Links: 7 Wonders and Forbidden Island Awarded Again, Stolen Eggs & The Benefits of Plagiarism

• Multi-award winners Antoine Bauza and 7 Wonders have picked up another trophy for the mantle: Vuoden Peli, or the Finnish Game of the Year award. The other titles nominated in the "adult game" category were Mr. Jack and Repello.

Forbidden Island also added another win to its list of awards, winning the family category over A la Carte and Mondo. Richard Scarry's Busytown: Eye found it! take the prize for best children's game over Dizios and Animal Upon Animal: Balancing Bridge.

• Out of the Box Publishing is adding a QR code to the back cover of Word on the Street "to allow customers to view a video demonstration right on their phones while standing in the store", according to an August 2011 press release. (For those clueless as to what a QR code is, head to the Wikipedia page.) Anyone know of other examples of QR codes on board/card games?

• Italian publisher dV Giochi, a.k.a. dV Games, is holding a contest in honor of its tenth anniversary in which gamers are invited to submit photos of themselves living out one of the games in the dV Giochi catalog. For each of dV's four product lines – Bang!, Wolf Party, Maestro and One & Fun – the company will pick one winner, who picks up exclusive items. And one of these individuals will win a "lifetime supply of dV games". Complete details are on the dV Giochi website in English (PDF) and Italian (PDF).

• Mayfair Games has announced a new three-year sponsorship agreement with Gen Con LLC, following its initial sponsorship of the con in 2011. From the press release:

Quote:

This partnership between the premier board game producer and the largest hobby games convention in the world was such a success it has been expanded and extended for three additional years. In particular Mayfair Games will have an expanded show presence with programs such as the Family Outreach Program, Giant Games and Ribbon Quest, all in a drive to expand and grow the popular board game pastime and make Mayfair synonymous with board games in the minds of enthusiasts everywhere.

This sponsorship deal also insures Mayfair is doing its part to help the "Best Four Days In Gaming" become even better and shows that Mayfair is willing to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to supporting Gen Con now and in the future.

• Yspahan can now be played online at BoardSpace.net, and Luna is available online in beta version at Yucata.de.

• Designer John Poniske challenges you to create the "most advantageous strategy" possible for the U.S. player in a scenario from Lincoln's War, with the best strategist winning a copy of the game.

• TricTrac.net highlights an Argentinian rip-off of Roberto Fraga's Dancing Eggs.

• Gaming's grand poobah and organizer of the International Gamers Awards Greg Schloesser has overhauled the website for the East Tennessee Gamers, the group with which he plays, and the site is loaded with reviews old and new from Schloesser as well as decent back-and-forth discussion of other new games.

• Anne Hathaway is a big Scrabble nerd.

• Not a link to new material, but new to me: Anyone who views certain game designs as too derivative might consider reading Jonathan Lethem's article "The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism" from the February 2007 issue of Harper's Magazine in which he argues (while writing about other artistic media) that we should expect nothing less:

Quote:

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul – let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances – is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks?