From Reaper Miniatures, casualty markers—how to maintain verisimilitude on your miniature field of battle:

And if you ever wondered how they’d do an invisible man (???):

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Sourced from Luxuo, here are a few more luxury chess sets:

The Carbon Luxury Chess set. EUR 8,000 (source) High Quality steel feet, 24 carat gilded and sterling silvered. Made from high grade steel of some sort.

The Art of War Chess set. Est. $50,000 (source) Rhodium and gold chess pieces and a jeweled ebony board on two yellow gold feet with diamonds and two white gold feet with rubies. Every piece is decked out with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires.

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Dennis Hoyle writes Pinebars, a blog about applying game mechanics to real world situations.

This week he had a month’s worth of shifts to assign, so he drew up the entire month’s schedule and let the workers choose them using worker placement mechanics. Result: success and some learning.

(first post, second post)

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Until June 27, you can get free shipping for any board game order on eToys. The terms don’t specify that the deal is only for the US, but I’m betting it is.

Here’s the source, a Typepad account called “RUs”, which claims to be “Toys.com”, which currently redirects to Toys-R-Us’ web site. The terms and conditions for the account indicate that it’s owned by Toys-R-Us. And the home page of the account promises that “Starting June 16 [that's tomorrow] never miss a deal again”.

So look for a new Toys-R-Us deal promotion site, starting tomorrow.

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Last October, Rachel Lowe of RTL Games was over the moon having secured a license from Warner Bros to produce a Harry Potter version of her hit game Destination. The company was turning over a million pounds a year.

Times have changed.

The sixth Harry Potter movie was supposed to come out the following month, but it got delayed until July, 2009. Orders were canceled or delayed and Lowe was left holding the bag, unable to pay her creditors without a cash flow. She lost her home and car, and her business is in administration.

(Seeing as the movie is now, in fact, about to come out, I would think that this would reverse her fortunes, but I don’t see a mention of that in the source.)

(source)

Update, Sept 22: BBC Panorama on Rachel and the bank’s behavior.

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