Re-Roll: This Week’s Tabletop Game News for Week 37 of 2019

The board game (and board game-related!) news that caught our attention for the week ending September 20, 2019.

Gaming News

A new industry award was announced this week. The American Tabletop Awards “are a new award given to various board games released over the previous calendar year by a committee of tabletop media professionals all based in the United States.” The committee includes GeekDad’s own Jonathan Liu. The first set of honorees includes The Quacks of Quedlinburg and Root.
Tragedy struck the industry this week when a truck carrying 3 pallets of pricey Chessex 6-sided dice took a turn in Atlanta too quickly and dumped about half of its load, totally 216,000 dice, onto the highway. The dice (and, for what it’s worth, I was today years old when I learned that a pallet holds 144,000 dice) was on its way to game designer Trivium for an as-yet-unannounced but presumably dice-based game that will be released in 2020. According to Kotaku, which reported the incident, the “truck was undamaged, having made its saving throw.”
Tabletop Wire is reporting that FedEx is raising its rates across the board next year. Given the number of prototypes I get via FedEx, it’ll be interesting to see what impact that has on designers and studios.
X-Wing Miniatures fans who have been longing to bring their Tantive IV model back to the table won’t have much longer to wait, as Fantasy Flight has announced the Huge Ship Conversion Kit, due in stores in the fourth quarter of this year. The Tantive IV is this week’s featured image.
Broken Egg games in Arizona is looking to hire a graphic designer on contract to design tokens for their games. You can submit your portfolio via Facebook.
Hellboy: The Board Game, the thing that I at least hope helps Hellboy fans forget that the latest movie ever happened, is getting an expansion. The Wild Hunt includes three new case files and is available for pre-order now.
Dungeon Academy, a roll-and-write from The Op, is now available.
A Wilmington, NC game store won the rights to consign a massive board game collection from the estate of Darryl Rubin, who once worked at the Stanford Research Institute on the team that helped develop TCP/IP. Later, Rubin became Vice President of Software Strategy and Advanced Architecture at Microsoft. His game collection now fills 3000 square feet of warehouse space at the store and includes many extremely rare and long-out-of-print games, including a chess set made from 20,000-year-old mammoth ivory estimated to be valued at $27,000. The store is offering tours of the collection by appointment. The collection is for sale via the store’s website.
Gamelyn Games is giving away two prototypes of their next, unannounced Tiny Epic Game. Details on how to enter can be found on their Facebook page.

GeekDad and GeekMom Reviews

Here are the games we’ve reviewed this week:

Jonathan Liu wrote up a Kickstarter Tabletop Roundup and reviewed GeekDad-approved Point Salad.
Paul Benson reviewed Zombicide: Invader.
Elizabeth MacAndrew reviewed The Furglars for GeekMom.

What We’re Playing

Finally, here’s what the GeekDads played this week:

Jonathan Liu played Peek & Push, SlipStrike, Tiny Epic [Not Yet Announced] Game, Adventure Games: The Dungeon, Ascension: Skulls & Sails, Rhino Hero, and Time of Legends: Destinies.
Greg Howley played Dungeons & Dragons and Sentinels of the Multiverse.
Rebecca Angel Maxwell played Marvel Fluxx.
Robin Brooks played Warhammer Underworlds: Beastgrave and Block Happy.
Michael Pistiolas played Mmm! and Zombicide: Black Plague.
I played Nine Tiles Panic, Tricks and the Phantom, and Point Salad.