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

Wow – what a difference a month makes! In our monthly review of games sales (using Alliance Distribution’s Game Trade Magazine monthly top 25 list), we see a ton of movement! Nearly half of the titles on the top 25 titles are new to the list. In all fairness, 4 of these new titles are related to the newest release of Magic the Gathering (Alara Reborn) – which should help convince people that Magic is still the king of hobby gaming.

Hobby/designer board and card games had a great showing this month with new BoardGameGeek favorites Le Havre and Smallworld taking spots in the top 5 and recent hits Agricola, Dominion and various Ticket to Ride games holding down the middle of the list. RPGs on the other hand continue to not perform particularly well with only Dungeons and Dragons making the list in a few places, but losing ground overall.

CCGs and CMGs as a whole suffered this month. Non-Magic CCGs faired very poorly, with every game losing ground. CMGs faired even more poorly with the new Star Wars expansion falling in the ratings and the new World of Warcraft expansion debuting lower than the core set’s rating last month!

The biggest improvement this month was DaVinci Games’ Bang! which seems to be the game that just won’t quit (doesn’t everyone already have a copy of this???). On the negative side, the biggest loser was the newest Pokemon expansion (Platinum) – its an interesting movement – do retailers buy in bulk the first month and just let the inventory run through.

Even more interesting is what games didn’t make it to the list this month: Heroclix and Monsterpocalypse (there were a few others that didn’t make the list, but these are particularly interesting). To a large degree, it seems that the soap opera that is the fight over Heroclix is leaving gamers uninterested in continuing to pay for a game that might not ever see another expansion. Monsterpocalypse on the other hand may be suffering from its own complexity and lack of recognizable characters (though the upcoming Voltron expansion might turn this around).

Overall the ratings this month are encouraging – a little over half of the games on the list are collectible (which seems to put the lie to the folklore that gamers don’t like collectible games), but more hobby and designer games performed very well this month. As always, we’d love to have some raw numbers or input from other distributors – if you can help, drop us a line!

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Galleria Florentina in Boston will be showcasing a collection of gorgeous chess sets and tables by artist Aldo Marsili from May 22 to June 27. The exhibit kicks off with the 2009 Galleria Florentia Chess Tournament with a prize package of $2,500. (source)

A sample table: 50” x 50” x 29” H. Figures are 12” H. Solid bronze, gold and silver plated, with an onyx table top.

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Nice Bear Naughty Bear is a deck of cards depicting (what else?) nice and naughty bears, including little rhymes as to good and bad behavior. Several traditional games are included for playing with the cards.

I can think of a few naughty bears that need a good spanking.

(source)

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Apparently, Xiangqi (Chinese Chess, the most popular board game in the world today) sets have, until now, not been generally available for the blind and visually impaired. Go figure.

A set for the visually impaired has now been developed by Professor Michael Siu, Professor and Leader of the Public Design Lab of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design. It’s won a number of design awards in China. And the Bunhoi Group is donating 1,000 sets to the China Administration of Sports for Persons with Disabilities and the China Association of the Blind.

(source, via)

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Oz Crawl is a board game about bar hopping in Australia. The game comes in a beer can and the board unrolls. You may have to sing, act, dance, answer trivia questions, and other assorted fluff.

The site stresses that the game is not a “drinking game”, so drinking is not encouraged; nevertheless it is “highly recomended”.

(source)

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Video game developer BioWare and publisher Green Ronin are teaming up to produce a tabletop RPG. The game will be based on BioWare’s upcoming Dragon Age: Origins electronic game, which when released promises a dark heroic fantasy setting with rich character customization options. Green Ronin states that the pen-and-paper version will be available this summer, suggesting that development is already complete. Also, in a move that seems to target potential customers new to tabletop roleplaying but is risky with established gamers, Green Ronin will be selling the game in boxed sets—for both the base game and future expansions.

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