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And speaking of Donald X., his Nefarious from Ascora Games also arrived at Spiel 2011, but only in limited numbers. Ascora received 200 of an expected thousand copies, and those copies had only one of the two coin sheets that they needed, so Ascora's Scott Tepper had to double up on the coin sheets and leave 100 unsaleable games piled in the corner of his booth. Those other hundred copies ready for sale? Gone in just over two hours.
Panic Station was another early blowout, with all hundred copies claimed from both White Goblin Games and Stronghold Games in under a half-hour.
Designer Igor Krasnodymov, hoping to release his first design – the quasi-village-crawler Haunted Village – said that he would know Friday morning whether or not his games would be coming in time. For the time being, he was demoing the game in otherwise empty booth.
Gung Ho Games and Pirates of Nassau co-designer Richard Glazer was in the same boat, demoing the game and saying that the published game will be available first in the UK in December 2011. He hoped to at least receive production samples on Friday so that he could show off the finished quality of the game.
Cambridge Games Factory had received copies of Barons (€15) and – somewhat more importantly – tables and chairs early on Thursday, in addition to mostly finished copies of Pala. (They lacked the finished gameboard and player reminders, but were otherwise the same as the copies to appear in stores later. CGF is taking preorders for its late 2011 releases Pala and Quills (€10 each) and Montana (€15) with free worldwide shipping offered, too. Free shipping on a €10 game seems like a break-even business model at best, but perhaps CGF is picking up a cut from the postal services around the world.
And naturally a number of publishers previously unknown or unannounced had booths with unexpected games, such as Singapore publisher Cardboard Island Games with its racing/hand-management game Dash. Each player has individual decks of movement cards, along with a half-dozen special powers, and players move based on playing stronger single cards, pairs and triples. As with other publishers I run across at Spiel 2011, I'll follow up later to get more game details and images and list them all in the BGG database.
CocoDice, which won a reddot design award, is a funky take on dice as the pips have been replaced by notches and bevels so that you have to look at the edges of a die to determine which number is on a face. A bit difficult to see at first, but perhaps with experience you can scan them more easily. The dice also have magnetic faces, so you can stick them together into squares and cubes. The four-die set includes puzzle cards that show four numbers in a square, such as 6-4-3-5, and to complete the puzzle you must arrange the dice so that the faces show the numbers on the puzzle card and the notches and bevels match across the adjacent dice. Seems tricky but also pricey – four dice sell for €20 at Spiel, with the 36-die pack going for €60.
Stronghold Games presents its 2011 titles in the BGG booth at 17:00 and has promised a huge announcement – but that announcement has already been spoiled on The Dice Tower podcast with word that Stronghold will release a new edition of Richard Hamblen's Merchant of Venus in 2012. Stronghold's Kevin Nesbitt had promised to me on Thursday that no bigger news would come out of Spiel 2011. We'll see how that promise holds up over the next few days...
Georg Wild at Hans im Glück says the Rio Grande Games will release Greg Daigle's Hawaii in English. No release date for this version, but Sophie Gravel said that the French version from Filosofia should be out in January/February 2012, so perhaps both version will be moving to market at the same time. Perhaps.
The Lamont brothers ended up receiving about 1,000 copies of Poseidon's Kingdom, so they did have copies to sell to passers-by.
Not only did Splotter Spellen have a reprint of Antiquity for sale in its booth; it also had copies of Indonesia, Greed Incorporated and Duck Dealer. Zoinks!
More later...
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