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Best Board Game
— Abyss
— The Battle of Five Armies
— Ca$h 'n Guns (second edition)
— Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game
— Sheriff of Nottingham
Best Card Game
— Among the Stars
— Linko!
— Splendor
— Star Realms
— Sushi Go!
Best Children's, Family & Party Game
— Archer: The Danger Zone! Board Game
— Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension
— Tales & Stories: The Hare & the Tortoise
Best Historical Board Game
— 1066, Tears to Many Mothers
— Armada Invincible
— Heroes of Normandie
— Last Chance for Victory
Members of the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design now vote on the nominees in each category — with many more categories shown at the link above — with the winners being announced during the 2015 Origins Game Fair, which takes place June 3-7, 2015.— Abyss
— The Battle of Five Armies
— Ca$h 'n Guns (second edition)
— Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game
— Sheriff of Nottingham
Best Card Game
— Among the Stars
— Linko!
— Splendor
— Star Realms
— Sushi Go!
Best Children's, Family & Party Game
— Archer: The Danger Zone! Board Game
— Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension
— Tales & Stories: The Hare & the Tortoise
Best Historical Board Game
— 1066, Tears to Many Mothers
— Armada Invincible
— Heroes of Normandie
— Last Chance for Victory
• Nominations have also been announced for the Dice Tower Awards, with the nominees being decided by more than fifty reviewers and bloggers, and the winners will be announced June 26, 2015 at the Dice Tower Convention. From the many categories that exist, I'll highlight the nominees for the one category that subsumes most of the others:
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Best Game of the Year
— Alchemists
— Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game
— Five Tribes
— Imperial Settlers
— Kanban: Automotive Revolution
— Marvel Dice Masters: Avengers vs. X-Men
— Splendor
— Star Realms
— Star Wars: Imperial Assault
— Xia: Legends of a Drift System
• A BBC article by Chris Baraniuk on placebo buttons — buttons that do nothing when you push them — tickled me for some reason. I was reminded of the frequent comments from game designers that when creating a game, you should remove options that players rarely or never choose in order to streamline the thought process required to play. Why confound people with options that aren't real options, the thinking goes — yet here's a purposeful reason for why such options exist in the real world.— Alchemists
— Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game
— Five Tribes
— Imperial Settlers
— Kanban: Automotive Revolution
— Marvel Dice Masters: Avengers vs. X-Men
— Splendor
— Star Realms
— Star Wars: Imperial Assault
— Xia: Legends of a Drift System
One game-related excerpt from the article:
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To understand [the effect of such placebos on] people you have to go back to the early 1970s. At that time, psychologist Ellen Langer, now a professor at Harvard, was a graduate student at Yale. During a five card draw game of poker she dealt one set of cards in a haphazard order.
"Everybody," she says, "got crazy. The cards somehow belonged to the other person even though you couldn't see any of them." Langer decided to find out more about the way people regulated the playing of such games. She went to a casino where, at the slot machines, she found gamblers with elaborate ways of pulling the lever. At another time a "highly rational" fellow student tried to explain to her why tossing a pair of dice could be done in a certain way to affect the numbers which came up. "People believed that all of these behaviours were going to increase the probability of their winning," she comments.
Naturally they were wrong and for many people a simple objective proof of the matter would have been enough. But not for Langer. The strength of the gamblers' convictions was, to her, not trivial.
• Purple Pawn reports on BoardGamesMaker.com, a new game manufacturer in Hong Kong that has a huge price list that lays out the costs for everything up front, allowing a designer or publisher to choose components from the provided lists, upload artwork, and start publication — kind of like taking The Game Crafter model and converting it to an actual manufacturing run, although tokens, dice and other common game elements are not included on the price list."Everybody," she says, "got crazy. The cards somehow belonged to the other person even though you couldn't see any of them." Langer decided to find out more about the way people regulated the playing of such games. She went to a casino where, at the slot machines, she found gamblers with elaborate ways of pulling the lever. At another time a "highly rational" fellow student tried to explain to her why tossing a pair of dice could be done in a certain way to affect the numbers which came up. "People believed that all of these behaviours were going to increase the probability of their winning," she comments.
Naturally they were wrong and for many people a simple objective proof of the matter would have been enough. But not for Langer. The strength of the gamblers' convictions was, to her, not trivial.
• In March 2015, I linked to a video of Persi Diaconis, Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University, explaining the best and worst ways to shuffle cards. Diaconis has now been featured in an article in Quanta Magazine about his efforts to study the randomness of the shuffling technique that he refers to as smooshing. An excerpt:
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This toddler-level technique involves spreading the cards out on a table, swishing them around with your hands, and then gathering them up. Smooshing is used in poker tournaments and in baccarat games in Monte Carlo, but no one actually knows how long you need to smoosh a deck to randomize it. "Smooshing is a completely different mechanism from the other shuffles, and my usual techniques don't fit into that," Diaconis said. The problem has tantalized him for decades.
Now he is on a quest to solve it. He has carried out preliminary experiments suggesting that one minute of ordinary smooshing may be enough for all practical purposes, and he is now analyzing a mathematical model of smooshing in an attempt to prove that assertion.
Fascinating stuff in that article...
Now he is on a quest to solve it. He has carried out preliminary experiments suggesting that one minute of ordinary smooshing may be enough for all practical purposes, and he is now analyzing a mathematical model of smooshing in an attempt to prove that assertion.
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