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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• Game designer and podcaster Nathan Russell has taken a spur from NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month, in case you didn't know, which is semi-organized each November – and proposed the complementary NaGa DeMon, or National Game Design Month for this November 2011. In addition to being even more fun to say than NaNoWriMo – hard to believe, I know – NaGa DeMon should prove to be of greater interest to users of BGG like yourself. Russell proposes four simple rules for NaGa DeMon:
—Create the game in November.
—Finish the game in November.
—Play the game in November.
—Talk about your experience.
Should you care to see what others are doing or get involved yourself, a number of people have adopted the hashtag #NaGaDeMon on Twitter and are posting progress reports.
• Tasty Minstrel Games' Michael Mindes is conducting a series of interviews on his blog and the TMG blog with designers, publishers and others in the game industry. Previous interview subjects (with interviews linked to their names) include Tom Lehmann, Ryan Laukat, Bruno Faidutti, Seth Jaffee, and most recently Phil Eklund, which shows that he's definitely a breed of his own. An excerpt:
Quote: I look at board games as art, and boardgame designers as artists. A useful definition of art is: "The selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's value-judgments, according to principles of aesthetics." By this definition, painting, sculpture, and literature are artforms. So are board games. I recreate reality in each of my games according to value judgements which I have carefully defined...to myself.
• The FallCon Gaming Society has awarded its annual Canadian Game Design Award to Matt Tolman's Undermining, newly released from Z-Man Games. Valley Games flew in advance copies of the 2010 CGDA winner, Roberta Taylor's Octopus' Garden, for the 2011 FallCon convention, which means that game will likely be hitting retailers in the next couple of months.
Guidelines for the 2012 CGDA are online, with the deadline for rule set submission being Jan. 31, 2012.
• FRED Distribution has announced that it "will handle the marketing, distribution and fulfillment for Academy Games" starting November 1, 2011. Strike of the Eagle should be available in November 2011, with 1812: The Invasion of Canada being released in December 2011. These titles, and the entire Academy Games' line, will be available to distributors and retailers through FRED Distribution.
• Designer Donald X. Vaccarino has posted "The Secret History of the Hinterlands Cards", a regular feature that accompanies each new expansion for Dominion, the expansion being Dominion: Hinterlands in this case, which debuted at Spiel 2011 in late October.
• The jury for the 30th edition of the Concours International de Créateurs de Jeux de Société de Boulogne-Billancourt – an annual game design contest known for both its extremely long name and its history of awarding designs that later see publication – has chosen four games out of ten finalists to be awarded:
—Karma, by Christian Rossiquet
—Serial Couleurs, by Cyril Blondel
—Space Squadron, by Stéphane Boudin
—Tokaïdo, by Antoine Bauza
Summaries of the four winners (in French) are available on the Centre National du Jeu website, as are summaries of all ten finalists.
• Colossal has a gorgeous gallery of dice sculptures by Tony Cragg.
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