FallCon - A Cornucopia of Gaming

One of the events I'm most excited about on our schedule this year is the Tichu Tournament. Tichu is a partnership card game (2 vs. 2) that merges rules from Poker and Janitor. While players play increasingly larger poker hands in attempts to win tricks, the real trick to the game is accurately predicting whether you will be the first to rid yourself of cards in a round.

Tichu is a favorite among several of the FallCon crew and we've seen its popularity increase dramatically over the last few years at our convention. Last year, it definitely made a breakthrough and appeared to be the default game being played in between scheduled events. Considering the apparent popularity among our attendees, it made perfect sense to add it to our schedule.

The plan is to run the event as a 16-team single elimination event. Highest score after each 45 minute round or first team to reach 1000+ pts will move on to the next round. Last round will go the full distance to 1000 pts. We want to encourage folks to register with their partners but you can also register for the event as an individual and we will pair you up. We anticipate this event to fill up so we'd recommend you register as soon as you can.

In a moment of amazing synchronicity, the Sentry Box is providing you the perfect opportunity to learn the game, test the local competition or brush those cobwebs away before FallCon! Greg is hosting his very own Tichu Tournament at the Box on Thursday July 29th. Entry is $10 but you end up getting that back in store credit. Plus you have a chance of earning some additional store credits if you win the tourney - not to the mention the priceless bragging rights.

See you there!

Jasen
 
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As was the case last year, we are reserving one of our Friday Night slots in our roster of game events for the People's Choice Game. After some friendly prodding from our faithful website/blog readers, we've opened up the nomination and voting process via a geeklist on BoardGameGeek. 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.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/56458/fallcon-2010-peoples-choice-game

Use this Geeklist to nominate ONE game that you think would be well suited to the 4-5 hr time slot (shorter games will be played multiple times). Once a game is nominated, use the thumbs up feature to vote for games you'd like to see become the "People's Choice" for 2010. 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. Last year's choice was Glory to Rome.

Remember: each person may nominate a single game to the list but you can vote for as many games as you wish. We look forward to seeing your nominations!

Jasen
 
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I hope everyone had a great Canada Day long weekend (or July 4th long weekend for those fans of ours across the border). I suspect many of you managed to indulge in some celebratory beverages and snacks, maybe even a game or two. A select few of you though managed to find the time to click on our "Register Now" button to find out it had gone LIVE over the weekend! As of July 1, online registration is available for FallCon 23.

I want to quickly highlight the benefits of registering online:

• Early bird pricing on weekend passes in effect until August 31st.
• Register to guarantee your spot at the table for your favorite game events.
• Event head count tracking lets us know if we need to modify the number of copies to moderate.
• Online registrations makes our life simpler and makes the lines move quicker on opening day - we're process optimization geeks too.
• Online registrants will gain access to our soon-to-be-released online auction submission form.

Details on that last little news item are forthcoming but we expect to have the auction registration up within a couple weeks.

So register as soon as you can and let your friends and family know about us too by referring them, tweeting, buzzing and Facebooking!

See you soon across a game table,

Jasen
 
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Happy Canada Day everyone!

And what better day to announce our list of semi-finalists in the 2010 Canadian Game Design Award?

We had a total of 18 truly fantastic submissions. The competition was fierce but in the end, the first round judges decided to select the following 8 designs for the next round of playtesting (in no particular order):

• Graeme Jahns - The Great Pyramid
• Orin Bishop  - Argo
• Jay Cormier & Sen Lim - Jungle Jam
• Roberta Taylor - Octopus' Garden
• Emmanuel Aquin - D-Day Dice
• Alan R Biggs - That Property Flipping Game
• Leif Steiestol - I Dig the Moon
• John Lucas - Fruition

All designers should be commended for their excellent work as it wasn't easy to make our selections. We can only hope the crop of designs is as good next year. Never too early to start working on those designs for the 2011 Award.

We will have an announcement about the selected finalists in a few months once initial playtesting as been conducted. Congratulations and best of luck to all semi-finalists!

Jasen & Brent
 
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