The Expansion Is Coming

This high-res picture from the NY Toy Fair last week was taken by David at Purple Pawn. You can see all the new bidding spaces and the new Palace overlay for the center of the board. There is no official word of a release date, but it may be as early as this summer. Special thanks to my two remote playtester groups, Xenia Gamers Club and Thirdfloorgamers, for helping double check things. Will (SJG), as before, gave us significant opportunity to contribute to the process.

In other news, I recently gave an interview to Crows'n'Bones, and I also found a new review. And one more bit of news--Revolution! has (nearly) broken 800 at BGG.

In non-Revolution news, I'm nearly finished assembling the art and layout for another game. My plan is to take a backpack full of games to Origins and see what happens!

Revolution!: The German Version

News is slowly leaking out concerning the soon-to-be-released German version of Revolution!, produced by Pegasus Spiel. Today, we got a picture of the new board from Nuremberg:


As you can see, this design is quite different from the Steve Jackson version. It gives the box art a bit of context as well. This picture is a crop of a larger one showing some of the bidding board. The new version features pictures of the characters on their respective spaces. There is currently a discussion taking place on BGG--most comments seem positive.

Here is another one, fully equipped with meeples instead of cubes (H/T):


By the way, here is the box in all its wild and comical glory:

Only In the 21st Century

It's really cool to be alive in the future. At least that's how it seems sometimes. I participated in some remote playtesting tonight. I emailed some prototype files to a group in Minnesota. They printed them out and playtested it. Then we had a very insightful Skype session hashing things out. Maybe you do that all the time, but it was a first for me. Zero cost and lightning fast!

Also, Revolution! made two bid podcasts will I wasn't paying attention:

The Dice Tower (Ep. 157 @13:45) and
The Spiel (Ep. 89 @25:00 - this one is pretty long).

Both were very positive about the game. Thanks, guys!

Tom Vasel Reviews Revolution! -- He Likes It!

Here is the BBG thread for more.

BoardGameGeek.CON

The BoardGameGeek convention is going on this week in Dallas. I just read this statement on the official Twitter feed (geekdo): "I thought Revolution! was going to suck, but it ended up being better than Loyang, Greed Inc, or Automobile." That's what I like to hear! Maybe the SJG folks will take some pictures . . .

Also, I received my twelve contractually obligated promo copies of Revolution! the other day. All the playtesters also got a copy. For future reference: help me playtest and maybe you'll get a nice game out of it someday.

Speaking of which, I head up to Xenia tomorrow for some playtesting with a high school gaming club. They really helped me out last year. I have three more prototypes for them this year. I have two more just at the brink of being ready for other people to test, but there just wasn't time to get them ready. There is a small chance that I will have them ready for the great Thanksgiving family week. Maybe I'll even get them to the table if I keep reminding everybody about the free playtester copy they got the last time!

Meeting Yehuda

I meet board game designer and blogger Yehuda Berlinger tonight. We shared some interesting vegetarian Indian cuisine as well as much game-related discussion. We have a few acquaintances in common: David Miller (who helps him run Purple Pawn) and Jackson Pope (who publishes his game called It's Alive!). Check out his Jerusalem Gaming blog and account of our meeting.

The Independent's Essen Article

UK's The Independent recently did an interesting story about board games and Essen. Definitely worth the read. I have such a burning desire to attend Spiel at Essen as soon as possible. I suppose I'll have to design more games to make that happen. So be it.