On Tuesday GMT begins shipping an expansion to Flying Colors. Ship of the Line focuses on major fleet actions during the American Revolution and also adds campaign rules to the base game. A traditional hex-and-counter war game, Flying Colors gives each specific ship its own piece and is designed to work well as a solitaire game.

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Not for the reward, but to help your fellow man. Still, if you’re going to give blood, maybe you’d prefer a free RPG to another one of those Red Cross t-shirts. If so, all you have to do is email Louis Porter at LPJ Design with a copy of your donation record and he’ll send you the company’s Obsidian Twilight roleplaying game for free when it’s available in October. (Don’t worry, he says it’s okay to black out any private information.) And what, you may ask, is Obsidian Twilight? Well because I like this blend of generosity and marketing, I’ll put an answer here. Obsidian Twilight is a D&D 3.5 setting supplement based on the concept of a cross between Dark Sun and Ravenloft.

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In an attempt to prove that I don’t know what I’m talking about, Rackham has announced a new plan to make their pre-painted miniature games, AT-43 and Confrontation, more accessible to new players. Starting in July, Rackham will be releasing Army Boxes for their games – essentially an army in a box. Each box contains a single army of about 2000 (that’s a mid to large sized army) points and about $200 worth of miniatures with a bunch of faction-specific extras (posters, books, etc) for $70 US. The releases will be:  

• July: Cogs (a faction of Therians) and the Revolutionary Forces (a Red Blok faction) for AT-43
• September: Army of the Lion and Army of the Wolf

I’m not going to lie – this will be the best deal in the miniatures industry bar none. It’s definitely the sort of thing I would buy (assuming Rackham could fix their distribution issues and figured out how to get product to actual store shelves…)

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Chicago Magazine: Pimps Diplomacy, in a long article about how its inventor, Allan Calhamer, failed to capitalize on its momentum. (source)

CNET: Pimps Werewolf, in a long article indicating that it’s become a darling late night game for Bay area executives. (source)

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The British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association has a workshop entitled Climate Change Showdown. The centerpiece of the program is a board game entitled The Climate Change Game. Roll, move, trivia. The kids seem to be enjoying it.

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The 2009 Mensa Select board game winners are:

• Cornerstone by sggc Good Company Games: A 3D game of strategy and balance.
• Dominion by Rio Grande Games: A clever deck-building game ranked highly on Board Game Geek.
• Marrakech by Fundex Games: A strategy game of laying rugs.
• Stratum by Family Games America: A 3D tile laying game, where the winner has the most pieces exposed at the end.
• Tic-Tac-Ku by Mad Cave Bird Games: An expanded Tic Tac Toe game with more challenge, played on a SudoKu board.

(source)

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Angleside School Adventure is a geometry teaching game created by Chris Dyer, a middle school math teacher.

Roll, pick a card, and set the central compass to the correct angle. Seems to be about it. Dyer says that the game could last three minutes or three hours, depending on what cards you pick.

(source)

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IBM is going to try out a computer AI on the game show Jeopardy.

The trick is not the trivia answers, which the computer will undoubtedly have, even if not connected to the Internet. It’s trying to understand the question in the first place.

The computer will be getting the questions via text message. Its human opponents will play as usual.

Jeopardy is available as a board game.

(source)

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