FallCon - A Cornucopia of Gaming

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Just a quick update to highlight the fact that we now have our miniatures events up on the schedule. We'll have the 3 remaining slots allocated as soon as possible but this should give our miniatures enthusiasts something to mull over should they wish to register to get that special early-bird pricing.

Those of you who've already taken a look at our roster of game events might be wondering:

"People's Choice? What's that?"

We noticed lagging numbers in our Settler Variants Events over the last couple years and decided to open the schedule up a bit to allow a crowd favorite on Friday night instead. A geeklist has been setup on BoardGameGeek to accept nominations and votes. We're looking for a fun, tournament worthy addition to our schedule so head over to the geeklist, nominate a favorite and vote for all the games you'd be willing to play. Keep in mind, you may want to check the geeklist regularly to see what other people nominate.

If this is a successful initiative, you can be sure we'll implement a People's Choice Event again next year.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/43337

UPDATE: For those of you who don't have a BGG account, feel free to nominate/vote for games in the comments for this blog post. I'll update the geeklist as often as possible with your nominations & votes as long as the comments are NOT anonymous.

From Wikipedia:

The Spiel des Jahres (German for Game of the Year) is a prestigious award for board and card games.

The award was created in 1978 to reward excellence in game design, and to promote top-quality games in the German market. It is thought that the existence and popularity of the award is one of the major drivers of the quality of games coming out of Germany. A Spiel des Jahres nomination can increase the typical sales of a game from 500-3000 copies to around 10,000; and the winner can usually expect to sell 300,000 to 500,000 copies.

This year's nominations were announced on May 23rd:

• FITS
• Dominion
• Finca
• Fauna
• Pandemic

Our Sunday schedule currently has a slot allocated to the Spiel des Jahres Winner or last year's winner Keltis. As Dominion and Pandemic are already on schedule elsewhere, the Sunday slot will be filled by one of the other nominees. Since designer Reiner Knizia won last year for his design of Keltis, it's highly unlikely he would get the nod this year for FITS. Should the winner be Fauna or Finca, we will pick a game to slot into the Sunday schedule based on game availability. At this point, I'd say the slot will either be filled by Finca or Keltis.

For more info on the Spiel des Jahres and its past winners, head over to the BoardGameGeek Wiki entry.