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Many interesting new releases were available at PLAY, including Augustus by Paolo Mori, Dungeon Venture by Marco Barbarti, and C.O.A.L. by Stefano Castelli. Interesting, soon-to-be-released games were also at the show for gamers to test, such as Galaxy Defenders, Carnival Zombie and Concordia.
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Of course given the location of PLAY, naturally it was the right place to present Italian editions of new games like Kemet, River Dragons, Anno Domini: Avvenimenti bizzarri, Náufragos, and many others. In addition to these releases, many Italian designers – such as Mario Papini, Andrea Chiarvesio and Pierluca Zizzi – presented prototypes, and a few non-Italians did as well, including Ignacy Trzewiczek and Mac Gerdts, our guest in PLAY.
Self-publishers showed up in the expected numbers in the great Area Autoproduzione, coordinated by designer/publisher Angelo Porazzi. It was really great to know that seventeen years after his first release, Porazzi was still able to sell all the copies of Warangel at PLAY during the event.
PLAY was also full of meetings that involved gamers, designers, publishers, teachers and universities — all on the topic of games — but what made PLAY a real heaven for gamers was the more than one thousand tables of games: demo tables from publishers, tables managed by gamer associations, and a lot of tables for free boardgaming. Some data points related solely to the area managed by La Tana dei Goblin, which represents more than two dozen Italian game associations:
• 160 games available in the game library with 130 different titles
• 361 games lent over the two days that were used by more than 1,500 gamers
• 60 tables of ready-to-play games
• 25 tables of ready-to-play games for kids
In the LEGO Games booth alone, more than 4,000 people played games, while in the Cornhole area players made more than 40,000 throws!
PLAY: The Games Festival will next take place in April 2014, and by this time the PLAY website will be fully bilingual in Italian and English.
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