The board game (and board game-related!) news that caught our attention for the week ending May 17, 2019.
Gaming News
- The latest round in the US-China trade war might impact our industry, as it looks like board games, dice, and toys are going to be included in the next set of tariffs on Chinese imports. As we know, most games are made in China, so the proposed 25% tariff could cause the price of games to go up.
- Details on the 2019 Pandemic Survival tournaments have been announced. The tournaments, which essentially take one of the best cooperative games out there and turn it into a competitive thing, use a special setup to remove much of the luck involved in the game. The eventual winner of the tournaments wins a cool prize, though: a trip to any city on the Pandemic board. (Hopefully, though, not one where an epidemic is breaking out.) Details on the tournament can be found on Z-Man’s website.
- Registration for Gen Con Events—including Gaming with GeekDad—opens Sunday at noon Eastern. The convention’s YouTube channel has a tutorial on how to sign up for events if you haven’t done it before.
- If you happen to be in Singapore, you can stop by the CMON store. It’s the first retail location for the company, and in addition to selling the company’s games, it will also feature a playtest area. The store is in the same building as the company’s headquarters. You can keep up-to-date with the happenings at the store on its Facebook page.
- A scientific paper published by US and UK researchers has found that Magic: The Gathering is perhaps more complicated than chess and that it might be impossible for computers to ever reliably beat humans at the game. The paper, entitled “Magic: The Gathering Is Turing Complete,” states that “Magic: The Gathering is the most computationally complex real-world game known in the literature,” making it potentially impossible to calculate a winning strategy, and that the exact degree of the game’s complexity is still unknown. You can read the paper in PDF form online. That’s pretty cool news for Magic, but probably not as cool as getting to be this week’s featured image.
- Bezier Games announced this week the upcoming release of Silver, a “traditional” card game from Ted Alspach in which players attempt to protect their village from werewolves. Silver is the first in a planned new series of games. The game will be released at Gen Con, and be in stores in September.
GeekDad Reviews
- Jonathan Liu reviewed Space Base: The Emergence of Shy Pluto and Deep Space.
What We’re Playing
Finally, here’s what the GeekDads played this week:
- Greg Howley played Spirit Island!
- Jonathan Liu played Big Easy Busking, Honga, and Shards of Infinity: Relics of the Future.
- Rebecca Angel Maxwell played Smash Up.
- Michael Pistiolas played Mastermind, Race to the Treasure, and Star Wars: Imperial Assault.
- Robin Brooks played Warhammer Underworlds: Nightvault.
- Rob Huddleston played Villainous.
