Linwood from sggc Garp Hill Games aims to be a hybrid between a Euro and a mainstream game by making its primary movement mechanism dice-based. It plays in 30 minutes for 2-6 players age 8 and up.

The game is an exploration game with a board built from hexagons as you play, searching for the four types of stones. Might make a nice gateway game.

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Incursion is a blended board and miniatures game set in an alternate history and fantasy setting. OK, to the point: Nazis controlling zombies.

Float your boat? Grab a free PDF copy of the game (without the miniatures and pretty packaging, to be sure) from the site. From Grindhouse Games / West Wind Productions, the makers of Secrets of the 3rd Reich, which has a similar fantasy/WWII theme and can use the same minis.

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Hackmaster is perhaps the most well-known RPG first created as a parody in a comic strip. Kenzer & Co gained the right to publish the game as a derivative of D&D after Wizards published Dragon Magazine archives containing KODT strips without seeking proper permission.

This agreement ended two years ago, and Kenzer has now moved forward with a new edition of the game without any protected WotC material, i.e. no longer a D&D derivative. Several source books and extensions are planned. The Basic rulebook is due out next month.

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Scroker is yet another entry in the card games with letters for cards category. It has 4 suits, with 13 cards in each suit, but the letters are somewhat unevenly distributed.

Cards are only $6, and the web site includes rules for 20 games, so far. Not too risky an investment.

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The latest expansion for the CCG Bella Sara will be Bella Sara Royalty, available from Amazon.

Bella Sara’s online site has 5 million registered users and Hidden City has sold over 83 million cards.

(source)

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The Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport and the City of Cape Town just ran a Mind Games event in Cape Town. The intention was to promote games apart from sports.

The games included “Klaverjas, Scrabble, Chess, Dominoes, Draughts, Bridge and War Games”. Klaverjas is a four player partnership card game. I don’t know what war games they had in mind.

(source)

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Sure, we’re all motivated to play games, but how often do games truly motivate us to action? Wired.com posted a quick article last week looking at the ways in which elements of gaming are being brought into other areas of life to change people’s behavior:

• Sending too much email? Why not give people a number of email tokens that can be attached to messages to increase their importance. But be careful! Use too many and your emails go to the bottom of the barrel. Seem hokey? Research at a test group within IBM showed that emails with 20+ tokens attached were 52% more likely to be read.
• Not taking exercise as seriously as you should? Nike’s Nike Plus program attaches a pedometer to your shoes and rewards you with achievements (like music playing) when you hit certain milestones and allows you to compete with friends and strangers alike.
• Wasting gas and killing the environment? The Toyota Prius shows your current gas mileage and then explains how wasteful or efficient you’re being.
• Want to encourage people to get out of their comfort zone? Use Foursquare, a mobile social networking application that relays location of friends to one another, but assigns points based on how often they leave the home and how distant the locations are from their home.

The idea is nothing new (my personal favorite is Merlin Mann’s idea for meeting tokens) and its a powerful motivator (as evidenced by the glee with which my children now do their housework thanks to Chorewars) – what game-inspired motivators are you seeing?

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