GAMA Trade Show 2010 Report–Part 2
This Part 2 of my ongoing coverage of the GAMA Trade Show 2010! Check back tomorrow for more or subscribe to the Livingdice.com RSS feed and not miss a single post.
Trask
Imports Dragon sells an a chess-variant called “Crusade and Conquer.” It uses some chess pieces and adds some fortifications and new rules involving which pieces can capture the king. They said 5000 copies of this game have already sold, so there is some interest. I received a demo copy of this game, so expect a full review in the very near future. Imports Dragon also had the most…unusual booth mascot of the entire show.
The Origins Awards was the GAMA voting area for retailers. The books had information about each nominee and you just dropped your votes into the box. Sadly, I am not allowed to vote, retailers only. 🙁
Mindware sells educational toys and games. Two of note were Q-bitz, a particularly difficult game involving rolling cubes and then making the pre-defined pattern on the card. You do it with the card and in the final round, you create the pattern from memory! Zenith is a stacking strategy game. One game I could not figure out was “Dizios.” It is a swirled-dominoes game. Basically the same as dominoes, but I could not get my brain wrapped around the swirls. Still, Dizios looked like a nice variation on an ancient game.
Bucephalus Games
Bucephalus Games gave me a quick demo of “Zombie Mosh Pit.” Players join a mosh pit filled with zombies and try to chew off other zombies limbs, while protecting their own. “Kachina” is a tile-based game of strategy. Players with the best kachina dolls claim rows of tiles for points. There are some wild cards and special tiles to keep things interesting.
On the horizon is “The Duke” an abstract strategy game and “Timestream” a non-collectible card game in the vein of “Dominion.” “Timestream” lets you pit fighters from various historical eras against each other. A new “Timestream” supplement comes out at Gen Con and “The Duke” arrives this fall.
Family Games America produces the excellent “Sacred Myths and Legends” puzzle series, of which I am a fan. There are riddles inside the puzzles and they are very, very hard. I have yet to get one figured out and then I meet a nice woman working the booth that claims to have written the riddles! I grovelled, begged and offered bribes, but still no success. She did mention the last puzzle “Secrets of the Pyramids” comes out this year and at some point after that release, FGA will release the riddle solutions.
FGS also has a line of family games and abstract strategy games. I rather liked the “Kewbz” game, where players score based on getting building corners with their cubes.
GHQ is a miniature and terrain publisher. They have a line of miniatures based on the “Wehrmacht 47”. “Wehrmacht 47” miniatures represent what the German army had on the drawing board for 1947. It is a “micro” miniature line, so they are very small. That said, they fit very nicely on the foam terrain blocks GHQ produces. It is a bit hard to see in my images, but there are rolling hills on the terrain setup. GHQ also sells books with pre-designed layouts for famous battles. All you have to do is assemble the foam blocks in the pattern and you have an instant historical battlefield.
PSI is a distributor for games. They distribute to retailers both large and small. A couple of the game publishers were sharing the PSI booth.
Tablestar had a new expansion for their board game “Wealth of Nations” entitled “War Clouds.” As you might expect, it adds a military component to the original game. Apparently some players of the original expressed concern there was no way to “catch” an early leader. “War Clouds” resolves this issue by allow players to disrupt production by taking and holding territory. I have a review copy of the original and the expansion, so a review is forthcoming.
Michael of Tasty Minstrel has his two releases “Homesteaders” and “Terra Prime” on display. I have never personally played these games, but you can get more information on the Minstrel site. Also, I should mention that Michael runs a weekly free contest that gives away free copies of these games.
Check back tomorrow for more coverage of GTS 2010!
Trask, The Last Tyromancer
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