After all these events, though, I wonder what impact this might have on Upper Deck’s Marvel trading card and CCG products.

Dungeon Crawler is a new fantasy combat CCG from Jay Legarie and sggc Gifted Vision. The first set contains 140 cards in four levels of rarity, and is based on game designs Jay has worked through for a number of years and art contributed by some excellent artists.

There’s a lot of information about the game on the site, and options to buy the game as $25 starters or $3 boosters all the way up to plunking down $780 (special pre-order price) for a big bundle of cards.

Despite the odds, the Naruto Shippuden TCG from Bandai is going strong. It’s Bandai’s best-selling TCG. I’m guessing that the continued popularity of the manga has something to do with it.

Bandai is planning a North American championship series called Shonen Jump, presumably sponsored by the magazine in which the Naruto manga is serialized. Prizes are not exactly stellar (top prizes include a PS3 and an Ipod Touch), but there you go.

Mary started out as a game designer. Through the course of marketing her own games, she met other lone designers who were reinventing the wheel in terms of finding suppliers, dealing with contracts, and trying to market their games, and whose power as individuals was rather weak. She formed Discover Games in 1997 as a cooperative project to collect the wisdom of these designers and to market the group’s games as a group. Rio Grande Games and R&R Games are sample companies that got their start through Discover Games.

Mary drew her inspiration for CHI-TAG from Essen, which she attended in 2000. She spent a few years trying to build up support in the gaming community. Early support came from Rio Grande Games, R&R Games, and Out of the Box Publishing (a Chicago-based company), who formed the core of her first event in 2003.

The 2009 fair had 11,000 visitors, support from major game industry players such as Hasbro, celebrity guests such as Daryl Hannah (pimping her line of board games), and important people you’ve never heard of, such as Reuben Klamer, the inventor of Hasbro’s edition of The Game of Life. The fair also had sit downs with the publishers, toy and game awards, and a whole lot of family-friendly entertainment.

In person, Mary is amazingly sweet and charming. Yet beneath that sweetness and charm lies the determination to forge a national convention out of nothing that now has major entertainment players (yeah, bigger than Hasbro or Mattel) coming to her to find out how they can participate.

She has also founded initiatives for games in education.

Mary Couzin and Yehuda Berlinger

Mary Couzin and Yehuda Berlinger

Justin Hoeger in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette pimps Small World. (source)

The Galesburg Register Mail pimps Magic the Gathering. (source)

CNN pimps Farmville and Zynga’s other online board and social games. (source)

The Dorset Echo pimps Title Chase, a football management game. (source)

Wired pimps Werewolf and its popularity in Silicon Valley. (source)

Evil Mad Scientist takes the game Blip and physically dissects the innards to see what makes it tick. It was a mechanical marvel. (source)

Disclosure: The company gave me one miniature in a sealed pack, which my daughter quickly confiscated.

Flipoutz are 1 inch metal coins that are worn five-at-at-time in special rubber bracelets. So far, there are about 70 different coin designs with cute pictures and positive slogans aimed at tweens. But here’s the really interesting part… The coins are easily removed and are meant to be traded. Each has a unique serial number on the back. With that serial number, kids can go to the Flipoutz web site, register the coin, and then follow it as its traded around. This adds elements of social networking and exploration, and potentially allows kids to experience relationships between people from different places and backgrounds as the coins travel around.

Of course, this social networking aspect depends a lot on wide distribution. That’s still being worked on. The Flipoutz team is currently running a community design-a-coin contest and developing a treasure hunt game to emphasize the combination of physical trading and virtual networking.

Disclosure: I was so excited by the concept that I registered a few related internet domain names. Maybe a special Flipoutz blog is in the works.

Blizzard will stop using Upper Deck to print or distribute World of Warcraft TCG. No word yet as to whether they are taking it in house, or using some other printer and/or distributor. But they intend to continue to produce and support the TCG, which appears to be doing well.

I wonder what would make someone want to stop doing business with Upper Deck?

(source)