Truth be told, I can’t resist free games.

Shipments of Buffalo Games’ newest party offering will begin in September, but you have an opportunity to win a free copy of Truth be Told each week in August. The company is running a contest on Facebook that draws ideas from the upcoming game. Each week, Buffalo Games will list two fill-in-the-blank questions on the company’s Facebook page. From among the answers posted to its wall, Bufflalo Games will select up to six participants to receive a free game.

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Crafty Games announced Tuesday plans for a roleplaying game based on The Looking Glass Wars trilogy by Frank Beddor. The Looking Glass Wars is in turn based on Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Of course, over time there have been other RPG products derived from the story of Alice, but this one promises to be more dark than comedic. Crafty also describes the game as being “powered by a versatile, new storytelling game engine designed for lightning-fast narrative play.”

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Microsoft Surface and the like are working at making gaming less tactile, yet still face to face. The Distance Lab is working in another direction: they’re trying to make gaming that is not face to face more tactile.

The lab straddles some area between industry and government in Scotland, and they’re not focusing on games, but games are what I thought of when I saw some of their prototypes.

For instance, the Mutsugoto is an erotic, sensual device for adults. Partners lie in different beds wearing rings, and however they move their hand, a standing light beam is drawn on the other bed (or body). Actually, I really couldn’t see how that works, either erotically or sensually, but game ideas – such as long-distance Tic Tac Toe as a trivial example – spring naturally from it.

Remote Impact is a wall that depicts the shadow of your opponent. If playing boxing, for instance, you have to jab the shadow on the wall, and avoid the shadow’s jabs. The physical wall makes give a tactile sense that the Wii can’t.

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I’m usually disappointed with card games that use letters as cards. Most of them involve simply transposing rules from numerical games onto letter cards, which doesn’t work. It’s far easier to meld words than a three of a kind or a straight.

5 To Close is another entry in the field, and, while I haven’t played it, it looks decidedly better than the others:

• It’s a partnership game, and partnership games are always better than non-partnership games.
• You’re racing against an increasing minimum word length, and your opponents ending the round before you can.
• You alternate playing letters onto the ends of letter piles, one at a time, with your partner, without communicating.

Could be wildly amusing, or not, but it looks interesting. Mind, you the ability to double, triple, and then redouble or re-triple word scores seems fairly unbalanced and overly luck-dependent.

The biggest problem is that the web site blatantly bandies about the name “Scrabble” as a comparison product: in the title of the site and in the copy. Without any disclaimer that they are not related to Scrabble and without even a trademark symbol or note.  Expect the trademark lawyers to come knocking soon, guys.

Note: The game has gone through previous names: Mingle the Game and Splingo the Game.

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To sell some under-invested development projects, the Northern West Virginia Brownfield Assistance Center created a Monopoly-like game Brown-opoly with real assets on the spaces, and then gathered together community members, investors, bankers, and regulators to sell them off.

(source)

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4Kids, global brand manager of Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Huntik, Chaotic, and many other brands, has put itself up for sale.

Most of the brand licenses it manages extend only to the anime and online game formats, as well as licensed games for the XBox. The Pokemon Company owns Pokemon trading cards, Konami owns Yu-Gi-Oh trading cards, and Upper Deck owns Huntik trading cards. 4kids maintains a stake in Chaotic trading cards, however, through TC Digital Games distribution.

Market conditions and the loss of a partnership with FOX television have led to this situation.

(source)

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Two academic journals weigh in on the tired subject of games fighting dementia:

Neurology finds that regular cognitive activities, such as puzzles and games, help fight dementia. (source)

Journal of Educational Psychology finds that linear board games that require you to count along a path toward an ending space – as opposed to a) circular board games, examples of which will not be mentioned here, or b) simply doing counting skills, such as counting poker chips – not only increases basic math skills in children, but increases their ability to learn new math skills. (source)

And Escapist Magazine so regularly pimps board games nowadays, that I now welcome them to the officially converted. Allen Varney pimps Dominion. (source)

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Or so Paizo claims. The company has already sold out it’s entire first print run even before the game has been released. But while I do feel that publication of the Pathfinder RPG is a significant event in the RPG field, there’s a fair degree of hype in Paizo’s announcement. You see, as I already pointed out, the game is not actually available yet to the public. So, much of those sales are distributor orders. You should still be able to find Pathfinder at your local retailer on August 13th. And I’d wager there will be several thousand waiting at the Paizo booth at Gen Con.

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