Links: Spielwarenmesse 2021 Gets Delayed, and Aleph Null Gets a Soundtrack

• In 2021, Spielwarenmesse — the annual toy and game fair that takes place during the intersection of January and February each year in Nürnberg, Germany — will instead be held July 20-24. As the convention organizer notes: "The decision was made taking in consideration rising infection rates and further restrictions on travel."

In early October 2020, Spielwarenmesse had announced a later starting date, but had not specified when the fair would take place. The organizers revealed this new date on October 28 — the same day that German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a month-long partial lockdown that will begin on Nov. 2, 2020 due to a doubling of patients admitted to intensive care units and an inability to trace the source of 75% of current infections.

I would expect more delays to be announced soon for NY Toy Fair, FIJ, and other conventions. (FIJ has announced a delay in the launch of its marketing for FIJ 2021, but not yet a delay of the event itself.) Personally, I'm expecting all in-person conventions for 2021 to be cancelled. Previously I had hope that SPIEL '21 (scheduled for Oct. 14-17) might be the first show to take place as normal, but now I'm ready to wipe the calendar and revisit BGG's 2021 plans for online game coverage following five such outings in 2020.

As for SPIEL, Friedhelm Merz Verlag reports that during Oct. 22-25, 2020 the SPIEL.digital platform "recorded 148,000 individual visitors". Additionally, "The official SPIEL.digital livestreams, which were offered in many world languages and provided an informative and varied program, also had over a million hits and were extremely popular."

Merz Verlag is more optimistic than I am, ending its press release about SPIEL.digital 2020 as follows: "The next SPIEL International Games Event will take place at the exhibition halls at the Messe Essen from October 14 to 17, 2021."

• Game and puzzle designer Wei-Hwa Huang (Roll for the Galaxy) was interviewed in Science News about puzzle creation and other related experiences.

• David Preti, COO of CMON Limited was interviewed on the ChiTAG website about his view of the game industry's current state and future. An excerpt:

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I also think that at some point the competition will die down a bit. Not only is it getting more expensive to make the games, but the bar to get noticed has become very, very high. The industry went from being the wild west to the golden age quickly. There will always be room for new publishers, or self-published passion projects, but there are growing challenges for smaller publishers.

• Nicholas O'Neill blogs about games daily on BGG in Meepleonboard, but he's also a composer and musician — and one of his current projects is composing a piano-based suite to accompany the forthcoming solitaire card game Aleph Null from Tony Boydell, a game of deck deconstruction and devil summoning. O'Neill gives an overview of his approach in this blog post. An excerpt:

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The first thing that I needed to do with the music was to decide on the harmonic and melodic raw materials, so the DNA of the vertical placement of notes (=harmony/chords) and their horizontal placement (=melody), and these can be the same as each other or different. The tools that I use tend to depend upon the subject matter at hand, as well as other concerns, and as long as the language is consistent throughout then the piece inhabits its own sound world.

While this process can be quite abstract in pieces without themes, Aleph Null is kind enough to come with its own subject matter as well as a set of titles for the various hours of the game, which progresses through the night from sunset to cock crow. However, this is anything but a calm and serene experience, for the player is attempting to thin out the deck and summon Baphomet, so the music needs to possess contradictory elements of calm and of tension, of repose and of fear, in order to work well.

Aleph Null has not been announced yet, but Boydell mentions in passing that he's been testing the game regularly with Matthias Nagy of Frosted Games, which co-published Boydell's solitaire game Lux Aeterna in 2019. Here's a video overview of Aleph Null from Boydell: