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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• The fourth edition of the International Boardgame Photography Award contest is underway, with a top prize of €500 "for the best photo about games, people playing, or anything related to gaming". Deadline for entry is September 30, 2011.
• Designer and Tasty Minstrel Games developer Seth Jaffee reports on his Protospiel 2011 experience. Will any of the games mentioned come to print? Absolutely – but that answer's kind of deceptive since Jaffee played Eminent Domain and its expansion at the event, as well as a future TMG release Kings of Air and Steam.
• Speaking of TMG, Tom Gurganus at Go Forth and Game interviews Gavan Brown, designer of the soon-to-be-released Jab from Tasty Minstrel Games.
• And for a comparison in interview styles, you can check out Chris Kirkman's interview with Gavan Brown on Dice Hate Me.
• Designer Lewis Pulsipher on what makes a game epic.
• Another "overlooked while on vacation" interview, this one being a talk with designer Philippe Keyaerts by Derek Thompson at Meepletown.
• Louis Perrochon and his Startup Fever are profiled by Jessica Bruder in The New York Times.
• Steve Jackson Games is holding a "suggest a subtitle" contest for Munchkin 8, due out Q2 2012.
• In a new board game column on Kill Screen, Gus Mastrapa discusses the "card draft" mechanism found in 7 Wonders and games that don't actually employ a card draft mechanism, at least not as I would define it.
• Hmm, yet another old news item that I only now discovered, namely the digital magazine Battlespace, which has three nicely-designed issues available online at this point, with coverage of board games, miniature games, CCGs and more.
• In honor of its 10,000th success project, Kickstarter has posted lots of details and stats about those projects, including a breakdown of the categories under which those projects fall and way, way down the list third from the bottom with 180 projects is games.
• And speaking of Kickstarter, in the category of "board game with possibly the smallest audience ever" we have Green's Cube, described on its Kickstarter project as follows:
Quote: Basically Green's Cube is a word game but with physics equations designed to emphasize the multiple forms an equation can take. Look at Newton's second law, which is often taught as F=ma but not necessarily. Students on a different part of the planet might know it as F=m dv/dt and Newton himself defined it as the change in momentum, or F=dp/dt (look at the main image for other examples). Green's Cube embraces these differences/similarities by encouraging players to find different forms. Players construct equations from a randomly chosen tool-set and are rewarded for finding different or more elegant forms of equations and penalized for re-using equations played by others.
But beware! This isn't [insert name of your favorite word game here], and there is no dictionary. If challenged a player must be prepared to defend his play with derivations, verifications, logical reasoning, or just all-out mathematical proof. The competitive arena allows players to peak inside the heads of their peers and pick their brains in a way that typically isn't appropriate in a classroom setting.
Hopefully players will gain new perspectives and insight in the relationships of equations and break down affinities that can limit one's thinking, ultimately producing a generation of more robust and confident scientists. Here's what I mean: Because of the way I designed the game, to me "s" meant arc length so whenever I played it I used it in the context of rotational dynamics or something similar, but a friend immediately thought "entropy" and thus used some limit cubes and other pieces to define the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This was the first time I got truly excited because he wasn't supposed to be able to make thermo. equations but he did.
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