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In this issue: - Welcome
- Settlers Tournament |
- Testimonials - That's a wrap |
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Welcome
Hi Everyone, The Settlers Tournament has come and gone. There were 23 contestants in all, with some coming from as far a field as Cape Town and Durban. The Tournament was judged by our resident board game expert, Gavin Westermeyer, with the assistance of Marcus Weinreich. It was a very close competition and the final results were
1st - Charmaine
Westermeyer It turned out to be an awesome weekend of fun and games and we hope to see you all there this year. |
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Settlers Tournament 2009 @ ICON – 10th
to 12th July
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Boardgames.co.za on Facebook With Board games being very social by nature it would make sense for us to start taking advantage of a social networking platform such as Facebook. Please feel free to visit our page and join up as a fan.
We are really excited
about the prospects that this platform holds to support our mission of
bringing family and friends together!
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Specials These amazing special offers will be valid for June only and are likely never to be seen again. Game Specials Normally
Carcassonne R450.00 R489.00 Don't forget to take advantage of our awesome bundles. Save huge amounts of $$$ - click here.
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Board Game Clubs Edenvale: Meets every 3rd Wednesday of the Month. Contact Barbara for details 082-880.2707 Pretoria: Anyone interested can contact Jannie Pieters at jannie.pieters@gmail.com. They get together every other Saturday. Cyrildene: You can contact Marcus. They meet on Wednesdays to play either Magic or board games. 0832559454 or marcus1@mweb.co.za
Durban: Gavin Westermeyer is the one to speak to
0837033326 or 031 202-3639. Anyone interested should contact him. He is
guaranteed to light a spark in the board gaming arena.
MahJong Club: If anyone is
interested in playing MahJong, Lippy Lipschitz is the man to speak to.
He is looking for players. Beginners are welcome as he will teach you
all there is to know about this awesome game. Please contact Lippy at: |
Board Game News
Spiel des Jahres
Days of Wonder Games
Prices |
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Some Interesting Titbits on Setters From Toy Directory
CATAN NEVER
SETTLES
The game is owned by Catan Gmbh and licensed to Mayfair Games. The son of the inventor, Guido Teuber, is both head of Catan Gmbh and a shareholder in Mayfair Games. Mayfair has rights to the game in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Continental Europe. Since its introduction in 1995, The Settlers of Catan has become a worldwide phenomenon. It has been translated into 30 languages and sold, in the past 10 years, 15 million copies — about $500 million at retail. Settlers of Catan is today the fastest-growing board game in the United States, having doubled last year to 200,000 pieces sold in the United States and Canada and grown by another 75 percent in the first three months of this year. An article about Catan and its designer, Klaus Teuber, appears in April's Wired Magazine. The article is a great read for anyone unfamiliar with the story behind the game. We don't know if Klaus would use the words "perfect" or "killer" to describe his creation, but it is nice to see a game like Settlers being compared to one of the best-selling boardgames of all time. --------------- Excerpt from Wired Magazine - 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, and in 1988 it won the Spiel des Jahres prize—German board gaming's highest honor. Winning some obscure German award may not sound impressive, but in the board game world the Spiel des Jahres is, in fact, a very, very big deal. Germans, it turns out, are absolutely nuts about board games. More are sold per capita in Germany than anywhere else on earth. The country's mainstream newspapers review board games alongside movies and books, and the annual Spiel board game convention in Essen draws more than 150,000 fans from all walks of life. Because of this enthusiasm, board game design has become high art—and big business—in Germany. Any game aficionado will tell you that the best-designed titles in the world come from this country. In fact, the phrase German-style game is now shorthand for a breed of tight, well-designed games that resemble Monopoly the way a Porsche 911 resembles a Chevy Cobalt. But back in 1991, despite having designed a series of successful German-style titles, Teuber still thought of making board games as a hobby, albeit a lucrative one. Eventually, Teuber whittled his invention down to a standard pair of dice, a handful of colored wooden houses that represented settlements and cities, stacks of cards that stood for resources (brick, wool, wheat, and others), and 19 hexagonal cardboard tiles that were arranged on a table to form the island. He had hit on something with this combination—the enthusiasm on family game night was palpable. During nearly every session, he, his wife, and their children would find themselves in heated competition. The game was done, Teuber decided. He called it Die Siedler von Catan, German for "The Settlers of Catan." Released at the annual Essen fair in 1995, Settlers sold out its initial 5,000 copies so fast that even Teuber doesn't have a first edition. That year, it won the Spiel des Jahres and every other major prize in German gaming. Critics called it a masterpiece. Fans couldn't get enough, snapping up 400,000 copies in its first year. "It was a maturation of the form," says Stewart Woods, a board game scholar at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia. "It wasn't until Settlers that the whole thing broke wide open." Since its introduction, The Settlers of Catan has become a worldwide phenomenon. It has been translated into 30 languages and sold a staggering 15 million copies (even the megahit videogame Halo 3 has sold only a little more than half that). It has spawned an empire of sequels, expansion packs, scenario books, card games, computer games, miniatures, and even a novel—all must-haves for legions of fans. And it has made its 56-year-old inventor a household name in every household that's crazy about board games, and a lot that aren't. Most impressive of all, though, Settlers is actually inducting board-game-averse Americans into the cult of German-style gaming. Last year, Settlers doubled its sales on this side of the Atlantic, moving 200,000 copies in the US and Canada—almost unheard-of performance for a new strategy game with nothing but word-of-mouth marketing. It has become the first German-style title to make the leap from game-geek specialty stores to major retailers like Barnes & Noble and Toys "R" Us. Settlers is now poised to become the biggest hit in the US since Risk. Along the way, it's teaching Americans that board games don't have to be either predictable fluff aimed at kids or competitive, hyperintellectual pastimes for eggheads. Through the complex, artful dance of algorithms and probabilities lurking at its core, Settlers manages to be effortlessly fun, intuitively enjoyable, and still intellectually rewarding, a potent combination that's changing the American idea of what a board game can be. --------------- campusprogress.org - Catan review on campusprogress.org, a website aimed at empowering young activists and journalists! http://www.campusprogress.org/underreview/3978/under-review According to my Gmail archives, I made a serious blunder on April 2. I emailed my housemates asking them if they’d be interested in playing Settlers of Catan, a wildly popular German board game I had just read about in a lengthy Wired feature, if I ordered it from Amazon. They were, I did, and our lives haven’t been the same since. Just as Wired noted, Settlers, which has only recently caught on in the United States, is frighteningly addictive. It’s rare that the housemates and I go more than two days without someone wanting to break it out. The game’s setup is simple: An unspoiled island, consisting of 19 hexagonal tiles, lies before you and your opponents. Who can earn ten “victory points” by building roads, settlements, cities, and other features of civilization the fastest? Every turn, each player has a chance at earning resources toward this end. The game benefits from some brilliant leveling mechanisms. Whoever is winning at a given point is the most likely target of the “robber,” a pawn that is placed on one hex at a time, sapping that hex of all resource production. And anyone with seven or more resource cards loses half of them whenever a seven is rolled. The result of all this fine-tuning is a game that always ends up being quite close; usually, the second-place player has 8 or 9 victory points and was only a turn or two from winning. Settlers is also endlessly replayable, since the layout of the island is shuffled before each game. None of the game’s charms fully translate into text. All I can do is implore you to find someone with a copy and play it. It will make you feel like a nerd, and it will devour far more of your time than you ever thought a board game could, but the experience will be worth it. 10 out of 10 dorkily misspent spring nights -Jesse Singal NEED WE SAY MORE!! --------------- Settlers of Catan fan site Be sure to visit this Catan fan site which contains cool things such as reviews, strategies and variants of play (http://www.settlersofcatan.net/)
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Testimonials
Not sure if you want to buy online?
Or unsure about the quality of the games available from our retailers or
our web-site?
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New Dealers
We would like to welcome our new
Retail Partner to the team. Ouma Bettie se Winkel in Great Brak River, W. Cape
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Board Game Geek? For more board game information, statistics, reviews, and descriptions log onto www.boardgamegeek.com. This site is a fountain of information.
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Prize Winner Congratulations to this month's lucky newsletter subscriber, Jenni Reeves, who has won a copy of Formula De valued at R420.00
The Boardgames crew hope that you thoroughly enjoy your prize and that you play it often with family and as many friends as possible. Spread the magic!
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Subscribe To subscribe to this newsletter, please click here. Remember that subscribing to this newsletter gives you a chance to win a board game every issue. So stay tuned and WIN! Please forward this mail to anyone who would be interested in receiving this newsletter. |
That's a Wrap! That’s all for now. We will be sending out another update soon. Until then, happy gaming! Please also give us any feedback that you may have. Play hard, The Crazy Boardgames.co.za Crew |
