Canadians in the Awards!

Essen Spiel, the big German tradeshow for the boardgames industry, is just about to begin. A lot of awards are announced in the weeks leading up to the show as a means of celebrating the year that was before shifting focus on all the brand new games surging onto the market for the holiday season. As a result, now's an excellent time to get a sense of the many Canadian games that have been receiving special recognition over the course of 2011.

I'd like to start right here with some Canadian-specific awards. I spent last weekend at FallCon in Calgary, where the Canadian Heritage Collection is kindly recognized as an official sponsor. For the past two years, they've run the Canadian Game Design Award to recognize new, unpublished Canadian designs and ensure they get into print. A single finished copy of 2010's winning prototype, Octopus' Garden (Roberta Taylor / Valley Games), was was flown in hot of the presses for the show and was looking gorgeous. Ask your distributors about it - it's a wonderful family game and should start finding its way onto store shelves soon. As it turns out, 2011's big winner, Undermining (Matt Tolman / Z-Man Games) will be on store shelves around the same time. Newly Canadian publisher Z-Man Games signed it after the game's entry into the contest and launched the game this morning at this year's Essen. Congratulations to Matt and Roberta, Valley Games and Z-Man! Having played both games in their pre-published form, everyone's in for quite a treat with these two well-deserving designs. Interestingly, both games were also manufactured by Vancouver's Panda Games. So congratulations to them as well. Also note that the Montreal-based Ludor Prize is in the final stages and will be announcing a winner any day now.

A sneak peek from the Canadian Heritage Collection newsletter...

New CanadiaN GAMES REVIEWED!

With the holiday sales season upon us, most of the new Canadian game releases of 2010 are now available from distributors and making their way into the hands of eager customers. With that in mind, I thought I'd share some of the customer reviews and commentary coming from BoardGameGeek, a popular gaming site among game enthusiasts. While commentary on the site doesn't always reflect the opinions of the broader market, it nevertheless offers some interesting insights into how you might want to present a given game to your customers. Read on to hear what people the world over are saying about some of the latest board and card games designed and published right here in Canada...

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.