Convention Preview Update: Competing Nürnberg and New York Toy Fair Previews!

Convention Preview Update: Competing Nürnberg and New York Toy Fair Previews!
From gallery of W Eric Martin
From gallery of W Eric Martin
For your viewing pleasure, I submit not one, but two convention previews: the previously available (and still growing) Nürnberg 2012 Preview and the newly published New York Toy Fair 2012 Preview. This latter preview is a first for me, although sometimes on Boardgame News I would roll games due to be shown at NY Toy Fair into the Nürnberg Preview. Why go through the effort of creating two separate previews, I would ask myself?

Well, now thanks to the awesome database-driven powers of BGG, creating two such previews is far easier than it would have been previously. What's more, I'm receiving more information about NY Toy Fair titles that I have in previous years, partly due to me asking for more and partly due to publishers and users submitting material on their own to the BGG database. Also, I think I have enough history at NY Toy Fair – four years of attendance, with another trip coming in mid-February 2012 – to have a good sense of which publishers will be there, so I know where to look.

I haven't published a new game round-up in a few days, but if you check out both previews, you'll find a wealth of new game listings to ponder including:

• A half-dozen mini Carcassonne expansions from Hans im Glück (as well as 999 Games). I've asked Rio Grande whether it will carry these expansions, too, and will report back once I hear something.

• Seven titles from Zoch Verlag, nearly all of which have no description for now but merely images that invite speculation.

• Another handful of games from Ravensburger, including a full description of the Reiner Knizia title Indigo, which previously had only a "to be described later" tag.

• A print-and-playish title from Stefan Risthaus and his new self-publishing company OSTIA Spiele – Speicherstadt Hamburg – that will be available in varying levels of completeness depending on how much work you want to do yourself.

• Another wave of titles from Kosmos, now that the publisher has released information about its entire line for the first half of 2012.

Board Game: Peek-a-Boo!
• A new title from Drei Magier Spiele that once again uses mirrors – Spiegel Spukschloss – that is also the only item to also appear on the New York Toy Fair Preview, with Playroom Entertainment being the publisher responsible. In fact, Playroom has a half-dozen titles in its English-language "Three Magicians" line, a few of which have been previously released – The Magic Labyrinth, Magician's Kitchen – while others are newly on the release schedule from the Drei Magier line. (I love the ghosts for hyphens in the image at left. Clever!)

• Also on the NY Toy Fair preview are a half-dozen titles from Gamewright including Scallywags, a nice-looking version of the print-and-play title Dubloons; more than a dozen titles from HABA – the U.S. branch of HABA, mind you, which releases its games roughly six months after the founding German branch has done so – a half-dozen titles from Blue Orange Games including impressively licensed versions of Spot It!, and a few other titles from Playroom, such as the next Killer Bunnies spin-off, namely Psychic Penguins and the Voyage Home. That last one is like a line from Burroughs' The Soft Machine...

I'm still waiting for the German branch of HABA to drop its own elephantine mass of press information, not to mention confirmation from Hans im Glück about its line. Pegasus has more to share, I think, and my inbox keeps getting pinged with news of this or that. Subscribe to one Preview or both, and you'll get updates as I add new titles to them. So much still to come!

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