DreamWorks Animation has acquired an option on the movie rights to the Mice and Mystics board game. The development was first reported by Variety and then confirmed today on BoardGameGeek by Jerry Hawthorne, the game’s designer.

With an option, the studio holds the rights while it explores the concept and business case in greater depth.

Mice and Mystics is a story-focused adventure game about a group of loyal subjects who have been turned in to mice and are now trying to warn the King about the evil Vanestra.

According to Hawthorne, the movie project was instigated 4 years ago by director Alexandre Aja (Piranha 3D, The Hills Have Eyes, High Tension), who was at the time playing the game with his 6 year old son.

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Okay, this is strange.

So there’s Shut Up & Sit Down, a games review site that publishes game news, and they’re kind of a big deal. Like, crazy big in the general gaming otherspace that’s not actually involved in designing or publishing games. Over 50,000 people are subscribed to their YouTube channel with several review videos having over 100,000 views.

Now they’ve decided to leverage their brand to launch a quite small gaming convention in “annoyingly beautiful” Vancouver, Canada on October 6th through October 8th of this year. Aiming to sell 740 tickets to a board game convention based in a downtown hotel (The Vancouver Marriott Pinnacle Downtown), they’re bringing the Seattle Megagames Society to run a few events over the weekend and a few select publishers (some small people, like Fantasy Flight Games and Plaid Hat Games) to run demo areas. Mainly funded by ticket sales instead of exhibit hall rental space, Shut Up & Sit Down is hoping that the US$150 admission price will help fund this show and lay the groundwork for future SHUX shows.

In particular, they’re using the funds to pay for flights and hotels for SHUX’s special guests. “You would be shocked by how few conventions do this,” SU&SD writes. SU&SD co-founder Paul Dean responded to that thread on their website:

…We constantly get invited to speak at or put on events at other cons, ones with far bigger budgets, without any offers of accommodation or travel assistance or fees for our time/preparation/work. That basically boils down to people saying to us “Please be an attraction we can advertise at our con for free,” while we look at air fares and hotel costs running into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

That sucks and we don’t want to do that to other people.

The mainly UK-based media company said that one of the reasons they chose to debut SHUX in North America is that continent has about 70% of their audience. “The UK is 15% of our audience, and has been from day 1,” was posted on Shut Up & Sit Down’s twitter. “70% of our donors are US and CA. If anything, it was the USA that gave us our start.”

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Asmodee Group is in the process of acquiring yet another game publisher, F2Z Entertainment, including the latter’s design studios, Z-Man, Plaid Hat Games, and Filosofia. Terms were not revealed but closing was said to be expected “in the coming months.”

Interestingly, the deal will unite two leading titles of the board game resurgence, Catan and Carcassonne, under one publisher (for English and French, at least).

Next!

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Just launched is Sword Coast Legends, a Dungeons & Dragons video RPG available for PS4 consoles and PC or Mac via Steam. Based on D&D’s 5th Edition rules and set in the Forgotten Realms, Sword Coast Legends features a Dungeon Master Mode, which allows a user to not only create new adventures but also to adjust them in real time in response to player actions.

The Exodus: Proxima Centauri Companion app (iOS) will calculate costs for working through the technology tree, plot fleet movement, and roll dice. Not yet but soon, it’ll provide a victory point calculation tool as well.

Another new companion app available on iOS devices substitutes for the Crossroads deck in Plaid Hat Games’ Dead of Winter. The app, though, forces the players to decide on which actions to take without the benefit of advance knowledge of the results.

A recent update to Sentinels of the Multiverse for iOS adds support for online cross-platform multiplayer games. There’s also now a free learn-to-play edition of the game (with limited content, of course) available for both iOS and Android.

Monopoly and Yahtzee join Catch Phrase as Hasbro games playable via Chromecast.

Family Fun Board Games’ The Postal Game is now available to download for PC or Mac, as an online browser game, for iOS, and for Android.

The City expansion for Talisman: Digital Edition adds a new region, six characters, 82 city cards, and three alternative ending cards.

Another classic, Titan, previously available for iOS, is now also available for Android.

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Each of these wizard-warriors had been gifted with but a fraction of the true power that blessed them, and that power now desired unification… Now is the time of the Collection of Ashes, when Phoenixborn must battle Phoenixborn until only one remains to inherit a newborn world.

Cards, dice and spells – if you love these elements, you might well be interested in Plaid Hat Games’ upcoming release Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn. With its design by Dead of Winter‘s Issac Vega and artwork by Fernanda Suarez, it is an expandable fantasy card game that uses dice as the major spending resource. Each player represents a Phoenixborn with his or her unique dice pool and pre-built deck of spells and units. For those who love deck building or drafting, specific set-up rules are also available.

Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn plays 2 to 4 players in 30 – 120 minutes. Players who pre-order it on Plaid Hat Games official site can enjoy a special price of $34.95 (which is a $15 off the original price) and receive a special Phoenixborn promo card set. The game is expected to be available in one to two months.

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Plaid Hat Games is teaming up with Rocket Jump to bring Video Game High School to the board gaming world. If you’re not familiar with Video Game High School, it’s a web-based action/comedy show about high schoolers training to be professional gamers.

In the game you’ll take on the role of a different student from the show. Each turn you have a limited allotment of actions to use to train your character in various skills, take on challenges, and set high scores in video games. The winner of the game is the first player to become the top ranked gamer in the high school.

Video Game High School will be out in July for a MSRP of $34.95.

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Rob Daviau, the designer of Risk Legacy, has partnered with Plaid Hat Games to co-publish SeaFall, a new legacy-style game. In SeaFall, five empires on the edge of the ocean in the Age of Sail, set out to explore the unknown. SeaFall is a medium-heavy weight game that is “reminiscent of a 4X game” (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate): manage an empire by trading, fighting, building, and exploring. Like Risk Legacy, players will unlock cards with effects that expand and evolve the game world. The designer states that funding for SeaFall will probably begin in January or February on Kickstarter with an expected 2014 release. For more information on SeaFall, listen to the full announcement on the Plaid Hat Games Podcast, Episode 106, starting around 24:45.

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