FallCon - A Cornucopia of Gaming

We've been pretty amazed with the amount of quality designs coming our way via the Canadian Game Design Contest. Not to mention the games prototypes we've played or seen outside of the Design Contest. Canadians are definitely talented game designers and it's only a matter of time before we see them as a veritable force among the elite of game design.

On that note, I wanted to highlight three Canadian game designs that are being released this summer:

Godzilla Stomp (Mike Kolross: Edmonton)

JAB: Realtime Boxing (Gavan Brown: Calgary)

Belfort (Sen-Foong Lim: London, ON; Jay Cormier: Vancouver)

As you are probably aware, our hobby relies heavily on word of mouth advertising. We feel it's important that FallCon supports our grassroot talent in game design. If you'd like to help foster the independent game industry in Canada, and support some Canadian game designers, there are a few very simple things you can do!

1) Ask your local gaming store to bring in some of these titles
2) Post some links to your Twitter / Facebook accounts
3) Easiest of all: Give them some image thumbs on boardgamegeek.com

Here's to seeing more and more Canadian Content on our gaming shelves in the years to come!

Jasen

 

Tweet

I'm happy to announce that registration for FallCon24 is now open. In fact as of this blog posting, we've already received 33 registrations since our June 30th registration launch. So roughly 2 registrations a day -  we like how those numbers sound! That puts us on track for 250-300 registrants this year. Exciting!

Most of you had likely already heard about the open registrations either via our newsletter (which went out last week), or Twitter, or Facebook, or via word of mouth. Some of you might have us in blog readers so it was high time to put something into our RSS feed. I'll be making an effort over the summer months to provide some content to read.

Jasen



Tweet

Man - it has been a long time between updates! Sorry about that folks. We (ok I) took a bit of a breather over the last few months but now that I've caught my breath, updates should be coming fast and furious (at least relatively) from now until Con Day!

Our news of the day is that we recently announced the semi-finalists for our annual Canadian Game Design Award. After a rigorous rules evaluation, our judges have selected the following games to play test in the 2nd round of evaluations:

• Akrotiri by Jay Cormier & Sen-Foong Lim
• Ciceron by Jérôme Morin-Drouin
• Coven by Paul Saxberg
• Yum: Realtime Ice Cream by Gavan Brown
• That Flipping Property Game by Alan Biggs
• The Market at Kos by Doug Meldrum
• Undermining by Matt Tolman
• *** Jump-Off by Gord Hamilton

UPDATE: After announcing our winners a few months back, one of our selected semi-finalists elected to not pursue his chances this year. I've been very late in updating this post. If you've managed to read this post before, you'll note that Potlatch Dice by Yves (Etienne) Tourigny is now replaced with Jump-Off by Gord Hamilton. Both are deserving semi-finalists and we wish Yves nothing but luck with his future game designs.

We had an excellent crop of 21 games this year, including a number of designers we hadn't seen in our list of 2010 entries. It was great to see our numbers up from last year. Several of our judges also thought the quality of designs had improved from the very high standard set last year. Good job everyone!

Thanks to all who entered the contest this year and we hope you'll consider entering the contest again in 2012. Congratulations and good luck to all our semi-finalists!

Jasen 
 
Tweet

Our friends at Valley Games and the Sentry Box are sponsoring a great fundraising event this weekend for the Little Moments Therapeutic Photography Foundation. The Foundation is an organization dedicated to providing good quality photos to families of children with cancer or other types of life altering illnesses. By doing this they hope to encourage positive healing and self confidence, things our children need dearly these days. The photography packages given to the children and their families include: a photography session, a colourful backpack, a build-your-own-bear, two 8x10 photos, one 4x6 photobook, and a CD/DVD of all photos taken. They supply these packages to the families at no charge as they do not wish to add to the financial burdens and stresses that may be experienced during these times.

The event itself will take place from 9am until 7pm at the Okotoks Elk's Hall this Saturday February 26th. Registration starts at 9:00 and games will follow at 10:00. The objective of this 2011 fundraiser will be to raise money for the photography packages Little Moments provides to families and to help them keep this needed service going. Various teaching tournaments will be available throughout the day along with prizes and a silent auction.



Tweet