The US Playing Card Company produced a special deck of cards – Bicycle 2010 Hope for Haiti Playing Cards – and is donating all of its proceeds to charity for Haiti.

The Globe and Mail pimps duplicate bridge. (source)

The launch of the next Magic: the Gathering set Worldwake was delayed in China because the ship carrying the cards encountered a huge iceberg. (source)

A Cornell study says that the more hands a player wins in online poker, the more likely they are to lose money. (source)

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Runewars is Fantasy Flight’s latest grand conquest game with more stuff than you can possibly assimilate. No, to be honest the game only contains 192 plastic figures, 10 plastic mountains, 12 plastic dial connectors, 16 activation tokens, 1 battle marker, 7 city tokens, 26 damage tokens, 8 defeated hero markers, 20 development tokens, 35 exploration tokens, 4 home realm setup markers, 40 influence tokens, 13 large map tiles, 12 resource arrows, 38 rune tokens, 16 stronghold tokens, 24 training tokens, 4 faction sheets, 4 reference sheets, 32 order cards, 23 quest cards, 30 fate cards, 12 hero cards, 16 objective cards, 25 reward cards, 32 season cards, 50 tactics cards, 3 title cards,  and a 40-page rulebook.

But then again, Runewars is not what you’d generally call a family game. It’s intentionally designed to engage players with its detail and epic scale. Runewars builds on the setting in Fantasy Flight’s previous game, Runebound, and incorporates elements from other products, such as Twilight Imperium and Warrior Knights. Not everything, however, is simply a rehash of earlier material. FFG one-ups its already outstanding level of physical components by adding three-dimensional mountain terrain to the hex-shaped board pieces. In terms of play, Runewars combines resource management, conquest by armies, and the quests of individual heroes all in to one box.

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Entertainment Weekly says that this is the scene you must watch as the final season of Lost begins:

And let’s not forget the promo for the last season, which used Chess as a metaphor (to the strains of Everything in its Right Place by Radiohead) …

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