2011 CHC Master Catalogue now available!

Welcome back, everyone! As you can see, I've been busy restructuring the site and giving it a fresh coat of paint. I encourage you to check out the new Gaming Canadian page for a big list of useful links that really highlight the depth and diversity of the Canadian board game industry. If you know of more links I should be adding, please let me know and I'll be happy to add them.

Even more importantly, the hard work of September is done and we now have a brand new 2011 Master Catalogue of Canadian Games. It's bigger than ever and full of plenty of new and revised "Did you know..." trivia callouts providing insights into the Canadian industry. A big thanks to all the advertisers who helped make this year's catalogue possible and I look forward to everyone's feedback on how we can continue to improve the catalogue in future years.

Codename Punk and How to Kickstart a Baby

It's Essen season in the board game industry and all eyes are turned to Germany. The big scandal this year is that one of the major European component suppliers has fallen behind on their orders and, as a result, a lot of highly anticipated games are delayed and won't be available at the industry's biggest trade show. This is devastating for some small publishers for whom that may be their only title this year. Fortunately, Valley Games is unaffected. They've run afoul of late deliveries in previous years so this time around they made sure to fly everything out to Germany a month in advance and warehouse it there so it would be ready and waiting for them when they arrived yesterday. Here's wishing them luck and some great international exposure for Two by Two.

"Two by Two" now available from distributors

Just a quick note to say that Two By Two is now available at the distributor level and should start appearing on store shelves sometime next week. Yay! I've waited a long time to see this game become a reality and I'm looking forward to reading the first reviews and session reports as they crop up online. I've been through this process a number of times before with my video games but thankfully that sense of childlike wonder never quite rubs off.

A Little Help From My Friends

Two By Two is expected to make landfall somewhere along the Pacific coast this Sunday. From there it will go to the warehouse of central wholesaler Publisher Services and then out to various distributors such as Lion Rampant here in Canada, ACD in the US, and Alliance for the US and worldwide. Online and brick & mortar retailers will include Two by Two in their regular orders from these distributors and the game should ultimately start appearing on store shelves sometime around the end of the month. The publisher had a few advance copies flown over from the actual print run (rather than preliminary proofs). Many of those will be going out to different reviewers and industry press but one should be arriving on my doorstep sometime tomorrow.

So, with the game almost in the hands of the general public, I thought now would be a great time to offer my thanks to all of the people who've helped along the way.