Monday, April 13, 2009

Two recent articles

In case you missed them, there were two recent articles about designer board gaming in the mainstream news media:

Masters of the (Tabletop) Universe
New York Times - ‎Apr 3, 2009‎
THEY tumbled in at 7:30 on an icy Friday night, collecting in the eat-in kitchen. Handshakes and the usual opening pleasantries. They were nine: eight men and a woman. They had a lot to do — build medieval kingdoms, manage beer gardens and construct galactic civilizations. If they had any energy left, they would cure the world’s deadliest diseases.


and, as I mentioned before, this big feature piece from Wired Magazine:

Monopoly Killer: Perfect German Board Game Redefines Genre

UPDATE - I got in touch with Andrew Curry, and a neat bit of info is that the picture above is of Klaus Teuber and his son, in their backyard. :)

In 1991, Klaus Teuber was well on his way to becoming one of the planet's hottest board game designers. Teuber (pronounced "TOY-burr"), a dental technician living with his wife and three kids in a white row house in Rossdorf, Germany, had created a game a few years earlier called Barbarossa and the Riddlemaster, a sort of ur-Cranium in which players mold figures out of modeling clay while their opponents try to guess what the sculptures represent. The game was a hit...


While the idea of someone playing Catan in their backyard in the grass is kind of amusing, I must admit, we have taken it with us on camping trips and had a BLAST (I'll have to dig up that photo).

Nice to see Wired and NYT talking about designer board games! Some people I've talked to felt that the Times' piece made fun of the hobby in a way, but if so I think it was good-natured fun, and I still feel it paints things in a positive light.

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