The Miami Herald pimps Eurogames, including Settlers of Catan, the Games Club of Maryland, and BoardGameGeek. (source)

The Buffalo News pimps Imagine If, Buffalo Games, party games, mainstream games, Games for Educators, and game nights. (source)

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Alphabet Runner is a set of cards with letters of the alphabet on them, as well as a number of rule sets that describe how to play with them. A board game is also available.

You can download PDFs of the cards, and rules, for free from their site.

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Zvi Mowshowitz tackles the top 50 artifacts from Magic: the Gathering. It’s cool, and bound to be controversial. I assume the number one spot won’t surprise you, but number two might.

He follows it up with 18 other “best of” lists about artifacts, such as the best “shields” and the best “golems”, best from each set, highest casting cost, and so on.

(article)

Update: This article is from 2005.

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Art students at Spelman College in Atlanta (a college for black women) have created a money management board game called Money Matters. It will be unveiled at a Youth Art Connection ceremony on April 29. YAC is a program for bringing art to the “underserved” in Atlanta.

The game is a roll-and-move trivia game meant to education teens about financial decisions.

Perhaps unfortunately, there is already a board game Money Matters, an educational game about finances aimed at the Christian market. Also Money Matters For Kids, by the same designer.

(source)

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The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY includes play areas, carousels, a toy museum, a mockup of Sesame Street, children’s reading corner, The National Toy Hall of Fame and The National Center for the History of Electronic Games.

They also underwrite the new quarterly academic journal The American Journal of Play. In the Spring 2009 issue (Vol 1, issue 4) the journal covers play through personal history, brain images, a learning medium, fake language, honor and fairness, play in animals, play as a civilizing tool, and nine books reviews.

Medical News Today writes a piece on the article about play as a civilizing tool in hunters and gatherers. According to the article, “[play] were means of maintaining the band’s existence – means of promoting actively the egalitarian attitude, intense sharing, and relative peacefulness for which hunter-gatherers are justly famous and upon which they depended for survival.”

As a bonus, a few other recent scholarly articles on play:

Play as a tool for learning democratic values

Free play is necessary for the creation of well-adjusted adults (Scientific American)

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Privateer Press has posted a video advertising the next issue of No Quarter magazine (their house publication) and its feature article: a how-to on building a functioning “mechanika” drawbridge. The drawbridge looks great and I’ll totally be picking the issue up, but its worth noting that very few game companies are actually taking advantage of online media effectively.

• Wizards of the Coast really started things with their series of videos about the 4.0 release of D&D – got a lot of people very interested, but they totally failed to follow-up on it…
• Fantasy Flight Games has been using video advertisements to get people jazzed about specific games – the spots are great, but they don’t really lead anywhere (though the Conan video is a step in the right direction)…
• WotC has started actually using their Facebook profile to post interesting comments and is actually starting to generate interest from other users

From my perspective, PP’s new YouTube ad is probably the best use of online medium for a game publisher – its short and to the point, uses the medium effectively and leads me directly to a product. I think WotC is starting to get the idea with their Facebook activities, but we’ll have to see if they actually start using it to get people excited about specific products.

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