Links: Kickstarter Game Survey, Making Achievements Work & a Glitzy Puerto Rico?

• On Purple Pawn, Yehuda Berlinger has surveyed successful and failed board game funding projects on Kickstarter and compiled feedback from more than a dozen designers/publishers. Lots to mull over for anyone considering something along these lines.

• Although focused on video games and not board games, a series of articles on Gamasutra on "How to Design Effective Achievements" – part 1 and part 2, with part 3 to come – might be of interest to those who care about game design as some of the principles can be ported to analog games. (HT: Tim Moore)

• Tom Gurganus at Go Forth and Game interviews designer John Clowdus about his one-man publishing empire Small Box Games.

• One more sign of how BGG ≠ all gamers: In a Spielbox news item on game sales by Ravensburger in 2010, Schlag den Raab: Das Spiel is credited with sales of 200,000 copies, with 2008 Kinderspiel des Jahres winner Wer war's? notching the second-highest sales total. Number of owners of Schlag den Raab: Das Spiel on BGG? 27.

(If you've never seen Stefan Raab's performance of "Wadde hadde dudde da?" at Eurovision 2000, you are missing something. Not sure whether you'll think it's good or bad, but it's certainly something.)

• Bohnanza is now available via iTunes for play in both English and German on the iPhone or iPad.

• Sage Board Games flashes a screenshot of the Puerto Rico iOS app, while noting that Ravensburger is now reviewing the app.

• In other Puerto Rico news, with 2012 being the tenth anniversary of this Andreas Seyfarth design, some folks have been clamoring for a special anniversary edition, one that at a minimum gussies up the artwork and at a maximum includes land deeds for property on the island. In a May 2011 interview on Brettspielblog.ch, alea developer Stefan Brück says that the company will have a "gepimpte" (i.e., pimped) anniversary version of PR at Spiel 2011 to mark the game's tenth anniversary at that convention (as PR was previewed at Spiel before being released in 2002). Rio Grande Games' Jay Tummelson has also expressed interest in doing something special for PR:

Quote:

I too like the idea of a special 10yr anniversary edition. If we do one, it will certainly have upgraded graphics and components. I suspect it will be a limited edition and not replace the "standard" PR. I also expect it will be much more expensive than the regular PR. Also, we will not make the upgraded components available separately. As soon as I have information on whether and what we will offer, I will make an announcement.

(HT: EndersGame, who is one of those calling for pimpage)

• And finally a note of possibly little interest to all but the grammarheads out there: In case you haven't noticed (and I wouldn't be surprised if you haven't), I've adopted the UK standard of punctuation in relation to quotation marks for BGG News – that is, all punctuation is placed outside the quotation marks unless the punctuation is part of the quoted material. Turns out that I'm riding the wave toward "logical punctuation" that's been developing online, a topic discussed in this Slate article from Ben Yagoda. For years on BGN I stuck with what I had been taught and what was standard in U.S. media, but I changed gears during my sabbatical. Why? To quote from the article: "For some, though, logic is more compelling than tradition." Logic for the win!