So Pirates of the Burning Sea is going through beta testing now. Some of the players are getting frisky, so there’s a plan to have a big battle royale where the “mighty devs” of Flying Lab take on upstart playtesters in a fleet engagement. Although we are entirely likely to get our asses kicked, this should be fun. A thread started in the beta test forum and naturally smack talk ensued. Yesterday, the head of my department told us all to pile into the thread and start taunting the playtesters. I posted:

“You can tell that war is brewing when gums start flapping. Let’s see who measures up once the battle starts. When shot flies through the air thicker than rain, who will brave it? When your decks are slick with the blood of your comrades, who will fight on? When the acrid smoke of the gun deck chokes you, who will keep loading the cannons? When your ship has more holes in it than a prostitute’s smile, who will go down with the ship? When you’re wearing your best friend’s face on your shirt, who will sound the charge? Is it you, big talkers, or will you be running away instead of running out the guns?”

This was slightly undercut by my co-worker posting a challenge in the form of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song lyrics (which he assures me is some kind of internet meme; whatever) but nonetheless the desire result was achieved. I am amused that I am getting paid to smack talk our customers. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for hobby game companie…

When I talk to other game industry people, they often ask me what is going on at WotC. There was certainly a time when I could tell them, having worked there for four years and knowing many of the people still inside the beast. These days though I don’t have much to report. Many of the people I knew have moved on and those I remain friendly with like their jobs enough not to go spilling secrets. So please don’t read too much into what follows. I sat down to write a little something about where the game industry was at in 2007. With all the other stuff I have going on, I realized that it was going to take me a long time to finish and it was going to be a lot longer than I expected. So I figured I’d do it in chunks instead and where better to start than the local heavyweight? These are my personal opinions, not those of Green Ronin, and I based on little more than observation and a fair understanding of the marketplace.

I might as well start with the question vexing the denizens of all D&D; fan boards at the moment: the dreaded new edition. I expect to see an announcement from WotC this year about 4th edition D&D;, probably at GenCon. The types of products that they are doing show all the signs that a new edition is in the works: compendiums (first spells, soon magic items, and then rules), disposable adventures, experiments (Book of Nine Swords), and nostalgia products. This is all the sort of stuff that happened in the waning years of second edition. Plus 2008 will be five years since the release of 3.5, which makes it a natural time to hit the reset button. I have talked to some folks who think this might be announced as early as next month at the “D&D; Experience” (the re-branded Winter Fantasy) but I really doubt that’s the case. There’s too much announced product in the queue and any 4E announcement is sure to kill sales on subsequent 3.5 books.

This year I also think D&D; minis may begin their decline. I think the majority of the purchasers have been roleplayers to date. DDM as a game barely seems to be a blip. Now that the minis have been available for a few years, I suspect most roleplaying purchasers have robust collections that give them most of the figs they need. The number of folks who will buy a full case on release will drop and instead they will buy the specific models they need from a new set on the secondary market. Of course, if set runs get smaller the secondary market will also suffer.

What WotC really needs to do to keep sales up is take the minis from being optional RPG accessories to mandatory ones. I don’t know what their plans are, but I would not be surprised if 4th edition takes a form that ties minis even tighter to the RPG experience. This will certainly make many fans howl if it happens. However, I’m betting that that collectible minis are making WotC a lot more money than D&D; books at the moment, which means the tail may now be wagging the dog. Considering the attitude of many RPG R&D; people when WotC first got into miniatures, this is supremely ironic.

While all this is going on, Magic will keep plugging along like it always does, giving WotC the solid baseline it requires to move ahead. It’s amazing that the workhorse keeps pulling the cart, but it has endured while games all around have died horrible deaths.

Saturday morning early Nicole and I stumbled off the bus on 3rd Ave on our way to the ALA show. Nicole turned left towards Pine while I turned right towards Pike. As my way was the direct route to the convention center, I turned around and said, “Where are you going?” Nicole replied, “There’s a Starbucks this way and I need coffee.” I pointed the way I was going and replied, “I need coffee too and there’s a Starbuck’s right across the street.” I later realized that had we gone straight off the bus we would have gone into this food court by the Borders that had a third Starbucks. And of course about four blocks away is the very first Starbucks location, which is by Pike Place Market. That’s downtown Seattle for you.

We’re in the midst of the American Library Association show this weekend. Nik and I left the house before 8 am this morning and got home some 15 hours later. I am beat and need to fall unconscious soon because I’ll be do doing it again tomorrow. This is the first time we’ve done an ALA show and it’s interesting. Many of the folks have no idea what to make of us, but it turns out that many librarians are gamers. Even if their institutions aren’t doing anything with games, they were excited to see us and hear about our upcoming books. We have also met a lot of youth and teen librarians who are doing things with games and those are the people we wanted to reach. We’ve been promoting an upcoming book that I’ll talk about soon, which is different than other stuff we’ve done and very cool indeed.

I only had a little time to look around the show floor. There are a lot of companies in attendance, from the biggest publishers to the smallest presses. I did make it by the DC booth and got an advanced reader copy of my friend Cecil’s graphic novel The Plain Janes. It’s the first of DC’s new Minx line for teenage girls. The woman at the DC booth started pitching me on it and Minx and I said, “I came by looking for this actually; Cecil is a friend of mine from college.” She said, “Really, this is Cecil’s agent,” and introduced to the guy she had been talking to. Funny. I read the first half The Plain Janes on the bus home and it is tre cool. Seems like the perfect title to kick off the Minx line, so go Cecil.

After a full day on the floor, Nik and I wanted to relax. We finally caught the Borat movie, which was painful to watch in places but funny. Then we tried a new restaurant called Qube. The service wasn’t great but the food was. Nicole will be posting pictures on her blog for those into food porn. After that we tried to go to the Can Can for a show and failed. Then we went to Cap Hill for a punk show and failed at that too. Probably for the best I suppose. Now I must sleep.

So a radio station in California had a competition to win a Nintendo Wii. It was called “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” and contestants had to drink as much water as they could without taking a leak. Although warned by callers about the dangers of water intoxication, the station employees laughed it off. They stopped laughing when a 28 year old mother of three died as a result of participating in the contest. The radio station has since fired 10 employees involved in the incident. The whole situation is really fucked up. Those kids have to grow up knowing their mom died trying to get them a stupid game console. Welcome to the 21st century.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6164262.html

A few weeks ago during the big windstorm and power outage, we had a strange experience in the house. Nicole had been out that first day to look for batteries and whatnot. She had been looking particularly for C batteries for our boom box, so we could at least listen to the radio and CDs during the blackout. She was too late though and there were no C batteries to be found. Later Nik, Kate, and I were playing a board game by candlelight. Suddenly the boom box powered on, there was a burst of static, and then we all clearly heard the name “Dave” come from the speakers. There was another burst of static and it shut off. So in the middle of a blackout, a boom box with no batteries even in it turned on and spoke to us. It was really odd.

This has, of course, led to a lot of talk as to who this Dave is. Naturally, we have decided that Dave is a ghost haunting our house. Now when something inexplicable happens, we have someone to blame. When Kate can’t find her Nintendo DS or there are missing socks, cries of “It’s Dave” echo around the house. It must be said that building up our own ghostly folklore is pretty amusing. Dave is not responsible for any murders just yet, but there’s still time.

Over at Flying Lab we debuted a new Pirates of the Burning Sea website this week and it looks pretty slick. Today I wrote my first “devlog” for the site and it has gone up already. In it I introduce myself to the PotBS community and tell them something of my roots in the “other game industry”. To see the new site and check out my devlog and other pirate goodness, go to http://www.burningsea.com. And now the obligatory yar. Yaaarrrrrr!

There’s lots of chatter about Bush’s speech last night but it’s so focused on “the surge” that something very interesting was passed over. I heard most of the speech in the car on the way to dinner and there’s one line that floored me:

“To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.”

So here we have a Republican president advocating redistribution of wealth to the masses. If this were the 50s, Tailgunner Joe would be calling Bush a commie right now and yet this seems to have passed by without comment.

Since the Bush administration apparently now thinks that wealth redistribution is acceptable, I have but one question for the oil companies: where’s my check? After all, we’ve all heard about companies like Exxon reported record profits last year and in the last six years they and other huge corporations have received unprecedented tax breaks and subsidies from the geniuses who thought never ending tax breaks while prosecuting two wars was a good idea. So listen up, fat cats, it’s time to pay America.

One nice side effect of my daily commute is that I get a lot of reading done on the bus. I’ve read two books in the last week or so, for example. There was a period before Xmas when I was rooting around for things to read. Between books I’ve gotten myself and things I got for Xmas or purchased with holiday gift certificates, I’ve suddenly got plenty to choose from. Here’s what’s in my “to read” pile:

1,000 Places to See Before You Die by Patricia Schultz

African Trilogy: The desert war up to the surrender of the Axis armies in 1943 by Alan Moorehead

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

The Battle of Britain by Richard Hough & Denis Richards

The Battle of Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 by Antony Beevor

The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople by Jonathan Phillips

Empires at War: The French and Indian War and the Struggle for North America 1754-1763 by William M. Fowler Jr.

Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer

The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea by Barbara Sjoholm

Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 by Simon Reynolds

Thunderstruck by Erik Larson

So yeah, that should keep me busy for awhile.

I didn’t do any roleplaying this week but I did have a chance to play some new boardgames. Thursday Rick and I played two games of BattleLore by Days of Wonder and today Rob and I played a game of Combat Commander: Europe by GMT. I enjoyed both games and some scattered thoughts on each follow.It was no big surprise that I liked BattleLore. It’s a medieval fantasy version of the Commands and Colors system, used in previous excellent games like Memoir ’44 and Battle Cry. Apart from the theme, there are a few differences between BattleLore and other C&C; games. The biggest new element is, of course, magic, but the game also tries to bring in some roleplaying elements with a “war council” of traditional RPG archetypes (cleric, rogue, wizard, fighter). The nicest addition is the support rule, which allows units to strike back when attacked in certain situation. I’ve found this really encourages the formation of battle lines and the creation of self-supporting combat groups, which makes the game more tactical than would otherwise be the case. I haven’t played with magic or large creatures yet because the scenarios start historical with Agincourt and then slowly add the fantasy elements. We’ve done the first four scenarios so far and have just started using the goblin and dwarf troops. While I’m not certain how successful the RPG elements are going to be, even if BattleLore is “just” an excellent medieval fantasy boardgame I’ll have no reason to complain.

Combat Commander: Europe, a World War II boardgame, takes its cues from an older generation of boardgames, the wargames of the Avalon Hill/SPI era. You could describe the game as a cross between Squad Leader and Up Front and that’s no bad thing in my book. CC:E starts with classic elements like a hexboard and cardboard counters, but adds new twists with the use of specialized card decks. Each army has a 72 card “fate deck” that is used to order troops, take special actions, and determine unusual events. The deck recipes are constructed to reflect some of the character of each army. Each card also has a 2d6 result on it so the cards can be flipped up to resolve attacks, morale tests, and so on. Sometimes these “die rolls” also trigger snipers and other events. If you’ve played Up Front, you can see where some of this inspiration came from but the development here is quite nice. The overall effect of the rules design and fate decks is to create a good simulation of WWII combat without the brain-melting complexity of many wargames. By the end of one scenario it was clear that the use of real WWII tactics brought good game results. You’ll have a hard time just sitting and blazing away with isolated units or simply charging across open terrain at a machinegun. You really need to coordinate your squads and use fire and movement to get the best results and that felt so right. Combat Commander: Europe covers the Americans, Germans, and Russians. The forthcoming Combat Commander: Mediterranean will add British, Commonwealth, Italian, and French to the game. I look forward to playing again.