WOW Trading Card and Mini world championships is this weekend in Austin, TX.

Epic Trading Card world championships will be Dec 11 – 13 in Philly. Chaotic’s world championships will also be in Philly, at the end of January.

Stardust Overdrive is on its way from Yu-Gi-Oh (source). ICv2 lists several future products from Yu-Gi-Oh: Yusei 2 Duelist pack (Jan), Absolute Powerforce booster (Feb), 2010 Duelist pack collector’s tin (Mar), Absolute Powerforce special edition (Mar). (source)

Pokemon’s Platinum Arceus expansion comes in Nov.

Mark Rosewater talks about the latest Magic set, and how his failed designs led him to (hopefully) better ones.

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Hasbro licensed their games into TV shows, so Mattel follows suit by licensing their shows to ITV Studios. Games to be turned into TV shows include Scrabble, Uno, and Pictionary. (source)

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In what will be a surprise to absolutely no one, a Cornell University study has concluded that a simple two-player game of Monopoly has a 12% chance of never ending. This result was after studying computer simulations, statistical sampling, Markov chains, and Brownian motion.

I know for a fact that they are wrong: all Monopoly games end, 100% of the time. Their error was in forgetting to study the motion of flying tables.

(source)

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Hasbro recently held their second annual “Inspiration Expo”, a gathering of people outside the company – and industry, even – intended to spark new ideas in Hasbro employees. (source) The oldest of the invitees is a 94 year old man, the inventor of a certain type of X-ray microscope.

“We pride ourselves on being an innovation-centric and creation-centric organization, but we work so many hours here, we don’t have a lot of time to go out and search for some inspiration,” said Leigh Anne Capello, Vice President of Design in Hasbro’s “Future Now” group.

Meanwhile, Mattel is looking to hire “toyologists” for the upcoming holiday season to play-test 12 toy offerings; applicants must be between 4 and 8 years old. (source)

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DavesGames.net has released a line of 8, 30mm-scale papercraft buildings for use in miniature games, railroad games, and whatever else you could possibly find a use for them.  The buildings range from $3 to $4 each, and are print and play.  After buying the PDF you just need a color printer, some card stock, a hobby knife, and some glue to have your own, beautiful models for you games.

We’ve recently posted about some papercraft Heroscape terrain for all the Heroscapers out there.  Now here’s something for the rest of you! You can find the entire line of buildings over at RPGnow.com.

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Toledo Blade pimps Eric Poses of All Things Considered (Loaded Questions). (source)

The Hour pimps Kevin Carroll and co-designers of Pickles to Penguins. (source)

Vision Magazine pimps Paradice. (source)

The Star Tribune pimps elderly Bridge players. (source)

Writing on a blog on The NY Press, staff reporter Armin Roses reverse pimps (aka disses) The Settlers of Catan when talking about a club: “The fact that a good percentage of the crowd isn’t there to hear jazz necessarily makes for a place that’s blissfully pretension-free: the Cat is ugly, crowded and chaotic; you couldn’t imagine anyone going there to feel sophisticated or look cool (there were people playing Settlers of Catan on Friday night).” (source)

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Like the Utah Board Game Designer’s Guild, Game Artisans of Canada is a collection of board and card game designers and wannabees who exchange prototypes to get play-testing feedback.

According to a conversation I had with some of the members, it was started by Alan Biggs and Rob Bartel and now has around 20 members across Calgary, Vancouver, and other areas of BC and ON. Membership includes:

• Dylan Kirk, designer of Genji
• Rob Bartel, who has a game coming out from Valley Games (possibly Caribe?)
• Graeme Jahns, designer of The Great Pyramid which just won a French game award (Concours International de Createurs de Jeux de Societe). (source) According to Graeme, TGP is “for 3 – 5 players and takes about 2 hours to play. It is mostly a worker placement game with area majority components. However, there are also resource management and blind bidding aspects to the game as well.” It is Egyptian themed (picture of the prototype, below).
• Peter Grant, designer of Battlefields Of Olympus
• Alan Biggs, co-designer of Check, the Chess card game from sggc Red3 Games
• Gavan Brown, self-professed designer, though I don’t know if he has published anything yet

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