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• Designer Bruno Faidutti announces his nominees for 2011 Game of the Year, and the list is as eclectic as ever – a good thing from my perspective, as my tastes tend to be similarly all over the place. Update, July 13: Just as this news item went live, I discovered that Faidutti had announced his winner: Ian Cooper's Ascending Empires from Z-Man Games.
• In an earlier blog post, Faidutti riffs on expansions, both why he doesn't like to design them for his games and what succeeds as an expansion (and what doesn't) from his point of view.
• In a deviation from usual practices, designer John Clowdus has ordered stock of both Omen: A Reign of War and Irondale and has them ready to ship. He's also stuck with his standard business model of "open a preorder window once a month to gang print everything at the same time", and the list of titles available for preorder, along with Omen and Irondale, can be seen at the Small Box Games website.
• Some gamers are petitioning GAMA to move the dates of the Origins Game Fair, which is scheduled for late May/early June in 2012 and 2013 after years of being held in late June/early July. The problem for many is that the dates for the next two years fall within the school year, which makes it impossible for them to attend. (HT: Peter Charnley)
• German game component retailer Spielmaterial.de hosted a "design a game bit" contest a while back and has now announced the winner: Rene Bongartz, who designed this three-part poppel that allows players to mix-and-match colors. The bits will naturally be sold through Spielmaterial, with Bongartz receiving one cent per pawn sold and an additional one cent per token sold going to a charity of Bongartz' choice. A promotional image from the retailer showing off these bits in action is below:
• Issue 2011/4 of Spielbox, due out July 18 in Germany, will include 130 Carcassonne stickers of followers, big followers and pigs. What would a person do with 130 Carcassonne stickers? Why, whatever he or she wants naturally.
• The German Times ran an English-language article online with the oh-so-cliché title "Serious Fun" on the rise of "German board games" throughout the world. (HT: Jeffrey Allers, who added this note about the article, "A few things I did not know that apparently contributed to the boardgame scene in Germany: Tobacco promotion and Peace movements. Now THAT's an interesting equation: Big Tobacoo + Neo Hippies = Good Board Games!")
• In a sequel of sorts to his previous celebration of back of the box shots, Universal Head rags on bombastically cliché game descriptions.
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