At NY Toy Fair, SJG's Phil Reed was showing of one of the new Cthulhu Dice colors as well as a solid metal version of the Cthulhu die that will be released sometime in 2012. That thing is heavy! Do not bring it to table if you fear that players will be spiteful when losing.
Reed had an advance copy of Zombie Dice 2: Double Feature, due out in April 2012, and those dice look as nice as the ones in the original game. I recall seeing a tweet from SJG about tests for Zombie Dice 3 – a tweet I can't find at the moment – and it's easy to imagine the game being expanded in any number of ways. That said, Steve Jackson Games is also tweaking the original Zombie Dice game to appear under a new title: Dinosaur Dice. Some mainstream retailers are leery of presenting that scrawny rotting zombie on Zombie Dice to their customers, so SJG is reconfiguring the game in a more family-friendly direction for those zombie-averse retailers. Reed pointed out that the footprints shown on the three types of dice match the dinosaurs on those dice – a nice touch.
Reed gave a quick demo of Halloween Dice, due out in August 2012 and another entry in SJG's line of quick-playing dice games. Here's the game description:
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Halloween Dice comes with a set of big orange-and-black six-siders, with custom Jack o' Lantern designs on each face. Your goal: roll those dice and try to reach the lucky total of 13. (Normally 13 is considered an unlucky number, but for Halloween, when darkness and otherworldly things are celebrated, luck stands on its head.)
On a turn, you choose one, two, or three dice and receive respectively $2, $5, or $9, with money being represented by tokens. You then roll those dice. If the sum on the dice equals 13, you end your turn and keep the money you collected. If the total is less than 13, you can stop and pay $1 times the difference between your sum and 13, or you can again choose 1-3 dice (receiving more money) and roll again, adding the newly rolled sum to your previous sum. You again face the same options of stopping or choosing more dice and rolling again. If your sum goes over 13, however, your turn ends and you pay $2 times the difference between your sum and 13!
The player with the most money after three rounds wins.
Finally, Reed showed off the components for the two-player game Castellan – due out in Q3 2012 – and give enough of an overview that I've updated the game description:
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In Castellan, two players work together to build a castle. Finely-detailed wall and tower pieces link together to form courtyards, and the player who finishes a courtyard claims it with a Keep, scoring points for that courtyard equal to the number of tower pieces surrounding it.
In more detail, each player starts the game with two decks of cards: a wall deck and a tower deck. Each card allows a player to play the components shown on it, with the wall deck cards always depicting at least one wall (and some combination of walls/towers) and the tower deck cards always depicting at least one tower (and again some combination of walls/towers). On a turn, a player can play as many cards as she wants, but she draws only one card at the end of her turn. The goal is to create courtyards – and subdivide existing courtyards – while keeping your opponent from doing the same. Players have the same cards in their decks, so the challenge is all about what to use when. The game ends when all the castle pieces are used up, and the player with the most points wins.
Two different pairs of Keep colors are available in Castellan, so with two copies of the game – and the right combination of bits – up to four players can play.
So, New York Toy Fair 2012 – an event that ended on the previous Wednesday and to which I'm only now getting around to reporting on in detail (aside from my overview of how the hobby and mainstream markets are blurring). I blame children and the diseases they carry. Curse you, little ones!
In any case, now that I can sit upright again without feeling queasy, here's an overview of the new titles from R&R Games. Since I've created game listings for each of these titles, I'll reprint my game description from those pages to make things easier.
First up is Pluckin' Pairs, a party game from Stephen Glenn due out in May 2012:
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Pluckin' Pairs embodies the same spirit as the classic party game Compatibility in that you want to match images with other players in order to score points, but the game play is more free form with everyone competing individually instead of in teams.
At the start of a round, eleven images are laid out on the table. All players secretly pair off images – say, coins and a manhole cover because they're both round, or a mirror and a building because they both reflect light – and write these pairs on their player sheet. One image will be leftover as the outcast.
After everyone has finished, you compare your pairs with those of other players. If no one – or conversely if everyone – created the same pair as you, you score no points for that pair. If only some of the players created that pair, each of those players scores as many points as the number of players who record the pair. (You can optionally compare outcast images as well, scoring points based on who had the same outcast as you.) The player with the most points after a certain number of rounds wins.
Next is Pass-ack Words, a game for four players only from Dave Arnott and Aaron Wiessblum due out in April 2012:
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As the name suggests, Pass-ack Words turns the long-lived game of Password on its head, with players now giving clues that they hope their "partner" will not decipher in the right way.
As in Password, four players compete in teams of two; unlike in Password, you and a member of the opposing team take turns giving clues to the remaining player on the opposing team. How this works is that the clue givers have a device that shows a list of clues. Each turn, one clue giver chooses one of the listed clues, presents it to the opposing guesser, and hopes that he presented it with the wrong intonation so that the guesser won't guess the secret code word. As the crummy clues are used up, the clues will get better and better, so your challenge as the clue giver is to quickly figure out what might give a hint to your partner without giving the thing away entirely – which again is pretty much like Password!
Double Take is a charades game built for two, so to speak. Each round, time willing, two players will present clues for a half-dozen familiar phrases that all have something in common. A sample category, for example, is "Something's Wrong" with the words to be guessed being divided as:
• Play | Foul • In the Closet | Skeleton • Sheep | Black • Gun | Smoking
Each clue giver acts out one side of the card, and since they're facing the guessers, the phrases will be acted out in left-to-right fashion ("Black Sheep", "Smoking Gun", etc.) If someone guesses one side of the card, that player scores – but the clue givers score only after both sides of a phrase have been guessed, so they need to work together – but separately – to make their clues clear.
Alas, I did my usual good job of forgetting to take pictures of anything, being more of a word guy than an image guy, so you'll have to use your imagination to picture how these games might look. I've requested images from the publisher and will get them in the system ASAP.
Warriors & Traders is a pure strategy, historical game, combining several mechanisms including area control, action point allowance and trading. It falls under the category of light civilization game, with a playing time of two hours.
Warriors & Traders was released at Spiel 2011, is the first game from NSKN and from myself, and has a unique story behind it.
The Kickstart
In my group of gamer friends, I was usually suggesting changes to make games either more strategic or less dependent on dice or in some way different from what the original idea was.
The idea to design my own board game was laying dormant inside me for a while, but a friend gave me that final push that made me start working. He gave me an actual challenge, telling me that within one year I have to come up with a board game that all of the people in our group will enjoy playing without complaining. So a few weeks later, I started putting my idea on paper. The one that seemed to be a step ahead of all the other ones was of a historical game independent of luck. Once I chose my winner, I also came up with the name and the gaming paradigms I was going to abide to no matter what. And so the story began...
Design Principles
I had to write down what I wanted to make out of this game, which I decided from day 1 to call Warriors & Traders. I had decided not to make any compromises and laid down all the important things that I care about and believe make a game with potential:
• Eurogame mechanisms • Deep strategy • A war component • Lots of player interaction • Layered long-term decision-making • Historical accuracy
Drawing the line, I realized that it would be hard to combine all of these in a game playable in less than an afternoon, so I chose my priorities.
First, I decided to put the playability before the historical accuracy, but without making severe compromises. This is why I chose the set-up of the Dark Ages of Europe, when empires were forming and setting the bases of today's European countries. At some point in time, every country was covering roughly the area which is drawn on the game board. And here and now I promise to come back with the details behind placing each single country on the board!
Another key point in game design was the decision to leave every single aspect of the game untouched by any element of luck. That means no dice, no event cards, no randomness whatsoever. At this point, the major decision was whether to go toward an economical game or a war game, keeping the "no luck" paradigm. At first I was tempted to go toward the Euro side, as it would have been much easier to balance economic decisions in a randomless environment, but I did not gave up and decided to search for a way to put together armies and war, while resolving battles without rolling the dice.
The place where I compromised a little was the player interaction. Having a fixed (non-modular) map, it was obvious that gamers would find more ways of interaction in a six-player game than in a two-player game. This seemed like the least amount of distance from the original idea.
Version 0.0
Once design paradigms were fully covered, I started to mentally make order of the game components and mechanisms. I had to always keep in mind that I was my own harshest judge and I would not go on easy on myself if not following my core design principles.
First, I wrote down game components, most of which you'll still see in the actual box of Warriors & Traders:
• Game board showing the countries in Europe, with each country divided into provinces • Army units, both player and neutral – all defined by power (which deals damage) and toughness (the ability to absorb damage before dying) • Resources: weapons and gold to build armies, food to keep them alive, and products as a generic "currency"
Then I wrote down the mechanisms and the main aspects of a turn:
• Tech development that applies to the entire "country" a player controls • Actions: each player takes action(s) each turn, developing a technology or building armies • Simultaneous army movement, followed by combat and clean-up • Strategic resource management, using resources before gathering new ones; this required strategic planning for at least one turn ahead.
Version 0.1 – Plain Paper
The map - I got excited and a bit carried away, trying to put every important European country on the same map, from England to Russia. It turned out to be quite crowded and extremely large, with no fewer than 109 provinces player "fought over".
Every province had 1 to 3 resources drawn on it, 1/2 of these resources on the map being Products, 1/4 Food and 1/4 Weapons, with Gold being available only through trade. The resource "tokens" were small square pieces of brown (Products), red (Food) and yellow (Gold) paper and some poorly drawn swords (Weapons), these being somewhere west of the map, outside of the picture.
Provinces consisted of Capitals (three resources and starting provinces for players) and common areas (one or two resources). Barbarians – random armies who would fight the invaders and nothing more – were in all provinces.
The development cards, nowadays replaced by the playmats containing the technology tree, were divided into... countless categories. The most important ones were upgrading Trade technology (allowing simply a better exchange rate with the bank for Gold), Production technology (multipliers for resources) and Military technology. This Military technology was the key to randomless combat as players were able to have up to five types of army upgrades with three options each, so you could end up with any kind of army X/Y (x-power, y-toughness) with X and Y ranging from 1 to 10!
After seeing the pictures above, you're allowed to laugh (but not too loudly).
The game round was composed of four steps:
• Feeding armies (yes, before getting resources) • Getting resources • Taking actions (upgrading tech OR building the army) • Moving armies and conducting battles
First Tests
The first two tests – actually two-and-a-half – were done with just me and my girlfriend. (Again, big thanks for putting up with all that.)
There were no two of the same army after five rounds and no victory conditions. We were just playing to see how the game works and which things needed immediate response.
At the top of the list were the giant number of army types and the Barbarians with random power and toughness, which conflicted with one of the core principles, that being no luck.
The first two game tests were conclusive: The game had potential; it worked, but it was too all-over-the-place. It required a lot of work to bring structure and a bit more effort on the basic design to make it user-friendly. The last test, well... I sneezed in turn three and all the "tokens" flew away, concluding a night that I will always remember – the beginning of an amazing story that changed my career options and maybe my life.
The first moments of euphoria – made of "I have a functional game" and "Oh, my God, it's really happening" – were soon dialed down and replaced with "Is this ever gonna work?"
Versions 0.2 to 0.5
It was already decided that the project needed structure to become an actual board game. I had to take it step by step, changing one thing at a time, to avoid breaking what was already working.
The first big step was to reduce the incredible number of possible army types to just a few, thus implementing a major change, specifically keeping the armies' power and toughness equal to one another and limited to a maximum of three. So the armies became 1/1 army (nowadays called Infantry), 2/2 army (Archer) and 3/3 army (Cavalry).
After testing this and seeing that the project showed a better shape already, I ran into a different problem: The outcome of all battles was easy to calculate by everyone, and there was nothing in the game that could spice it up. I needed a mechanism to make combat ... well, to tell the truth, less boring. The improvement I found and implemented immediately was the first ability in the game. Armies of a certain level had the option to retreat instead of dying when brought down to exactly zero life. This rule remains in place until today, but it took a lot of time, effort and testing to remove any ambiguity. Giving the players the power to freely distribute the damage inflicted by the armies in a battle combined with the retreat mechanism made battles interesting and unpredictable.
Technologies and the Playmat
With armies and the retreat ability successfully tested, the game still lacked structure. To develop the three technologies, players were using Development cards. Actually, every Action in the game was governed by this extensive card usage, a mechanism that slowed the game a lot.
To make it even more complicated, players drew their cards at the start of the turn, before feeding armies, and they used them in a later phase, after gathering resources and trading. Every player drew only one card per turn, but there was a mechanism in place to draw more. Thinking back, I guess we called it "level-up", meaning when you reached a new level on one technology path, you'd immediately draw a new card. When it came to using the cards, there was quite some chaos. Players were allowed to use as many cards as they wanted per turn, with the sole restriction that "Declare war" cards were played at the very end. There was no turn order and everyone was taking actions at the same time, the whole game turning into a small battlefield of screaming louder than everyone else. Furthermore, without a set order of play, the Declare war cards were only used to keep your opponents under pressure, but actual wars were rarely seen.
This whole mess needed to be addressed. At this point in the history of Warriors & Traders, a good friend of mine, Vlad, started being really involved and together we came up with the idea of removing the cards from the game.
At first, we merged the drawing and playing of cards into a single stage of a turn, called the Development phase. There was no need to make players think in advance what they would do later that turn, and there was also no need to pile up cards and play them all at once.
Then, we structured the technology tree for Production, Trade and Military on a playmat. On Production a player would get simple multipliers for the resources, on Trade better rates with the bank, and on Military better armies. To upgrade one level players would need one, two or four cards. This made the game better, but we did not manage to avoid stockpiling cards in our hands.
Versions 0.6 to 0.10
The game started to gain structure, and we enjoyed testing it more and more. If in the beginning, few of our closest friends were interested in playing again, at this stage a "queue" of people curious to try this new project developed, some of them already saying that they want a signed copy when the project was final. At that point, I was still taking such comments as jokes.
After a few more tests, we realized that the game was quite flat and that except for the military path that provided the option for armies to retreat, nothing else special happened in the game. Players would quickly get bored of upgrading a technology just to get more of the same things and went straight for battle. I already had a few ideas of things that would merge naturally into the game, but we needed a few more to make all the technologies interesting and useful.
The night after Christmas I met my friends for a "quick" game, which turned into an all-night session of development. By 6 a.m. we had a new playmat with all the technologies in place, the same as you can now recognize on the final playmat.
By that time, we had already made our own resources out of photo paper to avoid so much depending on beans, matches or, at best, resource tokens from other games.
We were testing continuously and making small changes, one at a time, based on feedback from many friends from many places when the idea to transform this into an actual business came out in the open. At first, I did not take it seriously, but it was growing on me and I felt that Warriors & Traders deserved a chance to become a published game. I cannot pinpoint when and what was the final kick – I just realized one day that I wanted this to happen. And I felt so attached to this game that I was going to try to publish it myself.
The game already had shape and was fully playable...or was it? Well, not quite, as it was missing one important element – the game board!
Building the Map of Warriors & Traders
Like any other person with high self esteem, I left the hardest part to the end. Being passionate or as some might say borderline obsessed with history, I could not make my peace with a perfectly playable game board without respecting the history.
With the medieval theme in mind, the first big decision to make was to choose a more precise historical setting of the game. My biggest problem was that Europe was divided into small kingdoms and other state-like entities throughout the Middle Ages, with borders changing on a monthly basis. No matter how I was looking at the history, there wasn't any single period in which all the great European powers were all within some set borders that resemble what they are today. Furthermore, some nations (e.g. Germany) were split into so many states that it became completely blurry which were the relevant ones that later on would form a country. So I stopped looking sequentially at the history of medieval Europe and I decided to make the border for each country based on its peak of glory. Thus, the setting is not well defined and players are the ones actually making history, taking their country out of the Dark Ages and creating an empire.
For those who have played Warriors & Traders, this map may seem a bit awkward as it lacks Germany and Denmark and contains two Spanish kingdoms. This was the first draft of the game board as I imagined it, both playable and fairly accurate from a historical point of view. This is also the version of the map that carried the heaviest testing load.
Looking at the map from the functional point of view, I had to sacrifice a bit of history to respect a few principles:
• Each country had to be composed of 5 to 7 provinces (including the contested ones). • The contested provinces had to be "in a circle", meaning that country #4 would dispute a province with countries #3 and #5, and so on. • The total number of external borders of the provinces of each country should be roughly the same.
Due to the constraints listed above and a few more, I had to bend history and even geography to place on the map a contested province between Portugal and ... Scotland. I knew from the beginning that this would create controversy and I had a plan to change it, but I needed it to start mass testing.
In the pictures below you can admire version 0.12 of Warriors & Traders.
At this point in the history of the game, we had custom-made resource tokens, army tokens, playmats – pretty much everything was homemade, printed on paper and cardboard, but still lacking any kind of artistic design. But good to go for mass testing.
Establishing the Company and First Steps toward Production
Now, I am coming back to the original question: You have a prototype, then what?
As I was saying before, I was too in love with this game and too tired of my old job, so I made the decision to establish an independent publishing house. You know how experts say that the reasoning behind making a decision is rational, but the decision itself is emotional? For me, it was just the impulse. I simply had to do this!
First was establishing the company, but I will not walk you through this bureaucratic process that is different from country to country. Instead I will skip to the main steps related to board game production and the funny inevitable mistakes which can be the difference between success and disaster.
While the game was still in testing, two amazing designers were working on the game box and the components. I thought this will be a piece of cake; I will give them the components with specifications and I will just leave the creative process entirely up to them. I did not think for a moment that the printing company would also have a big say in the graphic design process. I guess this was the second and most important moment where I realized how little I knew.
There's a big difference between being a board game designer and a board game publisher. While my main focus was on designing and improving the actual game, I realized that I also had to be involved in graphic design and production.
So I found a compromise – I became a game publisher by day and a game designer by night. (That's when I said my final goodbye to my former employer.) The graphic design was going well, but the components – while beautiful – still lacked functionality, reflecting our lack of experience.
The biggest surprise was after the first discussion with a printing company. That one meeting tore apart many days and nights of work. The expert in making board games explained to me the restrictions in dimensions, shapes and many more aspects, rendering half of the graphic designers' work useless. That's when I brought back to life an old motto: "Better ask now than be sorry later, and never assume."
Learning step by step what it takes to run a company and produce a board game, I had to go back to the basics and see what was left to fix in Warriors & Traders to get to the final version.
Version 0.15 and Final Testing
I am skipping to the spring of 2011. The testing showed several small flaws in the game and brought countless suggestions. Together with the development team, I was continuously analyzing them and keeping the few that made the game more interesting. We got to version 0.15, the last one without the final graphic design and with all the elements that can be found in the commercial version.
My original plan was to have Europe divided into West, Center and North and have three game boards in the box. Even more, I wanted to have them cut in such a way that players would be able to combine them into a giant mega-map on which up to 12 people can play together. Boy, was I naive! After seeing the proposed production prices, I realized that I had to come up with some out of the box ideas on how to keep all the components of the game and still afford to produce. The most important change after this epiphany was to make the map square and thus exclude Spain and Portugal and move Germany, Switzerland and Denmark to Western Europe. This proved to be quite simple and even more historically accurate than the previous version. I had a new round of testing to have the proof that these changes did not affect the dynamics of the game.
The next step toward making Warriors & Traders an affordable project was to reduce the number of components to a strictly useful amount. For this, I organized a few gaming sessions with different groups and recorded the maximum amount of resources, number of armies and Development tokens that players used in a heavy six-player game. At the end of this experiment, the number of physical bits and pieces was reduced by 60%, completing the process of making this a cost-effective project.
This was the outcome...
Releasing the Game and the Essen Experience
Once again, I will take a long jump in time, past the whole production process, arriving at the most exciting and scary part of making my first board game. I am talking about releasing it to the public.
Spiel 2011 was the first time NSKN Legendary Games was present at a gaming convention, and I am not only talking about Spiel. We were coming as an absolute surprise, the first Romanian publisher ever to attend the biggest gaming convention in the world. This was also the moment we chose to release our "first-born" – Warriors & Traders.
Signing-up and Preparing
Having little to no experience in preparing my company's attendance at fairs, I signed up for Spiel 2011 on the last day possible! It was one of the big lessons learned in the publishing industry – never leave things for the last moment. Thanks to Ludo Fact, the company that produced Warriors & Traders, I realized that Essen would be the perfect place to launch the game, so on the 15th of May, at 16:00 I sent the application papers, and this is how the adventure began.
With a plan in mind, the actual preparation for Essen started for NSKN at the end of September, when the games were shipped from Ludo Fact's production plant in Germany to our warehouses in Romania and Belgium.
The most important thing I did not account for was the amount of people. It's common to hear that 150,000 people have something in common, but this number of people usually represents the attendance at a great sport event or the populations of a medium-sized town or a small country (four times the population of Liechtenstein). So it is hard to imagine how this many people would look like and fit in the exhibition center and it is even harder to prepare for such an audience.
The original assumption was that as a completely unknown company, we would not attract much attention, so having a small booth, six people at the stand, and about fifty game boxes should be enough for the whole fair. Oh, and we'd also have time to go and advertise the game with distribution companies and retailers.
Day -2: First Contact
On the Monday before Spiel 2011, three days before it all started, we – the NSKN team – went to see the exhibition halls and to figure out what to bring and when.
On some level, I always knew that the booth would contain only white walls and nothing more, but that does not mean we were prepared for it. It was too late to ask the organizers for tables and shelves for rent.
We unloaded everything prepared for that day and started planning. We had three days left to fix the situation and make our booth look exceptional – or at least decent!
To avoid the feeling that we were leaving everything for the last day, we put our first poster on the wall, then headed to the place that held the answer to all our problems: IKEA. While driving, we made a whole list of things to buy. Four hours later, we came back, unloaded again and headed back to Brussels, our temporary headquarters, too tired even to take pictures.
Day -1: Last Minute Preparations
I forgot to mention this before, but besides the standard booth we also signed up for the inventor's table. This is where designers bring their unreleased creations to get first-hand feedback from the public. Of course, we had to prepare a prototype worthy of the showing to the outside world.
Day 0: Setting Up the Stand
That's when I started counting down the hours. One last trip from Brussels to Essen, loaded once again with game boxes, we drove early in the morning allowing plenty of time to set up the stand and have everything ready for the grand opening.
We started paying the price to our lack of experience. NSKN was not present at the press conference on Wednesday, missing a lot of exposure with reviewers or distributors; we did not use the exhibitor's parking and so on. We did not even have a power plug in our stand!
The main task of the day was building the IKEA furniture with the aid of an electric screwdriver. Learning from our mistakes, we enjoyed a full day of physical labor, while 90% of all other stands stood ready, full of games. By 7 p.m., everything looked ready, the shelves were up, the carpets "glued" to the floor, the gaming table ready for demo sessions, and the games waiting for the customers.
In the evening we made the final "battle" plan. Having six people at the stand for Thursday and Friday and eight for the weekend, I assumed that at least one of us could do advertising and sales all the time. Again, time will have proved me wrong.
Day 1 (Thursday): The Initial Shock
8:00 AM: The whole team arrived at the stand, bringing the rest of the game boxes to a grand total of 48. This is what we expected to sell over the four days of the fair. From 8 to 8:30 we made last moment arrangements inside the booth and had a chance to walk around halls 4 and 6 to decide what to buy later on.
8:55 AM: We met the first potential customers. In spite our lack of German language skills, people were listening to our explanations and were amazingly interested... "Really, a pure strategy game with battle?"
9:20 AM: We sold the first copy of Warriors & Traders. We could not believe what was going on around us, it was pouring down with people, all interested to hear all the details and some of them actually buying the game.
10:40 AM: My first corporate meeting as a board game designer and publisher was also the most unusual one. A company from Ukraine was interested in translating and publishing the game in the local language. It was hard to believe my eyes and ears, but I spent more than 45 minutes talking about this opportunity.
11:45 AM: The first meeting with a distribution company ended up very promising and two weeks later we were shipping a full pallet with 120 games toward the United Kingdom. The interest in Warriors & Traders was far higher that I expected and the flow of people to our stand exceeded our most optimistic expectations.
12:00 PM: Seven games sold.
12:30 PM: None of us had a chance to have lunch or even visit the toilets.
1:00 PM: A group of five friends came back to our booth for the first session of Warriors & Traders. They spent two-and-a-half hours playing a full game. In the meantime, everyone else was talking, laughing, explaining, busy but enjoying every minute of every hour – and it was still early on Thursday.
3:30 PM: The first gaming session ended, the second one was about to begin. People were convinced and wanted to have their own copy of the game signed by the designer. Our total sold for the day increased to 19.
4:30 PM: No customers at the stand for five consecutive minutes. We had time to take a breath, grab something to eat very quickly, and rest our feet, except for Vlad who was in the middle of the second session of the day. All my colleagues complained that their throats were hurting from so much talking.
5:00 PM: A new "wave" of people came by. We assumed that those who got out of work or school later did not want to miss the first day of Spiel 2011. We welcomed them.
6:00 PM: The gates of Messe Essen were officially closed for day 1, however all six of us were still talking to customers. Our total number of sold games raised to an amazing 32 pieces. Truly unbelievable!
7:15 PM: Our last customer of day 1 left. We went for a quick clean up of the booth, than we sat down amazed trying to seize the moment. We counted the total amount sold and this was 35 game boxes. This left us with a big smile and a giant problem – almost no games left for Friday.
Did I mention that our only vehicle was a normal five-seater car with a limited amount of space, especially when it came to carrying game boxes? This was a big puzzle: How do you get more games to the fair, using only that car and be rested for the next day, assuming that the games are stored 250 km away?
8:00 PM: Driving to Brussels, sometimes breaking the speed limit, wishing to have had rented a van. Essen -> Brussels = 250 km + a few less hours of sleep. Having games for the next day – priceless!
2:10 AM: It was technically the next day. I was back with 55 more games. Friday was covered, being tired did not matter anymore.
Day 2 (Friday): The Easy Day
You may wonder what was so easy about Friday...
7:50 AM: Arriving in front of the exhibitions hall, we had sixty games to unload and set up in the stand. The biggest challenge wasn't the cold, but the fact that the dedicated parking space was full and we had to carry the games from quite far away.
8:50 AM: Eight people are in front of our booth, asking all kinds of questions about Warriors & Traders. Our second day started earlier.
10:00 AM The first gaming session of the day starts earlier than planned. A few very passionate gamers insisted on squeezing in a one-hour playtest before the one at 11:00, already planned since the day before. But we always put the needs of the customer first, so Vlad had to give up his brunch and start explaining all over again. He did not mind.
11:30 AM: Sales were going great, almost twice as good as Thursday. Half of us already lost their voice and we are seriously thinking about getting pills for our throats.
12:00 PM: We gave a copy of Warriors & Traders to the BGG guys to play it at BGG.CON.
12:45 PM: Getting in and out of business meetings, it looked like I have a few seconds to catch my breath. I was, of course, wrong. There was a guy from Alliance already waiting for me for a while. I knew of Alliance, it was just hard to believe they were interested in us. Halfway between confusion and happiness, I went through the first of the three meetings with the largest game distributor in the United States (and possibly in the world). All went well!
2:30 PM: Feeling like a star! I had never had this image of myself being important, but for five consecutive minutes I actually did. Customers were asking to have their games signed by the designer and there were six of them – I am not kidding – just waiting in a sort of queue for me to sign their copy of Warriors & Traders. I have to say that all the corporate meetings felt good, but that was astonishing, seeing all these guys and girls really interested and wanting their game signed made me feel like all the effort and craziness was really worth it. I thanked them then, and I want to thank them again – they made me and all my team feel wonderful.
3:45 PM: A moment to rest, there were only a few guys in our stand, so we quickly took advantage of that and, one by one, managed to grab something to eat. We called that lunch.
5:00 PM: The people who played in the second session of the day came back to buy the game. We had to refuse any discount for the press as we were once again running low on stock.
6:07 PM: I gave an interview, my first interview related to Warriors & Traders.
7:15 PM: The last customers were passing by our stand while we made a new plan to bring in more games for Saturday and Sunday.
8:30 PM: I just left on another trip to Brussels to bring back another sixty games. I put the idea of rest in a closed box and decided that sleep is for the weak. I drove again for almost six hours, completing my task without incidents. I thought the day was over...
2:25 AM: We had a review of the day and decided what we could improve for Saturday. I cannot even remember that discussion; I just know that it was very effective.
You might be wondering by now what was so easy about Friday... it was just that great feeling that what you do matters and that it was worth all the effort in the world just to be able to experience such a unique environment.
Day 3 (Saturday): New Definition for Crowded
7:50 AM: We arrived at the exhibition center and unloaded all the games we brought before. Our booth looked once again fully supplied with game boxes waiting for people to look at, buy or just admire.
8:20 AM: The game table was ready to go for the 9 a.m. session. We had to pile up the games to have some space left to move around our booth.
9:30 AM: I could count more than 25 people in front of our stand. Some were just looking around and moving on, most of them were listening to my colleagues and I describing Warriors & Traders. The first session of the day had already started, and people seemed very enthusiastic. The day was looking good.
10:45 AM: Someone had just come to buy the game, without any explanations or questions asked. We asked why and we got the answer: We were in the first place in the BGG list of new releases. It was as cool as it was unexpected. From that moment on, we put up a hand-written placard asking people to keep voting for us.
11:30 AM: Our stand was around 80 meters (250 feet) away from the bathrooms. I assumed this would be a five-minute round trip and, boy, I was wrong! It took me 15 minutes and a great deal of pushing and pulling to get there only to acknowledge a 100+ men and women queue for the ... men's toilet. I gave up and decided to return later. I spent another 15 minutes on the way back, reconsidering my definition of crowded.
12:00 PM: I had just completed my fifth business meeting of the day. We had more and more interested people coming over, and we were also stirring up the interest of retailers who wanted to buy our game by the case. Unfortunately, we had to turn most of them down, fearing that we'd be sold out too soon and end up disappointing our customers.
2:07 PM: From our team of eight people, only seven were still able to speak. The first "casualty" went to find some quick remedy to help him get back fast in the game.
4:00 PM: I threw away the original schedule put together before the fair. It was written in there how many companies we had to approach each day of the fair and it was not realistic. We did not approach anyone and yet we had already had more than 50 business meetings, most of them successful, about two-and-a-half times more than what we had planned. And Spiel 2011 was not over.
5:15 PM: Spending most of the time standing and talking, focused 110% on board games fans, we learned to take advantage of any little free moment and take a picture or two to have then some memories to share. One of these photos shows some very dedicated players continuing one game even after one of them technically won.
5:15 PM: More than sixty games sold in one day – a new record!
6:00 PM: We honored some promises made to retailers in the previous days and delivered their games. One box of six pieces weighed more than 13 kilos (29 pounds); nevertheless everyone seemed happy.
6:25 PM: Taking into account the significant decrease in people coming to our stand, we decided that was the right moment to ... have lunch. We took turns; whoever did not have anyone to talk to, explain the game to, or make a sell to had 5-10 minutes to grab a bite. I was the seventh one to go out of eight people. By that time I did not even feel hungry anymore; actually I was feeling nothing but adrenaline. It had been another amazing day. I had met all kinds of people, from a 14-year-old kid impressed by the graphic design but without enough money to buy his own copy to the CEO of one of big names in the industry. They all had two things in common: the passion for board games and the modesty.
7:00 PM: There were still people around. I did not really understand why, realizing a lot later that the exhibition halls were open until later. I had reached another milestone – more that 25 games signed in one day!
8:35 PM: Spiel 2011 was closing down for another day, but this one was special for me, as I did not have to go back to Brussels to bring more games. At that particular moment, there was nothing that could have made me happier.
9:00 PM: It was time to celebrate. The fair was not over, but since Sunday evening was planned for cleaning up and driving back home, we needed our moment of joy, feeling happy of what we accomplished. We did not manage to have a coherent discussion over dinner, but we had fun.
Day 4 (Sunday): What's Going on Outside Our Booth?
9:00 AM: People are playing! That's not a joke; there were people who came in early and wanted to play the game because their friends said it was worth it.
11:00 AM: The last day of the fair is also the most prolific for small retailers who are coming to buy the latest and hottest in the gaming world. Warriors & Traders drew some attention, maybe not even half as much as the grand releases, but enough to pose a dilemma: Should we sell to the retailers or should we wait until the end of the day and focus on regular customers? We made a compromise, selling to those retailers who came from a country where we had no contact for distribution or retail, ensuring wider coverage.
12:30 PM: Sunday seemed to be less crowded than all the other days. It is the first moment when I found a half-hour free to go look around and possibly buy games for myself.
1:45 PM: A phone call from a few meters away – a colleague of mine is asking whether I am available as some guy wants to buy all the rest of our games! Sadly, we had to turn him down as there were only so many games we could sell to retailers.
4:30 PM: We have five games left, and three of them are promised to some gentlemen from the press who are late picking them up. Do we sell them or not?
6:00 PM: We had three games left, excluding the two exposed ones. The last hours were rather slow compared to the rest of the exhibition, and we did not have enough energy to make the best presentation to potential customers. Plus, there wasn't much to sell. All of us got at least 45 minutes of walking around and crossing items off their shopping lists.
6:45 PM: Our shelves were dismantled, having no more games to support. Our last gaming session ended and I was ready to run to the officials' desk to ask for a 15-minute parking permit to load all that was left from our stand. We had one game left as someone had not honored the promise to come at 6:30 p.m. and make the final purchase.
7:03 PM: Our last customer, Guido, bought the very last game – and I gave that to him in writing!
7:30 PM: I was the proud owner of two 15-minute Parkschein, rushing back to exhibition hall number 4 to load and make Spiel 2011 just a memory.
11:25 PM: Having had no more unforeseen events, we arrived back in Brussels. I guess that's where the story of the beginning ended and where the story of Warriors & Traders really begins...
• Designer Alain Epron is going the crowdsourcing route for a reprint of Spiel 2011 hit Vanuatu, but with IndieGoGo being the crowdfunding vehicle of choice instead of Kickstarter.
Epron is also simultaneously running a crowdsourcing campaign for the production of his Massilia, due out at Spiel 2012, and this campaign is running on the French site Ulule.
• Cryptozoic Entertainment has set an April 2012 release date for The Big Bang Theory: The Party Game. The television show has a number of fans on BGG – or so I'm led to believe based on past comments on BGG News – so I thought I'd best mention the game's imminent release here.
• Alcatraz: The Scapegoat, which debuted at Spiel 2011, is going to be released by Z-Man Games, according to Piotr Żuchowski of Kuźnia Gier, the game's original publisher. For background detail on the game and its development, read this designer diary on BGG News from co-designer Rafał Cywicki.
• Steve Jackson Games has announced six new colors of Cthulhu Dice for release in May 2012, along with a new set of six Munchkin Level Counters. The expansions keep rolling along, yes they do, yes they do...
• GMT Games is including six extra cards with Dominant Species: The Card Game as a bonus for those who preorder the game directly from the publisher. These cards will later be sold via the BGG Store. For more on what will be included – and why the existence of these cards doesn't make everyone a happy camper – head to this thread on BGG.
• And speaking of promos that will both please and displease many gamers, Alderac Entertainment Group has announced that Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin – which officially goes on sale March 12, 2012 – will be available for early play at various brick-and-mortar game stores during a prerelease "Level Up Event" the week of March 2-8. In addition to being able to buy the game early at such events, players who do so will receive a free 25-card Avatars mini-expansion – an expansion that will be sold later for $10. I've included a somewhat grainy image of sample Avatar cards below.
Believe it or not, that back-handed compliment delivered shortly after the first playtest of Farmageddon was when I thought I might have something interesting. I had spent months subjecting my friends to a terrible sci-fi civ-building game I had created, so to hear a little praise – even praise with a caveat – was definitely a good sign.
When I began working on Farmageddon, I set out with a few goals in mind. First, I wanted to create a simple, fast game that my less nerdy friends would enjoy. Believe it or not, I looked at Farmville and set a goal of making a more interesting farming game. In Farmville, you plant crops, wait for them to be ready, then harvest them. I took that as inspiration, then added competition and a little strategy on top of it all.
After a few months of testing and a few more months waiting for the brilliant Brett Bean to finish the art, I released Farmageddon on the print-on-demand site The Game Crafter. I thought, "Surely people will enjoy this low-cost, silly game!" I was partially correct, but mostly fairly wrong.
The problem is that I underestimated how much work even a simple game required to be good. I didn't test sufficiently – can you ever? – and I failed to edit my rules enough to catch some glaring typos. My aunt, a retired teacher, called me to criticize the editing on her copy! It was embarrassing and shameful, but there was a glimmer of hope. Most people didn't hate the game; they just didn't enjoy it. I'm an optimist, so I decided to fix the problems and make it a much better game.
Crop rotation, Pesticides, Crop Insurance
After mailing dozens of copies to bloggers, old college roommates, Facebook fans, the occasional curious farmer from BoardGameGeek, and fellow designers, I've done just that – made it a much better game. As I look back on this year-plus of development, it's interesting to reflect on some of the most fundamental changes.
Josh Edwards provided the harsh, but excellent feedback that the game lacked fundamental strategic choices, such as the ability to obtain more crop cards or defend your holdings. He also noted that the game was often won by the player who drew the best cards, which led to my multi-month pursuit of balance and subtlety, not haymakers.
Cyrus Kirby at Father Geek and I exchanged dozens of emails discussing every single element of the game. He came up with numerous house rules and cards, some of which you'll see in the final game – cards like "Rented Land", which helped address a balance issue favoring the first player. Cyrus also wrote an incredibly kind and enthusiastic review, which gave me the huge emotional boost and charge to seek out a publisher. It was people like Cyrus who pushed me to make Farmageddon great – that, and the picture of his young son beaming with my game in his hands.
Around this time I also removed money from the game, a fundamental change that removed fiddly components and tightened every element of game play. It's as if I took a huge wrench to a loose bolt and just cut off the flow of garbage. You could say this was the turning point. From there on out, many of the new cards used crops as a currency, which added strategy and depth – two beautiful things for a game.
After playing the game countless times, my friends would speak up about cards they hated: "Foul Manure" is fiddly; "Crop Insurance" is annoying and isn't powerful enough; "Foreclosure" is too powerful; I want to be able to harvest instantly. I tested every variant, cut favorite cards, and fixed old problems that persisted for too long. Game design is a long, bumpy road of smoothing out a good idea and turning it into a fantastic experience.
Bodacious Broccoli, Jazzy Coffee, Stinky Truffle – all from the included FrankenCrops mini-expansion
I encountered a great couple on BoardGameGeek, Jim and Nicole, who have tested the game for months. Every time I sent them a change or a new card, they'd try it out and provide me with feedback. I cannot thank them enough. And of course Phil Kilcrease, the man behind 5th Street Games, has been watching the game from afar for a really long time. He would read my rules and even cut up the entire print-and-play to try it. Without him, the game wouldn't be what it is today.
Finally, every time someone said, "I was confused here" or "I didn't get this", I revised the game and asked for their feedback. You'd think the two hundredth time you open the document you'll get it right, but the search for crystal clear rules is a goal all designers should seek.
Farmageddon was designed to bring out at a dinner party when the conversation runs dry. It's designed for hardcore gamers in between Euros at game night. It's designed for parents and their children, roommates enjoying a few beers, or a gamer and his or her non-gamer significant other. It has truly been an effort of the passionate boardgaming communities on Twitter and BoardGameGeek. I am so thankful for your thoughts and ideas, and I cannot wait for you to play the final version.
Happy farming to all! If you're interested, check out the game on Kickstarter. You can read the rules and watch a quick video explaining how to play. If you have any questions or comments, we'll be watching the comments section. Thanks!
On Monday, Feb. 13, 2012, I blazed through New York Toy Fair in seven hours and undoubtedly missed dozens of new games on display at the show. I plan to follow up with the contacts listed on the flyers and catalogs and postcards that I scooped up while whirlwinding through the aisles, and I'll scan Toy Fair's virtual press site again to look for publishers and games not already covered in the 2012 NY Toy Fair Preview that I compiled for BGG.
That said, I'm more interested in discussing two broad subjects related to the U.S. game market, both of which came up in multiple conversations with publishers during NY Toy Fair, than particular games, so let's talk about that first, then get to the games in later posts.
Us 1 :: Them 10,000
Subject #1 is the dichotomy at the heart of the U.S. game industry. No, I'm not talking about the tired Eurogame vs. Ameritrash debate. That topic is trite and meaningless, of interest only to those who bathe in minutiae that's irrelevant and invisible to those outside the hobby.
Instead I'm talking about the division of the market between hobby and mainstream game releases, and consequently the division of gamers into hobbyists and the public at large. Hobbyists follow game release schedules, study designers and publishers and the style of games they release, discuss game trends, and build a mental image of the game industry that includes them as an essential part of it. Joe Public, on the other hand, buys a game, plays it with friends or family, has a good time, then puts it away and doesn't obsess over it.
In case you didn't already know, the number of Joe Publics in the world is vastly more than you could ever imagine.
Hobby, Mainstream or Both?
In late 2011 at Toys R Us, after searching in vain for new Cars diecast figures with my son, I visited the store's game section and was surprised by this selection:
Progress?
To be clear, I was not surprised by either the Jersey Shore Trivia Game or yet another version of Jenga, but rather by the presence of the comparatively meaty Jungle Speed between those foamy pieces of game breading. Jungle Speed in Toys R Us? Neat, I thought. Hope that goes well for Asmodee.
Then shortly afterward I saw Jungle Speed on sale at the mainstream department store Target, then at a different Target, then at multiple Barnes & Noble bookstores, and finally at Walmart. How is this possible, I wondered? This little game – this decade-old design that's been kicking around hobby stores – is suddenly all over the place.
At NY Toy Fair, I asked Stefan Brunell from the U.S. branch of Asmodee about this, and he said that success came after finally realizing that the U.S. market is not like those in France and Germany. In those countries, he explained, games are sold in retail outlets of all sizes, and games percolate up from small stores and tiny print runs to medium-sized, then large retail outlets. Games prove themselves over time, then earn a spot in a larger retail arena, then move up again, and so on. (Many games, of course, never graduate to larger outlets, or they advance a bit but then stagnate.)
The U.S. market, by comparison, has no middle ground; every retailer is either big or tiny, so there's no middle ground by which games can become known over time. "Even something like Funagain," says Brunell, is tiny. Thus, publishers need to recognize this division and pitch their games to the large players directly. Asmodee finally did this with Jungle Speed, and the result is that game appearing in mainstream outlets across the country and more copies being sold in the U.S. in three months than in the previous ten years. (In March 2010 on Boardgame News, I had linked to an article in Air le Mag (via Filosofia) that mentioned annual Jungle Speed sales of 200,000 copies. That total was for worldwide sales; Brunell expects Jungle Speed sales in 2012 in the U.S. alone to far surpass that number.)
That success with Jungle Speed has been mirrored in other mainstream retail outlets with other games. The original Munchkin game was added to two dozen Target stores in April 2011 as a test sales program ten years after the game's original release (and domination of sales charts in hobby stores), and sales went so well that by January 2012 the game was available in nearly all 1,500 Target locations. So as with Jungle Speed, a game once thought of as hobby-specific has gone mainstream in terms of its availability – with nothing being changed in the game play itself.
Barnes & Noble has also become an influencer in the general game market. One publisher at NY Toy Fair mentioned that when B&N picks up a title, it orders a thousand copies in one shot – which is a huge number for publishers used to handling print runs that consist of only a few thousand copies in total. Another publisher explained that B&N requested changes in box size (but not the game play) so that the titles would have more shelf presence in their stores, the goal being to have offerings at multiple price points in each game category it carries.
B&N also carries a handful of different Munchkin standalone games. Matt Morgan at MTV Geek interviewed B&N reps in October 2011 about their approach to game selection, and one said, "I'm continued to be blown away by Munchkin." That same article explained that B&N reps rushed to get Fantasy Flight's Civilization board game on shelves in time for the 2011 holiday season, and the game sold out and was reordered. With "at least 3 copies in each of [the] 'A' stores" and 450 'A' stores in the B&N chain, at least 1,350 copies of a complicated hobby game were sold at MSRP to the public at large. B&N also carries (and presumably sells) Gears of War, Agricola, 7 Wonders, Arkham Horror, Days of Steam, Empire Builder, and other titles normally thought of as fairly involved and designed for hobby gamers.
All of which makes me think that the difference between hobby and mainstream game releases might be less than most gamers perceive it to be. I've long pushed for greater public awareness of designer games; in 2006, for example, I sold a write-up on Reef Encounter to Scuba Diving magazine, sold a review of Primordial Soup to the science magazine Discover, and wrote a regular column on games for the (short-lived) Coffee Magazine. I pitched many more game-related articles to magazines and newspapers in the mid-2000s and had some success, with many, many more rejections. Each success was all about getting the right game in front of the right readership, the right market – although I'd argue that many of the rejections also had the right game for the right market, especially Funny Friends for Rolling Stone. C'mon!
In the end, perhaps the only difference between the majority of hobby and mainstream game releases is where they are sold – and with more outlets carrying more designer games, the line between what's hobby and what's mainstream may continue to blur until the dichotomy has even less meaning than it already does. Whether this will happen or not won't be clear for a couple of years, as those buying Civilization and other "hobby" games via mainstream outlets might have been scared away from buying unfamiliar games – or they might be ready to try something new this holiday season. Time will tell...
Kicking Game Sales into the Mainstream
The other subject under discussion at NY Toy Fair was the emergence – or rather, the growing presence – of Kickstarter as a vehicle for game sales for publishers both large and small. While I've backed a number of Kickstarter projects, I've always held reservations about the Kickstarter process itself for three reasons:
• The risk-shifting involved in the publication process, with a publisher not fronting the money to produce a game but rather using funds from customers to do so. At some level, I want to know that a publisher has invested itself in the success of a game and is putting itself financially at risk so that it is, in a sense, saying, "This is how much trust we have in this game. If it weren't as good as we think it is, we would never have brought it to market?" Yes, I know publishers that use their own funds can deliver terrible games as easily as those using Kickstarter – and however you buy a game, you're at risk of not getting something you like – but still that mental discomfort persists.
• The ease with which awful projects rub shoulders with good ones. I know this shouldn't bother me since a project's awfulness says more about the sponsor than about anyone involved in the gaming community, but I still hate to have others furthering the notion that a slapped-together roll-and-move activity – one intended more for delivering eyeballs to sponsors than for delivering game play to buyers – is what I'm talking about when I talk about games. I'm interested in games as a creative pursuit, as an artistic medium, and while I agree that the primary purpose of a game is to play it, I still enjoy seeing what others create and present as objects unto themselves.
• The knowledge that some day a publisher will take the money and run, delivering nothing to buyers and tainting future possibilities for those who want backing for projects of their own.
All that said, talks with a number of publishers at NY Toy Fair had me thinking about Kickstarter from three new angles, one being from the hobby/mainstream angle that I discussed above. I knew from previous discussions with game industry personnel that game publication projects on Kickstarter attract buyers far beyond the BGG audience – but what I didn't know was how large that mainstream audience is. One publisher estimated that the percentage of supporters not coming to a project through BGG, Tric Trac or other hobby-specific media was 60-80%. One way or another, those outside the normal confines of what we think of as the game hobby are finding out about these projects and backing them – and as I stated above every such purchase blurs the difference between hobby and mainstream games.
Another angle to Kickstarter relates to the risk-shifting I mentioned above. Yes, a publisher using Kickstarter benefits by raising funds to cover the cost of game production – but a related and possibly even more important factor is that the publisher has some way to estimate sales for the game in the marketplace at large and can adjust the print run accordingly. If a game barely clears its funding goal, the publisher can cut publication numbers to cover what's needed for the project and basically wash its hands of the game, forgetting about long-term profit to satisfy its immediate obligations, then move on. If a game has more support than anticipated – or support from unexpected locations – the publisher can figure that it underestimated the game's potential and boost the print run accordingly.
Why is this practice important? Because game retailers – both brick-and-mortar stores and online sellers – have traditionally been terrible at placing preorders, leaving publishers in the dark as to how many games to produce.
Asmodee's Stefan Brunell mentioned this during our talk. In late 2011 Asmodee brought it roughly two thousand copies of Eclipse, despite not having preorders to justify that amount, and blew through all the copies immediately. Now Asmodee has an Eclipse reprint of 5,000 copies scheduled for release in the U.S. in May 2012. Brunell says that his bosses balked initially because retailers and distributors still weren't placing reserve orders to justify a print run that large, but he convinced them to do it anyway. What's changed in the intervening weeks between the time that reprint order was placed and today? Eclipse has hit large, everyone wants it, retailers and distributors have finally placed preorders – and now those 5,000 copies are already sold out at the publisher level, with another reprint in the works. If retailers and distributors had done their homework when the game debuted at Spiel 2011 in October and placed orders accordingly, both the initial shipment and the reprint would be larger, and everyone would have a better chance of getting the game. (That said, gamers also tend to be negligent when it comes to placing preorders, and their preorders drive those of retailers and others down the line.)
The third angle relevant to Kickstarter taking on a bigger role for publishers relates to the Kickstarter projects being relatively inexpensive marketing for the games themselves. An active project gets people talking about a game, reading the rules, asking questions, looking for artwork, and so on – all of which brings games to the attention of retailers and distributors, in addition to those who would buy the game directly. One publisher at NY Toy Fair said that while you might think that distributors would be upset by sales lost directly to Kickstarter buyers, they are instead happy that Kickstarter advertises the game more effectively than a sell sheet or a description in their catalog, thereby getting gamers excited about the game and retailers eager to support something that already has a presence in the market. Kickstarter does the work that a distributor might otherwise need to do – or might not do at all, which would leave the game gasping for air among a crowd of indifferent retailers.
Like it or not, more publishers will be using Kickstarter for more games in the years to come, both for off-the-wall projects that might have a seemingly small audience and for otherwise "normal" games that you'd expect to see available through all the regular outlets anyway. As for what those titles will be, watch this space for details!
Here's some video from the floor to give you an idea of the magnitude of the toy fair. Kick back and enjoy the soothing sounds of some of my favorite classical tracks, and pretend you are there without braving the -6 degree weather.
