Army Ants is a new board-like card game that can be played using a standard deck of playing cards.

You lay the game out in a Stratego-like setup (except that all forces are all revealed) and try to capture your opponent’s queen.

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The Gamer Dome’s new wiki is for tabletop game designers to post ideas and receive community feedback. The exact idea is a bit hard to follow, but the essence seems to be a place to create variants: scenarios, new cards, expansions, and so on.

Gaining access to the wiki is a bit of a pain: you need to register with Wikidot, and you also need to subscribe to the Gamer Dome blog feed, find the announcement post, and find a separate password at the end of it. But what confuses me most is the terms from the announcement: “Most of the projects will be community-driven, and I’ll have final say over inclusion and rules disputes; however, regular contributors have the opportunity to become admins themselves, and private development space may become available!”

That doesn’t sound like a community driven wiki to me. Perhaps I misunderstand the intention of this thing.

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Press Pass Inc is canceling it’s trading card game based on the show 24. According to the source, it’s moving out of the games business, altogether.

The reason for 24’s cancellation was last year’s screen writer’s strike. Apparently, with the TV show out of commission, hype for the licensed product died down.

(source)

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Rusted Heroes is a new miniatures skirmish-style game from Fantization.

It uses 32mm minis and d10s for combat results. Most of the figures are scheduled to be released in August.

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Tenacious Games, publishers of The Spoils CCG, is closing down.

The reasons are to be found in a forum post, detailing the exact financial problems they encountered in the last two years. Essentially, they overspent, and failed to collect the last investment money as quickly as they required.

(source)

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The Fresno Bee covers Chris Handy, designer of Plext, Linkity, and Handy.

It’s a nice pimp piece for Euro games.

(source, hat tip)

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Only a few copies of the 115 year old Zimmer’s Baseball Game are known to exist. Some dude found a mint copy in the storage space in a servant’s bedroom.

The owner is currently resisting  a likely high auction price (similar games have sold for $27,000) and a museum entreaty for the game.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShBrK3wWRWY&feature=user]

(source)

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Mensa picks their favorites from a pool of submitted games during their Mind Games competition each year. This years picks are:

AmuseAmaze a word race in a maze game by HL Games

EyeKnow, a trivia poker game by EyeKnow Games

Jumbulaya, a tile word game by Platypus Games

Pixel, a sliding pattern alignment game by Educational Insights

Tiki Topple, a strategy card game by Gamewright

(source)

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Dead Gentlemen Productions, creators of the Demon Hunters RPG published by Margaret Weis Productions, as well as the original The Gamers film, have signed a deal with Anthem Pictures to distribute their latest project, The Gamers: Dorkness Rising. This film is a parody of fantasy films and adventure games, and features a dysfunctional roleplaying group. Anthem distributes independent films to major retailers and rental companies. Paizo Publishing will distribute Dorkness Rising to the hobby trade.

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The major industry of Hasbro is not games and toys but licensing. Most of Hasbro’s new games each year are the same games with new themes from movies, television shows, and other pop culture sensations.

Now, Hasbro is beginning to think of itself as a brand. Having acquired exclusive rights to some of the brands they use on their games, as well as having achieved top brand recognition for their own products, such as Monopoly, Hasbro’s new CEO is looking for ways to license their brands out to others, as is evident from recent news items about Hasbro movies, online games, game shows, and so on.

Which begs the question: are we going to see Hasbro products which are themselves the results of licensing end up relicensed to other products? A Powerpuff Monopoly television show, for instance? Maybe a Hannah Barbara UNO cartoon?

Where does it end? To paraphrase William Gibson (originally on Tommy Hilfiger ): There must be some sub-licensing event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more licensed, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

(source)

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