What's next on the agenda? Launching the Gen Con 2013 Preview on Tuesday, July 2, 2013. If you are a publisher or designer and you plan to sell/demo/give away/euthanize games at Gen Con, which takes place August 15-18 in Indianapolis, Indiana, please email information about those games to me using the address in the BGG News header. If the games aren't already in the BGG database, please submit them as you undoubtedly have a better understanding of your games than I do. If you plan to sell or demo games at Gen Con but don't want information about those games publicly known before a certain date, send the information to me anyway with an embargo date at the top of your message; I'll keep my trap shut until the date in question. (Include the embargo date on any game submissions, too, and feel free to use a pseudonym on the submission if the game name would be a giveaway for anyone scanning the list of pending game submissions.)
Honestly, I'd love for more designers and publishers to use embargo dates as I'd then have time to prepare news posts in advance. Heck, sending me any press release at all is a good way to find your games included in a BGG News post. I spot lots of new titles in my daily data sifting, but I can never see everything.
BoardGameGeek will have a stand at Gen Con 2013, and we plan to livestream game demonstrations and interviews similar to what we do at Spiel each year. Please don't contact us yet about scheduling a demo time in the BGG booth! Instead send me information about your games (including prices, booth number, preorder details, author signings, etc.), and we'll start our interview schedule by contacting publishers on the Gen Con 2013 Preview. Thanks!
• The Spiel 2013 Preview will go live on Tuesday, July 9, 2013, one day after the 2013 Spiel des Jahres winner is announced. Hanabi or Augustus? I'm still not sure. The former stretches game boundaries and would introduce families to a new style of game, while the latter provides a classic Eurogame experience with lots of tiny emergent card combos married to slot machine excitement as you beg and plead for the "right" token to appear. (Qwixx is a decent, light family-friendly game, but it's a distant third compared to the other two SdJ nominees.) As for Kennerspiel des Jahres, I think the fantasy-based co-operative game Andor will take the prize, even though I have zero interest in that game and am wildly enthusiastic about Bruges, which I've played four times now and absolutely adore.
In any case, the SdJ announcement serves as a coda for the 2012-2013 release season, so we might as well kick off the 2013-2014 season by getting an overview of what to expect October 24-27, 2013 at Spiel, the annual game convention in Essen, Germany that is the place to launch your next release to wild acclaim (or to miserable silence, but let's try to look on the bright side for now). The same request for Gen Con applies here: Publishers and designers, send me information about the games you plan to sell or demo at Spiel 2013! Use embargo dates freely if you don't want game info announced now, but if you wait until September or (someone get me the smelling salts) early October, you might get overlooked in the rush. The Spiel tidal wave grows each year, and ideally you can be at the crest of that wave instead of a speck of water lost amongst all the other drops. To do that, though, you need to get your game information into the public eye, and appearing on BGG's Spiel 2013 Preview (which already has more than one hundred items listed!) is an ideal way to do that. Less than four months to go until the doors open in Essen...