sandra Lean-Fore, who happens to be blind (from birth) and has also suffered fom CFS for the last twenty years.

(source)

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