Happy 8th Birthday Days of Wonder!

Days of Wonder, the designer board games publisher that brought us games like Ticket to Ride and Small World, turns 8 today.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

PS - You can try out Ticket to Ride free online at their website, here.

Just a cool Catan commercial

PAX East btw

PAX East was a couple weeks ago, and I couldn't go there and NOT film. Things I filmed there for the movie:

• The Dungeons & Dragons demo on the MS Surface. I think Eurogames on the Surface would be a lot of fun, especially since you wouldn't need the DM driving the game forward like you do with D&D (granted, the interface to do that looked pretty cool if rather technical). I will have a section in Going Cardboard about technology and board games, ports to platforms like the XBox 360 and iPhone, so I wanted some footage of the Surface in action. It lends itself especially well to board gaming, I'm sure we'll start to see Eurogames on it soon. And I still really really want to own one, $15,000 pricetag be damned.
• Zev of Z-Man games was in attendance, so I did an interview with him. I'd been bummed to miss him at Essen, and life doesn't hand you second-chances like this very often. Or maybe it does, because while we were chatting, who meanders over but...
• Rick Thornquist, creator of boardgamenews.com and currently finishing up a book about Infocom games. He did not escape uninterviewed.

I also recorded a board game panel called Beyond Candyland. I was lucky enough to get a follow-up interview with the panelists, Rym and Scott, who host the Geek Nights podcast show I mentioned in my last blog entry, great insights and a unique perspective on the hobby, you'll definitely be seeing them in the movie!

Geek Nights podcast FTW

One of the best things that came out of PAX East for me was meeting Scott and Rym, the dynamic duo behind the Geek Nights podcast series. These guys were hosting 3 panels at PAX East, but the one that caught my attention was "Beyond Candyland," really the only panel discussion about designer board gaming.

Since they were in town for the whole week after PAX to also attend Anime Boston, I actually got a chance to sit down and interview them. These guys seem to know something about pretty much everything geeky and/or cool, and an awful lot about game theory, which was a subject I hadn't heard anybody talk in depth about. Bottom line, they had an interesting perspective, are fun to talk to, and are just all-around cool guys.

The Geek Nights podcast is divided into 4 themes. From their About section:

Mondays: Science & Technology
Tuesdays: Gaming
Wednesdays: Anime, Manga, and Comics
Thursdays: "Anything goes"

If you haven't heard of GeekNights already, check it out!