GAMA Trade Show 2011 Exhibitor Coverage–Part 7
Today’s GTS 2011 report includes, Konami, Hobby-Q (formerly Reaper Miniatures), Twisted Entertainment, Out of the Box Publishing, Chessex and Outrider Hobbies.
Last year’s winner for best of show returned with Yu-Gi-Oh, but added a new CCG “Super Heat.” In this CCG players use cards to do skateboarding tricks and earn points towards victory. Card art looked good and production quality appeared solid. Remains to be seen if this more “realistic” CCG style will catch on.
Hobby-Q is the new name of Reaper Miniatures and Asylum Miniatures. They stated that the original names were not “friendly” enough for some toy and game stores. Besides their Master Series Paint line, some quite nice miniature kits recently released. The boxes are themed with several unpainted metal miniatures inside a hard-plastic carrying case. Here is a shot of the new cases without miniatures.
Not custom cut foam, but still a nice bonus when buying miniatures.
Hobby-Q also offers a line of museum quality animal replicas under their “CollectA” banner. Mostly dinosaurs, but that is ok because as a kid I could never have too many large plastic dinosaurs. Hard to tell from the photo, but the construction and paint on these figures/toys is quite good.
Twisted Entertainment is a GTS newcomer with a new CCG. Rather than the usual mechanics, the game uses a rock-paper-scissors combat system and stickers. Yes, rather than cards it uses collectible stickers. This allows children to play anywhere with minimal preparation time. An online challenge component is under development as well as a “home base” registration feature designed to get players in to game stores for tournaments. This game has a May 19th, 2011 release date.
“Shake and Take” and “Faux-cabulary” were the latest family releases from Out of the Box. Faux-cbulary involves rolling dice with parts of words and generating a new, fake word that every agrees best matches a definition on a drawn card. A family game, it played a round and found it amusing. Shake and Take is a spoons-like game with a “capture the alien” theme. Players grab for aliens as they appear on the alien die. Plays fast and looks like a fun, light party game.
Outrider had a wide assortment of cut foam and cases for miniature transport. I got a kick out of the hot pink miniature case. That takes a very confident, manly gamer to walk into a 40K tournament with his Eldar in a hot pink transport case.
Besides a plethora of pre-cut foam, Outrider has a large catalog of pre-designed foam trays for a variety of miniatures (40K, Wings of War and many others). Bryan (the owner) is also branching out into foam trays for board games. You can see the “Dungeonquest” tray in the image above. This is still under development and there will be further announcements about the board game line.
Chessex makes dice and they add new colors regularly. Simply not a lot to say about this company, they make great dice and produce them in lots of colors. Check out their site for more information about options. There are literally thousands!
And the march continues… More tomorrow!
Trask, The Last Tyromancer
