Links: The History of Dice, Behind the Scenes at Zoch & Faidutti Packs It In?

Germany was one of the biggest markets for board games in the 1980s and 1990s and so having a games company over that time has been a wonderful experience. However the rest of the world has woken up to this so there is a bit of a crisis in Germany. Everybody is seeking to sell their games into the German market with some great games coming out of the Czech Republic, Italy, Korea, and Brazil amongst other countries, and the number of games being produced is just not sustainable given the current levels of demand.

Over the years the German games publishers have had a convivial rivalry with it being like a big family where everybody is doing their own thing but we all know each other. Increasingly though the smaller retail outlets are not taking games, and whilst the big chain stores do, they don't have staff that understand the games and can demonstrate them. We are also increasingly seeing companies coming into our market with games very similar to ours and or with very similar artwork but ultimately nothing new, other than at a lower price point!

This website was originally designed like a small game encyclopaedia, and this concept has become largely obsolete, for at least two reasons. First, there are more and more new board and card games every year, and I play fewer of them every year, which makes the ideal game library much less relevant. Second, the internet also has changed, and encyclopaedias are now collective stuff. There is more even about my own games on the Boardgamegeek than on my own website.

This is why, in a few weeks, I plan to shut down this website and replace it with a more modest, more standard, but also more actual blog, with only short descriptions of my games and the occasional op-ed, not necessarily always about games.