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Links: Trajan Wins the 2012 IGA, Looney Labs Sells a Lot of Fluxx & How Not to Run a Small Game Business

Links: Trajan Wins the 2012 IGA, Looney Labs Sells a Lot of Fluxx & How Not to Run a Small Game Business
From gallery of W Eric Martin
• I'm a bit behind the news curve due to my focus on the Spiel 2012 Preview and the attendant addition of games to the BGG database and rewriting of game descriptions, so you might have heard this news already. If not, here we go: The winners of the 2012 International Gamers Awards have been announced, with Stefan Feld's Trajan from Ammonit Spiele winning the multi-player award and Uwe Rosenberg's Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small from Lookout Games winning the two-player award. (You can view the twelve nominees in the former category and the four in the latter in this BGGN post.) Congrats to the winners!

(Note: I'm on the IGA jury for the general strategy category, but for the second year running I have abstained from submitting a nominee list.)

• Alain Ollier's The Boss is now playable in a beta version on Board Game Arena, while Emiliano Venturini's tricky-sounding Carnac has been added to BoardSpace.net.

 
• UK publisher Reiver Games went out of business in 2011, but in addition to working on new game designs, owner Jackson Pope has been thinking about what went wrong with his business, and his analysis might be of use to all the young guns starting up as publishers these days. An excerpt:

Quote:
I tried to move from being a small hobby publisher with a dedicated, but small, army of fans to being a full-size pro publisher with professionally manufacturer games and sales and distribution channels. And I tried to do it too quickly. If I was a marketing genius, it's conceivable that it could be done, but it was a long shot and I didn't have it in me.
Board Game: Fluxx
• Designer Andrew Looney and his wife Kristin – co-owners of U.S. publisher Looney Labs – were featured in The Gazette, a newspaper published in Maryland, which is where they live. One detail of note: "The company offers 20 game titles, with numerous playing styles, and generates about $1 million in yearly revenues. They hope to exceed that sales total this year with the entrance of Fluxx into the mainstream market."

• Designer Tony Boydell is up to his usual word play in his BGG blog with a ludic reimagining of a classic number from Queen (and that's not a shortening of Queen Games, mind you). An excerpt:

Quote:
Are these the real dice?
For Fighting Fantasy?
Caught in Wallenstein
No Escape! from Polarity...
Open your Ice, Flow up to Sun-Sand and Sea (!)
I'm just a Troyes boy I need no Sympathie
Take It Easy come, easy go; little high, little low
And Before the Wind blows doesn't really matter Tomy, Tomy...

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