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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• Portal Publishing challenges you to score more than everyone else in the solo variant for 51st State, with the high scorer taking home a copy of The New Era. Beat the Polish champion's score of 148 and you win Prêt-à-Porter, too.
• On August 24, 2011, Lars Rose, who runs the weekly radio show "Global Voices" on Finding Voices Radio, talked board game design with Graeme Jahns (Alba Longa), Roberta Taylor (Octopus' Garden, Sherwood Showdown), Sen-Foong Lim, and Jay Cormier (Belfort, Train of Thought) and organized a game-related playlist to match the guests and their games. Check out the playlist and listen to the podcast here.
• German retailer Spielmaterial.de has started a new game design contest in which designers are tasked with repurposing these metal boxes:
For those who recognize the tins, they are from Hart an der Grenze, a smuggling-themed bluffing game in which players try to sneak more goods in their suitcase through customs than what they claim. That said, don't let that original purposing get in the way of you designing something new. The only restriction for the design contest, which runs through May 2012, is that everything must fit inside this 11 x 7.5 x 3 cm box. More details on this and previous design competitions in English and German on the Spielmaterial.de website.
• Oddball projects abound on Kickstarter, and one currently looking for funding that might interest BGGers is The OggBoard, which creators Sam Lytle and Brock Bingham describe as "a platform that combines augmented reality (AR) and mobile gaming in a way that could change board and card gaming forever". Big claim that.
How this system is designed to work is that each player attaches his iPhone (or possibly his Android) to the elevated areas of the playing board so that the OggBoard app on the phone, combined with the camera, will read the specially-marked tiles on the playing area and present an animated version of the action on your phone's display screen as players move their pieces about the board.
Here's a promotional image of the game board prototype; a video explaining the concept can be seen on the OggBoard website. I don't see the appeal of adding a barrier between you and the opponent/playing space. The idea reminds me of the painter Raymond Dufayel in Amélie who used his video camera to display the time shown on a clock outside his apartment instead of opening the curtains and looking at the clock directly.
• Pergamon is now playable online in a beta version at Yucata.de.
• ClimateWire, via The New York Times, spotlights a scenario for The Settlers of Catan called "Climate Catan" in which players can buy oil in addition to other resources. From the article:
Quote: Every use of oil turned a counter that would bring the players to a random climate-related disaster once it hit five. Using enough oil would cause complete environmental devastation, and everyone would lose. Within a few turns, the disaster limit was reached and a flood triggered by rising sea levels from fuel emissions washed away coastal settlements, with [Dan] Hudner's developments largely spared.
"From a very cold, calculated point of view, it wasn't that worrisome for me to use oil and cause a natural disaster," he said, pointing out that his developments were nearer to the center of the island and largely insulated from water-related troubles. "You may be aware about what you're doing to the environment, but if you think it's somebody else that would be affected, you lose a lot of incentive to save the environment," he said.
(HT: Alf Seegert)
• For those of you in the U.S., can't you picture the following ad running on Saturday mornings between reruns of decades-old Bugs Bunny cartoons?
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Can we just have a blanket policy that discussion of Games with an overt heavy handed political, religious, or sexual theme have to go in the RSP Forum? OH WAIT. 
