Gamers near Plano, Texas have an opportunity to practice their crafting skills with Goliath Games. The company is looking for a part-time Prototype Maker.

The U.S. Chess Federation is searching for an experienced Director of Development. A new position with the organization, the Director of Development’s role will be to “create and implement a comprehensive development plan for short- and long-term revenue growth in support of the US Chess mission.”

WizKids is looking for an experienced Product Manager in Hillside, New Jersey to develop long term plans, develop packaging, and interface with operations on the company’s unpainted miniatures line.

Ludo Fact needs Machine Operators and Assemblers for board game manufacturing in Lafayette, Indiana.

For production of miniatures, Privateer Press needs a Metal Caster in Bellevue, Washington.

Topps has multiple openings at its locations in New York City and Scranton, Pennsylvania, among them a New Product Development Associate with drawing and modeling skills and a Brand Manager for non-sports entertainment properties.

Hasbro’s 100+ openings include:

• Games Brand Writer to write copy for games packaging and to “produce accessible, friendly, and accurate rules.”
• Product Design Manager for the kids gaming category, which includes Jenga, Simon, Bop It, Connect 4, and Twister.
• At Wizards of the Coast, Manager of Global Brand Marketing for Dungeons & Dragons.
• Also at WOTC, Technical Product Manager to focus on the company’s product development process.

TCGplayer has numerous openings in Syracuse, New York and Atlanta, Georgia. Lots for Software Engineers and Product Engineers. Also for finance and data analytics and shipping. Two individual positions are worth highlighting, though. There’s one for a Digital Marketing Manager to be responsible for online marketing campaigns. And the company is looking for a General Manager of Seller Services, who will be a member of the executive leadership team and responsible for the company’s line of business supplying software tools to retailers.

ACD Distribution has several warehouse opportunities in Middleton, Wisconsin and Fresno, California. Also sales positions in Wisconsin.

Alliance Game Distributors is looking to hire a Sales Specialist in Roseville, Minnesota, specifically to work with Asmodee North America. The company also has openings for a Sales Trainee and an Administrative Assistant at its home offices in Maryland.

Asmodee North America, itself, is recruiting for a Trade Marketing Manager to support the sales team with PR, media relations, trade shows, and merchandising.

Games Workshop has many openings for retail work at various locations worldwide, also for a variety positions at headquarters in Nottingham, UK, including:

• Middle Earth Product Manager to coordinate production, promotion, and consistency with the source material.
• ‘Eavy Metal Painter for Forge World products including Horus Heresy and Middle Earth miniatures.
• Managing Editor for White Dwarf magazine.
• Games Developer for Warhammer Age of Sigmar products.
• Games Developer for Warhammer 40,000 products.
• Armies and Battlefields Painter for products to be showcased in Codexes, Battletomes, and other publications.
• Games Developer for specialist brands, such as Blood Bowl and Necromunda.
• Model Designer for specialist brands. Experience preferred but the position may be offered at a trainee level.
• Concept Artist to be part of the Citadel Miniatures conceptualiser team.

Gamerati in DuPont, Washington is looking to hire a full-time Social Content Creator/Community Manager for the company’s services to game publishers.

Board game-related freelance jobs posted on Upwork include:

• Design and production for an employee-training game ($3,000 fixed price).
• Rulebook-writing for a historical board game.
• Production of an animated instructional video for an adult card game.
• Social media management for an upcoming Kickstarter project: Facebook and Twitter.
• Graphic design for a game’s box, cards, and tokens.

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Castles of Mad King Ludwig from Bezier Games has hit the app stores. There are pass-and-play and play-against-AI modes. Also a campaign mode with levels based on real castles.

Fantasy Flight Games has released Road to Legend, a companion app for Descent: Journeys in the Dark. The app acts as the overlord, giving everyone a chance to play on the same side. Road to Legend also includes a new campaign, Kindred Fire, and automatically adjusts content to the expansions owned by the players.

Long-term agreements with the National Football League and National Football Players Association has Topps publishing digital football trading cards through its Huddle app.

Antidote Lab Assistant provides a note-taking platform to help players with Bellwether Games’ deduction title, Antidote.

ScorePal is a board game scoring app for Android that features score sheet templates customized to individual games. At least 100 are included but more can be created by the user.

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Force Attax for Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a collectible card game from Topps (UK). The series features 200 cards, with more coming in March.

Gameplay is simple. Players line up their cards, choose one with which to attack, and then choose either the offense or defense value. The one who wins the majority of battles wins the game.

The Force Awakens Force Attax is available in eight-card packets (£1) and a Starter Pack (£4.99) with a game mat, binder, and limited edition Kylo Ren and BB-8 cards.

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Star Wars Galactic Connexions is a new collectible game from Topps retailing exclusively at Walmart. The game consists of hexagonal “discs”, each depicting one of 75 different Star Wars characters.

Collectibility is enhanced by a variety of decorative styles in several rarity tiers. Common discs are grey, uncommon discs are black, and rare discs are clear, but discs of all three may appear in standard, foil, or pattern-foil variations. There are also seven types of ulra-rare discs, including translucent lightsaber red and metallic C-3PO gold.

Gameplay is a matter of placing pieces so that the number of hash marks along each edge of a piece being played is greater than the number of hash marks on all adjacent edges. The total number of hash marks on both sides is the score earned that round. Bonus points are available for relaying how the characters are connected within the Star Wars story line.

Star Wars Galactic Connexions is available in a Starter Deck with 14 discs, including one ultra-rare, for $10 and in five-disc booster packs, which Walmart online is selling in a bundle of five (that’s 25 total discs) for $20.

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Grandmaster Gaioz Nigalidze of Georgia was expelled from the Dubai Open tournament after his smartphone was found running a Chess app and hidden in a bathroom stall wrapped in a wad of toilet paper. His opponent had lodged a complaint with tournament organizers after Nigalidze had visited the bathroom several times and always used the same stall.

Dhruv Kakkar was caught employing a slightly different approach to cheating at the Dr. Hedgewar Open Chess Tournament in New Delhi, India. He had two mobile phones strapped to his legs and a micro-speaker in his ear, a setup he was using to receive instructions from a friend running a computer Chess program in another city. In this case, Mr. Kakkar’s opponent became suspicious when no matter how simple or complex the current situation, Mr. Kakkar took a consistent 2 minutes to make each and every move.

In a 4½ year old cheating case, the World Chess Federation is threatening to take “proceedings” against Sebastien Feller of France if he doesn’t return by May 7th the medal and prize money he won at the 2010 Chess Olympiad.

While attempting to offer its condolences to the Nepal Chess Association, FIDE instead stated, “We… deeply deplore those whom we have lost in this disaster.”

Officials in Handsworth, UK yanked the license of Club Paradise (“weddings, parties, funerals, much more”) after management failed to notice or report a shooting that took place at the club because they were busy playing Dominoes.

The Polish government just noticed that since 2013 the game Apples to Apples has had a card that refers to “Nazi Poland”. After complaining to Mattel that the card misrepresented history, the company apologized and offered to exchange the game free of charge.

British Chess grandmaster Nigel Short is feeling public ire after telling New in Chess magazine that women are not as good at Chess as men. He claims that his position is not a value judgement but rather an honest assessment of the different skills between men and women.

After receiving several warnings for writing notes to himself during the ninth round of the U.S. Chess Championships in St. Louis, Wesley So had his game forfeited by the arbiter. The rising star of the Chess world was distracted and put off his game by a surprise visit to the tournament of his estranged mother.

The folks at Cards Against Humanity are in a bit of trouble with local officials in Liberty, Maine. As part of one of their holiday promotions, the company purchased an island, Birch Island in Lake St. George, and doled out 250,000 “licenses” for exclusive use of 1 foot square parcels. The company also installed on the island a vault containing unique expansion cards. Town officials, however, consider this illegal commercial activity and subdivision of property. A letter from Liberty’s code enforcement officer threatens Cards Against Humanity with significant fines unless the company submits a satisfactory remediation plan.

In Sri Lanka, a man murdered his wife’s lover by luring him to the house to play board games.

An allegedly intoxicated driver fleeing police crashed his car through the front window of Red Castle Games in Portland. The owner of the store is asking for donations to cover losses not covered by insurance. Oh, and the incident was caught on the store’s security video:

After entering in to a marketing arrangement with Hasbro, BuzzFeed deleted an article critical of Monopoly. The article has since been restored and an editor has apologized.

Shuffle Tech International filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court against Scientific Games Corp., alleging that the latter has monopolized the casino market for card shuffling machines through fraudulently obtained patents.

More than 1,600 government workers in Qianxinan prefecture, China were “recalled” and forced to undergo extensive retraining, including military drills. What did they do wrong? Gossip, watch movies at work, and play Mahjong.

A group of grandmothers from Zhejiang province, China who were arrested for participating in ketamine drug parties told investigators that Mahjong just wasn’t enough anymore to alleviate their dull existence. I wish they would have asked. I could have recommended some other games to try.

The latest round between Mattel and Zynga saw the toy company score the upper hand. The Court of Appeal found Mattel’s trademark for “Scramble” valid and infringed by Zynga’s use of “Scramble” and “Scramble With Friends”. The court, however, decided that Zynga’s “Scramble” did not infringe on Mattel’s “Scrabble”.

Upper Deck won a $1.8 million verdict against J&T Hobby in a dispute over a distribution deal dating back to 1994.

Ruling that MGA’s infringement wasn’t willful, a federal circuit court judge has cut in third the $4.7 million dollars in damages awarded by a lower court to Innovention Toys in the patent case for laser board games.

Topps has applied to trademark “Masterwork“, which it began using in February, even though Leaf has been using that term in the trading card business since 2013.

A former Philippine basketball star was arrested in a police drug raid. The charges leveled against him, however, were for illegal gambling. He was found at the scene playing Mahjong.

A former UK and European Scrabble champion who felt persecuted for being a transgender woman, decided to step in front of a moving train.

A man out on bail was shot dead while playing Dominoes on the street in Coconut Grove, Bahamas.

Six men playing dice on the street in Waterbury, Connecticut were arrested for gambling.

Gambit, a website that allows users to wager Bitcoins when they challenge each other on classic board games (e.g., Backgammon, Penta, Dominoes, and remakes of Monopoly, Risk, and Battleship), has decided to eliminate rake (the fee charged as a percentage of each pot).

A Chess coach, who’s also the founder of a Columbus-area Chess club, is facing charges for raping a 4 year old girl at a preschool where he taught.

Albany County, New York has passed a law prohibiting any amount of benzene, lead, mercury, antimony, arsenic, cadmium, or cobalt in children’s products or apparel. The Safe to Play Coalition, an alliance of manufacturers and retailers, is challenging the law in court, claiming that it’s preempted by federal regulation.

A shootout erupted among a dozen men playing dice in Wetumpka, Alabama when half the players tried to rob the other half.

In Beaumont, Texas, a man apprehended by police with a gun and cocaine claimed that he was actually the victim. He said that when the police saw him running through a park, he was trying to escape from another man who shot him in the ear during an argument over a dice game.

A man who ran when he was spotted by police playing dice on the street in Memphis was also caught and arrested for possession of cocaine.

Other men from Memphis decided to take their dice game to a hotel in Nashville. The move, though, didn’t help. One ended up shot in the leg. Police are looking for the other.

The man Indianapolis police found shot following a dice game later died at the hospital.

Not all dice rolling is frowned upon by government. In fact, in Platte, South Dakota, the winner of the mayoral election was decided by a roll-off between the two candidates.

Wild Horse Concepts has filed suit against Hasbro, claiming that the idea for interchangeable action figure body parts, which Hasbro made in to Marvel Superhero Mashers, was presented by Wild Horse in a meeting 2 years earlier.

Corporate Responsibility Magazine ranked Hasbro second overall in the list of 100 Best Corporate Citizens of 2015.

Police raided a dice game, which a laundry owner in Thailand had organized in his business.

When the host of a Dominoes game in Delray Beach, Florida asked one of his guests to leave, a fight erupted and the host ended up stabbed in the chest and abdomen.

A Utah-based financial planning firm claims that a Florida-based financial planning firm intentionally copied its trademarked logo, a knight Chess piece centered above the company name.

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New in a long history of licensed games for the property is a Top Gear TCG from Topps. The over 200 cards in Top Gear Turbo Attax will feature mostly cars but also show hosts Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May.

Assuming it’s anything like Topps’ other Attax games, play is pretty much choosing and comparing stats.

[via Toy News]

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Topps Europe has just launched the Disney Princess Trading Card Game. The game’s 170 cards feature all 11 Disney princesses and include 16 colour-me-in cards, 10 heart-shaped cards, and 27 storytelling cards.

Disney Princess TCG Starter Packs retail for £5 and come with a collector binder, a collector guide, a sticker sheet of gold hearts, and one booster pack. Six-card booster packs retail for £1 each.

[via Toy World]

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