Category Archives: News

Boardgames in the News: The Consequences of Losing Catan—The Demise of Mayfair

The dramatic growth of Asmodee has been the subject of much comment over the last few years, but more recently it appeared to have slowed a little. It would seem that perhaps the consequences are now beginning to kick in though. Nearly two years ago, Asmodee acquired the rights to the English Language edition of the Catan series of games from Mayfair Games. At the time there was some speculation as to the effect this would have on Mayfair as the Catan range had dominated their catalogue and provided a high proportion of their revenue. The loss of such a large part of their portfolio inevitably led to major restructuring particularly as the then CEO of Mayfair, Pete Fenlon, left to become the CEO of the new Asmodee owned “Catan Studio” taking a bunch of other people with him.

– Image by boardGOATS

Thus, Mayfair not only lost the Catan franchise, but also their entire development team and graphics department. Essentially, they were left with Alex Yeager as lead developer, head of acquisitions, and marketing manager and a catalogue of about a hundred games including some of the popular 18xx series, Martin Wallace’s Steam, Caverna: The Cave Farmers, Lords of Vegas and Nuns on the Run. Mayfair also had a controlling influence in the German company, Lookout Games which they had acquired back in 2013, and this partnership had produced games like Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King, Costa Rica and Patchwork. The Mayfair strategy was primarily to focus on the partnership with Lookout while continuing to support their existing catalogue, and then, once that was stable, further develop the Mayfair-exclusive products.

– Image from twitter.com

Questions were first asked when Mayfair didn’t exhibit at PAX West or PAX Unplugged, despite featuring in the exhibitor list, though they did present as usual at BGG.CON. At the beginning of November, however, Alex Yeager announced that he had left Mayfair, and this, together with the earlier departure of Julie Yeager and Chuck Rice indicated that the chairs were being shifted on the deck of the Titanic, and there were rumours that Mayfair was in trouble. Mayfair had not independently produced a new title since the loss of the Catan franchise, but they still had their controlling stake in Lookout Games and producing the English language version of the popular Lookout range of games seemed like the basis for a strong partnership.

– Image from lookout-spiele.de

Lookout Spiele was a highly successful German company responsible for developing games like Agricola, and more recently Bärenpark and Grand Austria Hotel. At Spiel in October, Mayfair and Lookout shared an extremely popular booth, and it seemed so successful that there were rumours that another merger was on the cards. Sadly however, this was not the case, and on Friday it was announced that Mayfair had sold its three remaining assets (their games inventory, the IP, and their 74% stake in Lookout GmbH) and was closing their doors after thirty-six years. Simultaneously, Asmodee acquired the remaining 26% of Lookout from the original owner, Hanno Girk and on Friday announced their take-over of Lookout. With that, one of the most productive and popular of the German board game companies joined the likes of Days of Wonder, Fantasy Flight Games, Space Cowboys, Z-man Games, Pearl Games, Ystari, Plaid Hat Games and of course Catan as yet another “Studio” in the great Asmodee Empire.

– Image from lookout-spiele.de

Boardgames in the News: Radio 2 and Online

Over the last few years there has been a lot of anecdotal evidence that modern boardgames are becoming less of a niche activity, with a large number of reports in local and national media. Last month alone, there was a prime-time article on BBC Radio 2‘s flagship Breakfast Show, where Chris Evans interviewed Dicky Duerden, Head of Games at the Chance & Counters Games Cafe in Bristol. The interview took place shortly before 9am (2hrs 13 mins into the show) and discussed classic games like Connect Four and Kerplunk as well as their most popular games, Scrabble and Jenga.

– Image from bbc.co.uk

The interview included a couple of nice little anecdotes, for example, Dicky Duerden explained that Battleship began life as a French game called “L’Attack” and was renamed twice, changing to “Salvo”, then “Broadside” before finally becoming “Battleship”. He was also asked whether they have problems with players having temper tantrums and whether people lose pieces or walk off with them. Apparently, Chance & Counters has heavy unflippable tables with shelves to store the games and cup-holders to help prevent spillage. So, the most damage they’ve had to a game was when someone stole all the marbles from Hungry Hungy Hippos—presumably the thief couldn’t stand the noise!

– Image from medium.com

Modern boardgames have also featured in print and other media channels. For example, the literary and cultural commentary magazine, The Atlantic, recently reported how U.S. sales of boardgames grew by twenty-eight percent between spring 2016 and spring 2017. They put this increase down to the rise in popularity of card games like Cards Against Humanity, Secret Hitler, and Exploding Kittens as well as what they initially refer to as “hobby” boardgames. Although the article is written from a US perspective, it includes a nice commentary from Phil Eklund, head of Sierra Madre Games and designer of Pax Porfiriana, Greenland and Bios: Megafauna amongst others. The interview with Phil Eklund is excellent and well worth a read; it includes discussion of Essen and Spiel des Jahres as well as discussion of a wide range of games including Power Grid, Biblios and El Grande rather than just the usual Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride.

– Image by BGG contributor Schaulustiger

Every report about the growth of modern boardgames hides something less cheerful: the number of stores that have closed in recent time. As demand for modern games increases, so does their availability at places like Amazon, and that increases the pressure on an already squeezed niche. In the last year or so, several excellent and well established stores have closed including Shire Games and Northumbria Games. With prices continuing to rise—a new big-box game is rarely below £50 these days—and the growth of crowd-funding, more and more gamers are looking for discounts where they can. The boardGOATS are lucky to have three excellent outlets locally, Eclectic Games (in Reading), Thirsty Meeples and The Gameskeeper (both in Oxford). Perhaps the Chris Evans interview will encourage more people to pay them a visit.

– Adapted from Image by Petras Gagilas (flickr.com)

Christmas GOATS 2017

– Image from weclipart.com

The Calendar has been updated, but here is a quick summary of the key dates for GOATS and Didcot Gamers:

Christmas 2017
Tuesday 12^th December 2017 (Last normal boardGOATS of the year)	Pizza & Games “Festivities” from 7.00pm at the Horse and Jockey pub in Stanford-in-the-Vale.
Friday 22^nd December 2017 (Didcot Gamers)	Games Night, location to be determined.
Wednesday 27^th December 2017 (Monster Games)	Monster Games at Barney’s House (games dependent on numbers).
Thursday 28^th December 2017 (GOATS do the Quiz)	Quiz Night at the Horse and Jockey pub in Stanford-in-the-Vale from 9pm, with possible food before hand.
Sunday 31^st December 2017 (New Year Party)	Games and food from 7pm at Barney’s House.
Friday 5^th January 2018 (Didcot Gamers)	Games at The Loop in Didcot (as normal).
Tuesday 9^th January 2018 (boardGOATS)	Games from 7.30pm at the Horse and Jockey pub in Stanford-in-the-Vale (back to normal).

Deutscher Spiele Preis – 2017

In 1990 the German magazine “Die Pöppel-Revue” introduced The Deutscher Spiele Preis, or German Game Prize, which is now awarded annually at the Internationale Spieltage, Essen. While the Spiel des Jahres rewards family games and is awarded by a panel of judges, the Deutscher Spiele Preis is awarded based on votes from the industry’s stores, magazines, professionals and game clubs. For this reason the Deutscher Spiele Preis tends to reflect “gamers games” and is usually more in line with the Kennerspiel des Jahres. This year the award went to Terraforming Mars with the winner of the International Gamers Award, Great Western Trail, as runner up. The 2017 Spiel des Jahres winner Kingdomino was joint sixth with the Kennerspiel des Jahres nominee Raiders of the North Sea. Ice Cool, winner of the this years Kinderspiel des Jahres, also won the Deutsche Kinderspielepreis.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor punkin312

In Terraforming Mars, players take the role of giant corporations, sponsored by the World Government on Earth, to initiate huge projects to raise the temperature, the oxygen level, and the ocean coverage until the environment on Mars is habitable. Players then buy project cards into their hand and later, when they have the resources needed, they can play the cards and ultimately place tiles on Mars itself. There are three different types of cards: Red cards provide actions that have an instant effect and are then discarded until the end of the game; Green cards have a one-off effect but their “tags” are retained, and Blue cards have an ongoing effect and/or an action that can be activated once per round. It is building these card combinations that is at the core of what we have found to be an interesting game.

– Image by boardGOATS

Essen 2017

It is that time of year again when the gamers’ minds turn to Essen and – The Internationale Spieltage. To Gamers worldwide, Essen is synonymous with the largest games fair in Europe and, arguably, the world. The fair runs Thursday to Sunday in mid/late-October every year and is the one of the biggest and most significant of all the boardgame conventions with many new releases and timed to coincide with the end of October. This year the first day will be this Thursday, 26^th October and games, publishers and their wares are all making their way to Germany for four days of fun and games.

– Image from merz-verlag-en.com

Last year several of the group went, and they came back with a lot of expansions for well-loved games like Istanbul, Colt Express, and Orléans and picked up some new games like Key to the City – London, Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails and Cottage Garden. This year, new games include Queendomino, Indian Summer, Altiplano and Keyper, with expansions to old favourites like Isle of Skye, Imhotep, Ticket to Ride, Terraforming Mars and Splendor as well. Once again, several locals are going and they are sure to bring back some interesting toys to play with over the coming months.

– Image used with permission of designer Richard Breese

Boardgames in the News: AlphaGo Goes Again

Last year, Google announced that it’s AlphaGo software (part of their DeepMind project) had beaten the reigning three-time European Go champion Fan Hui winning five consecutive games – the work was published in the scientific journal Nature.¹ The original tree search in AlphaGo evaluated positions and selected moves using neural networks. These neural networks were trained by supervised learning from human expert moves, and by reinforcement learning from self-play. Today the team reported² a new version of AlphaGo, “AlphaGo Zero“, that was developed without any input human data beyond game rules. Previous versions of AlphaGo were initially trained on thousands of human amateur and professional games to learn how to play Go. AlphaGo Zero skipped this step and learnt to play simply by playing games against itself, starting from completely random positions. AlphaGo Zero thus became its own teacher and after three days beat the previously published, champion-defeating version of AlphaGo by one hundred games to nil. After playing thirty million games over a period of forty days AlphaGo Zero became even stronger, outperforming the version of AlphaGo known as “Master”, which has defeated some of the world’s best players including the current world number one Ke Jie.

– Image from deepmind.com

¹ Silver et al., Nat. (2016), 529, 489; doi:10.1038/nature16961.
² Silver et al., Nat. (2017), 550, 354; doi:10.1038/nature24270.

Five Today – Happy Birthday to Us!

Five Today!

BoardGOATS is Five Years Old Today!

We are very lucky: after five years the boardGOATS is still here meeting fortnightly in the Horse and Jockey in Stanford-in-the-Vale. The group is now bigger than it has ever been, but still has a lovely, friendly, social feeling. We would like to thank to everyone who has come along in the past and in particular, all those travel from further afield to make it the success it is – we really appreciate it. We’d also like to thank the folks at the Jockey who have been supportive throughout letting us have so much fun in their back room.

Boardgames in the News: Rolling the Dice in the British Virgin Islands

With Hurricane Maria currently devastating the Caribbean, people are once again battening down the hatches and preparing for winds that could reach over 150 mph. While they are waiting, they could do worse than play a game or two to try to take their mind off it. That is exactly what the Virgin tycoon, Richard Branson, did when Hurricane Irma struck his home, Necker Island, in the British Virgin Islands. According to his blog, Richard and his team settled down to an evening playing Perudo (aka Liar’s Dice) before the whole team slept together in two rooms, listening to the parrots chattering away next door, waiting for the arrival of the approaching menace.

– Image from virgin.com

This is not the only time Richard Branson has shown an interest in games. He has expressed a love of chess previously, but he also nearly had a commercial interest in another well known game. Back in the early 1980s, a friend in Canada, introduced him to a new board game. It was such a hit that developers invited him to travel to Quebec and seal a deal to distribute the game globally. Since Richard was incredibly busy with Virgin Records at the time, the trip was postponed so the developers sold the game, Trivial Pursuit, to another company, and the rest is history.

Boardgames in the News: Biscuit Boardgames at Bake Off

This week on The Great British Bake Off, it was biscuit day. So, Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith set the remaining eleven bakers the challenge to bake a biscuit-based showstopper with a boardgaming theme that could actually be played. Now on its eighth series, The Great British Bake Off recently moved from BBC to Channel 4, a change that was accompanied by a rejuvenated presenting team including Sandi Toksvig and Noel Fielding.

– Image from Channel4.com

Sadly, the games depicted were all variants on traditional games like Snakes and Ladders, Coppit (similar to Ludo), Operation and Chess rather than some of the fantastic modern classic games now available. Nevertheless, there were some interesting renditions, including from one contestant, Kate, who went for something slightly more modern, basing her creation on Jumanji, the game from the eponymous film. Stacey was more ambitious deciding to design her own game called “Get to School”, as well as bake it. There wasn’t time to play test that, but Paul Hollywood did challenge student Liam to a game of Noughts and Crosses played with his compendium of biscuit games. In the end, the title of Star Baker went to Steven, the Marketer from Hertfordshire, for his “Check Bake Game”, based on Chess.

– Image from Channel4.com

The episode is available to watch on on demand for another three months.

Boardgames in the News: Meeples vs Tequila Slammers

Last week, a team of boardgamers were pitted against three lovers of Latin cuisine, on the quiz show, Only Connect. Only Connect is an unusual program that takes pride in being esoteric, challenging teams of contestants make connections between apparently unconnected things. The team of Meeples included Gail Trimble who led the Corpus Christi College team to the final of University Challenge in 2009. Although Corpus Christi beat the team from Manchester by eighty-five points, they were later disqualified after an investigation revealed that one of Gail’s teammates finished studying at Corpus Christi while the series was being recorded. Now back in Oxford, Gail currently holds the position of associate professor in Classical Languages and Literature. Proving that gaming is a family affair, Gail was joined on Only Connect last week by her husband Tom West and her brother Hugh. Amongst other things, this episode featured groups of geometric shapes, lucky statues, and micro-genres on Netflix. The Meeples took an early lead, and despite failing to solve their “Wall”, progressed safely onto the next round. The episode is available to watch on iPlayer until the end of the month.

– Image from bbc.co.uk