![Links: Funding, Broadcasting, and Designing Tabletop Games](https://cf.geekdo-images.com/ltsaHxGVQpbvDO2zrfXSQw__medium/img/UfDLLTnYpCiyIB7mDRcHGMAxhU0=/fit-in/500x500/filters:no_upscale():strip_icc()/pic2926407.jpg)
• The River Falls Journal in Wisconsin profiled Booty designer Alexander Cobian in Dec. 2015, and it's the type of local press that designers should always seek out as it introduces the idea of modern games to people who aren't already in the know, in turn creating an audience for the very thing being featured.
• I ran across a post on Facebook in February 2016 that announced a new service for Spiel 2016 that will package and ship your games so that you can avoid playing luggage Tetris or make travel easier on yourself should you be wandering around Europe — but the link that I sent myself no longer works, so we'll just have to keep our eyes out for news of this service in the future.
• I've linked to many posts from designer Grant Rodiek recently, but he keeps writing things that stick with me, so here's another article from him, one that separates flavor from theme and boils theme down into two principles:
-----—The experience has a narrative arc.
-----—Player actions are indicative of the theme, and you do things in character.
(This article is #9 of Rodiek's The 54 Card Guild series in which he writes about creating a game that consists of at most 54 cards, while inviting readers to join the process and create something themselves, too.)
• Speaking of thematic, in Feb. 2016 the Israeli game blog Pundak published a long interview with Roberto Di Meglio of Ares Games. Di Meglio details the fall of Nexus, discusses the focus of Ares Games ("create beautiful thematic games"), and tells a few great stories, such as this detail about the design of War of the Ring:
This was achieved through the combination of the Hunt system, the Fellowship movement system, and the action dice system in general. Sauron cannot "attack" the Fellowship; he can just "hunt for the Ring" and decide how much attention is given to that, and how much attention to the war — allocating Hunt dice. But he is obsessed by the Ring — so he does not have perfect control of this choice. And the hidden movement system (somebody says it's the Schrödinger's Fellowship — you never know where it is, until you find it) makes the Fellowship somewhat "out of sight" for both players.
And regarding the tenth anniversary edition of War of the Ring, Di Meglio says, "Warriors of Middle-earth is going to have a painted edition. And we are planning a third — and final — expansion after that, and we want it to have a painted version, too. After that, I like the idea of getting everything together in one box — but maybe such a 'monster edition' will be impossible to create and sell, so that's far from a sure thing."