Every year Heroscapers.com and Wizards of the Coast organize events in October for National Heroscape Day. As of right now there are at least 23 events being held around the country on October 17th and 18th.

I’m a huge fan of Heroscape, and I love that the game still has great support from the fans, and is at least still being supported by Wizards of the coast.  It’s a shame that I’ll be busy during that weekend, as there’s an event happening an hour away from me at the UCONN campus in Storrs, CT.

Details on dates and locations can be found here.

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The Toys R Us’s annual holiday gift guide is a Big Deal to the marketplace, so it’s worth a look at the games on it:

• Scatterpillar Scramble: A dexterity game from Hasbro where you try to put the marbles into the wiggling caterpillar. The recommended age is 4-6 years old, but the product carries warnings about choking on the balls and the balloons if the child is under 8.
• Various Bakugan products.
• Battle Strikers spinning tops.
• Mindflex, the hot and clunky mind control game that everyone will think is so old-fashioned two years from now.

That’s it. I’m happy to say that they didn’t organize the toys into categories of “boys” and “girls”, instead letting the children choose for themselves. Clicking on the boys and girls links within the games category on the Toys R Us website is also better than expected, with all sorts of strategic games in the girls section – only the overtly violent fare excluded – and not simply games about makeup and girl talk.

This is as opposed to Hasbro, whose game gift recommendations are still stuck in the 1950s.

Nevertheless, a teacher in Sweden is leading his (or her) class of sixth graders to file a complaint against Toys R Us for sexism in their 2008 Christmas catalog (Isn’t that from last year? Why now?). (source)

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Gonge is a 43 year-old company that supplies nifty balance and play products to primary schools. They also havea pair of games called Mirror Game.

Each player gets 2 cubes with simple patterns for faces and a little mirror stand. A card is flipped over, and players have to form the pattern on the card using the cubes and the mirrors. Not too difficult, but looks like fun under pressure.

The red edition is for 4-7 year-olds, while the blue edition is for 6-14.

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Martyn F is a designer from The Netherlands who self-publishes his games as Emma Games. He adds the rules and variants to his games on the site. Which is nice.

He has three games (and an expansion) so far:

• Cities: Carcassonne crossed with Crossword Squares, each player simultaneously picks a tile to fit into his grid, while placing or moving his meeples to score the most points on the finished board.
• Wadi: On a grid board, with water movers moving down the rivers, players try to position their pieces to take the most water markers and place them adjacent to their pieces. Also has a small expansion.
• TWRS: A new limited edition game with strange looking glass pieces, you have to move your towers and place pieces to enclose the largest area; unlike the other games, the full rules are not yet available on line, so I can’t tell you more.

TWRS costs an astonishing 545 EUR, including shipping to outside Europe (only 515 EUR within Europe). The other games cost a more normal $35 or so, and can be bought at various shops.

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Rite Publishing has released The Hero’s Bastard for the Pathfinder RPG system.  The PDF contains a monster that is produced when a hero falls from grace.  Rules are uncluded for several other d20 suppliments, including d20 Modern and Call of Cthulhu d20.

It’s interesting to me that people would be willing to pay $2 for a 4 page PDF containing 1 monster for an RPG.  Considering how many full-book PDFs can be found for around $20 or less, this doesn’t seem like a great deal.

I have to admit there is certain appeal to this monster, though. The idea of a hero turning into something terrible after making some wrong choices in life is something that could be well exploited in a good campaign.

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For reasons mud-clear to me, there exists a subculture of … entities that record themselves opening one or more packs of CCG boosters and upload the result to YouTube. Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh are the most common, of course, but it doesn’t stop there. There are over 35,000 such videos on YouTube.

The following video has over 33,000 views, for example:

Some have over 150,000 views. Someone want to explain this me?

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October 10: Grand Prix Melbourne

October 24: Grand Prix Tampa

October 31: Grand Prix Kitakyushu

November 7: Grand Prix Paris

November 15: Grand Prix Minneapolis

November 19: World Championships, Rome

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Seniors in Canada aren’t the only ones enjoying games after retirement.

Masters Games of Alabama, ending today, attracted over 600 participants for sports and board game competitions. MGoA is a non-profit org, sponsored by the Alabama Dept of Senior Services.

(source, further info)

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