In a MS conference today they revealed that Settlers of Catan, Carcassone and Alhambra are being made for xbox live.

These will be small downloadable games instead of full price games bought in shops.

Cool eh?

Mike..............

(And i get them free as i work for MS Games, and no, not in the division that get any money from these selling any copies!)

YES! When? Link?

Tell me more!

That's interesting. I wonder if they do well enough, if they'll branch out and turn more games into downloadable XBOX-playable versions. That has potential to blow open the visibility for board games to a huge degree, especially if they catch on with video gamers.

Awesome... I hope the UNO crowd switches over.

Way, way cool

Excellent. The board/card games have been dull so far to me.

Great...

One minute ago I couldn't care less for the Xbox 360, now I must have one

I hope it is part of the free subscription that comes with the 360 and not the paid "Gold" subscription!!!!

http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/11609/Microsoft-Offers-More-Wa...

Second paragraph under Xbox Live Arcade. Not much more than was already said.



Well, what would most likely happen (based on the other things that have been released) is that you can buy an Xbox 360 and then purchase this game for another $5-10 (no gold membership is needed to purchase XBLA games). This would let you play the game against the AI or "hotseat" if they put that mode in. If you wanted to play with other people online, then you would have to pay for gold membership or wait for a free weekend on a silver membership.

I wonder how they're going to handle the rules for games like these. Most Xbox Live Arcade games have just a few rules, or are so familiar that they aren't needed.

I'm almost as big a fan of XBox Live Arcade as I am of boardgames, and I never thought this would happen.

I'm excited that this will allow friends from out of town play, and even more excited that Euro-games will get some mainstream trial.

This sounds great! I may have to renew my X-Box Live subscription.

Sorry for the no link, it literally had no more info on it.

It was mentioned at the end of a sentence by www.Eurogamer.net who were reviewing the conference but didn't even know what the games were!

To be honest at the moment, i play Spades and Hearts more than any other xbox game. Then again, Fable 2 (shameless plug) isn't out yet!

Mike........

You did Fable? You did Fable?!! What a fantastic game.

Excellent. I had been eagerly awaiting such an announcement from Microsoft regarding Settlers. I wasn't expecting that they would be including other Eurogames as well. I hope this is just the beginning of what they're planning for Eurogames on the Live Arcade.

Aye, i was one of the poor guys brought in at the end to shove the game out the door. I ended up rewriting the bulk of the complex quests in the game, and was in charge of all of the extra quests in The Lost Chapters.

And now i'm in charge of all of them in Fable 2.

Great, I just switched from GameCube to PS/2. Now I have to switch again?

i hate to be the voice of dissent, but i sure hope this doesn't cut into the sales of *actual* boardgames. If you can buy Carcassonne for $5-10, then what about the storefront trying to sell it for $20-25?

i would rather have a piece in front of me on a table than on a screen any day... don't get me wrong, this is coming from someone who probably logs on average 10-30 hours a week in late-night PC gaming. However, if there are folks available to play "live" games rather than virtual games, then i would opt for the "live" game every time.

Feel free to pass this on to your PR department and Mr. Major Nelson:

This news has just solidified even more how great a platform the Xbox 360 is to me. I haven't picked one up yet but have been saving up for it (and a Wii) for a while now. News like this just makes me giddy and looking forward to getting my 360 even more now. Thank you very very much for this news!

So, when's the 360 with the cooler processor coming out again?

Given that boardgames are so niche (Alhambra probably sells tens of thousands of copies), and Xbox Live sells millions of subscriptions, I think the exposure can only do good.

I think what you might see is an increase in sales of the printed game. People might try them out on the Xbox Live free weekends, really enjoy themselves playing a game they may never have heard of before, then go out and buy the game to play with their non-Xbox Live enabled friends. It's much easier to spend $40-$60 on a game you're familiar with than one you've never played before.

I'm working on the assumption that most people realize that some things, like reading books and playing board games, can be done on line but are much better to do off-line. Ticket to Ride, Magic the Gathering, and BSW are all online versions of board and card games and I'd like to think they increase sales of the printed games rather than decrease them.

You still have to spend $300-400 on an Xbox360, and another fee for online play against real opponents, so I think the idea that these electronic versions will cut into normal boardgame sales is probably unwarranted.

Here is another link from the official XBox site.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/2006/0823-leipzigan...

I'm pretty sure XBLA won't hurt sales any more than BSW does, where you can play for free. Let's face it. There's only two types of people who will purchase eurogames on LIVE. Those who already own the games, or those who probably would have never even played the game for real in the first place. (XBLA games all are required to have a free demo of the game) Either way its a win!


I'd rather play FtF than online any day as well, but sometimes I don't have that luxury. Playing FtF isn't practical when the people I want to play with are 3 states away. Plus, XBLA has built in VOIP and is tons more user-friendly than BSW.

Well I'm in. The neat trick is that they are doing three games from three different German publishing companies. But they did probably pick three of the most recent remarkably popular titles.

So somebody at Microsoft is paying attention to us.

Moo,
Frank