Games Quarterly Magazine

[Valamir]

The premier issue of GQM is out, a companion magazine for the retailer's bible Games Quarterly Catalog.  Its primarily full of advertisements aimed at retailers but there are a number of good articles as well as random musings by various industry names (a page on which snack food is luckier by James Earnest for instance).

A couple of the articles are of particular note to us.

In an article titled "Historical Trends in Hobby Gaming" (which sounds like it is to be a regular column), Peter Adkison concludes with:

Not every trend in gaming needs to be a big commercial success in order to be deserving of discussion.  In fact, I'm very intrigued these days with some trends that are happening in role playing games that are being led by a group of game designers that almost seem to take pride in not having created big companies out of their labors (check out The Forge website at www.indie-rpgs.com).

Theres also a far-too-brief-too-be-informative piece on the card game Apples to Apples by Out of the Box games which has now sold 1,000,000 copies.  It caught my eye because on the mention of it achieving mainstream appeal outside of the hobby industry.


Theres an article by School Teacher / Game Designer David Niecikowski on setting up a gaming club in conjunction with local schools.  Its targeted at retailers but some of the advice might be useful to folks given some recent threads here on starting gaming clubs.

Another article later on indicates Settlers of Cataan has sold more than 10 million copies and continues to sell 2000/week.  Interesting numbers to compare to RPGs



David also provides a list 3 pages long (in small print) of games (mostly board and card) that he feels have educational value which might be of interest to those with young children.


Theres an article / rant by Ken Hite on Call of Cthulhu.  Based on some of the questions in the faux Q&A format one might think Ken had been reading some of the recent Cthulhu rants here on the Forge (of course this is hardly the only place where such comments are to be found).  I was a little disappointed in the piece.  Given Ken's long history and love of CoC I would have prefered seeing him surgically demolish the various "issues" raised rather than swerve into rant mode.  I did find his pledge of love for rail roading to be notable.




A couple of interesting trivia notes:

Testors, the ye old model and model rocket company has started a game division focused on minis.

West End Games is about to start releasing product again under its new owners Eric Gibson and Purgatory Publishing starting with the D6 rules and GURPS-esque genre splats.

An interesting line up of celebrity guests this year at Gen Con, and a pledge that the registration line issues have been solved.  Also a personal reminder to Ron Edwards that the date has been moved to August 19-22 ;-)

The Lord of the Rings CCG is adding an expansion featuring all of the characters and locales from Tolkien (including 2nd age) that weren't in the movies.  I found this of interest simply because it must have required a seperate licensing agreement, which given that it can't be cheap suggests the game is doing well.



Anyway, those are the items I found note worthy.  The magazine should be available for free from your FLGS.

[Matt Snyder]

Yep, I saw it, Ralph. Did you Forgers also note that in the "sneak peek" at next issue, it says Peter Adkison will devote a substantial portion of his article to Indie RPGs and/or the Forge? Cool. (It said "what those elitist nuts on The Forge have been up to." Guess they've been reading the forum lately, too, huh?)

Overall, the magazine was interesting, but MAN did it have some edit and design issues.

[daMoose_Neo]

After hanging out at the GenCon forum I guess it was a virus in the computerized system that was wreaking havoc. This year, they have the public access computer units and the registration system on two different networks to avoid that.

[Andy Kitkowski]

Actually, it wasn't so much the computer system going down, it was the fact that they had nothing in place in case of such an occurance. No back up plan.  All the eggs in one basket, and someone set the basket on a high ledge (open outside network).  The chaos that ensued was like a geek version of the fall of Gamorrah, if what I hear is right. But that's just an aside.

My question: Games Quarterly... is that any relation to the monthly Games Trade Magazine? Are they the same distributor?

-Andy