International Tabletop Day is almost upon us and LXG have organised an event to run on the day, in conjunction with our good friends at Grill’d Burger Camp Hill.
Come along to Grill’d Burger at Camp Hill between 1pm and 5pm on Saturday 30 March to play. Bring your favourite games or simply turn up as there will be plenty of games available to join in.
And if you want to fill in a Game of Games sheet or two you’re welcome to do so!
The events are coming thick and fast these days! Here’s another one, International Tabletop Day, a mix of virtual and physical get-togethers for tabletop gamers all around the world.
The explanatory video says everything that needs to be said, so take it away, Felicia Day!
On 18 January 2013 The Courier-Mail ran an article on board games and how much they have changed over the past two decades. The bulk of the article was based around an interview with LXG’s Keith Done, and it includes a list of top twenty board games, written by Keith.
The article never appeared online, but the Courier-Mial have very knidly given LXG permission to display the article on our website. Click the links below to open up the two-page article. Enjoy!
Grill’d Burger Game Night
A group of a dozen members enjoyed the hospitality of the people the Grill’d Camp Hill after January’s meeting. They must have enjoyed our company too, as they would like to have a monthly boards game evening, on the first Tuesday of each month.
The first LXG games night at Grill’d Burger Camp Hill gets underway on Tuesday 5th February 2013 from 6pm. Join other club members for dinner and a game and help promote the club to other patrons of Grill’d. The location is at Samuel Street Shopping Centre, Corner of Samuel Street and Boundary Road, Camp Hill. Bring your favourite game and see you there!
Summer Legends 2013 is almost here! Have a look at the events list to remind yourself of all the events that are on.
Also a reminder for those wanting to enter the boar dgames tournaments we are hosting on either day.
Queensland Board Game Tiles
This year LXG is hosting the Queensland Board Game Tiles at the Legends of Summer Weekend 16th -17th February 2012. This is part of the Australian Board Game Championships in June at the Toy and Game Expo in Sydney. These are all day tournaments where to progress through several rounds. You can play in the following events:
(Saturday 16th) Settlers of Catan OR Carcassonne
(Sunday 17th) Ticket to Ride OR Dominion OR Memoir 44
The cost to enter any tournament is $12.50 and the TAG Expo is resourcing the events with great prizes and trophies. To enter you need to register and pay on-line at:
http://tournaments.toyandgameexpo.com.au/index.php/qld-family-tournaments
Alternately, contact Keith at keefdoneATgmailDOTcom to confirm you want to play and arrange to pay on the day. You must contact Keith no later than 14th Feb 2013.
Registrations are beginning to appear on the web-site already. Places are limited so book soon!
The Converplayion at The Edge is on tonight, featuring LXG speaker David K talking about the past, present and future of board games. The session goes from 5.45 – 7.30 including some time for playing board games at the end. Club copies of Settlers of Catan, Dominion, and Ticket to Ride are available.
If you’d like to come there is still time to register!
Behind a bland box cover lies a very interesting game. Power Grid is a game where you must provide power (electricity) to as many homes as possible, as quickly as possible, while competing against other players who are trying to do the same.
To achieve victory you will bid on the power assets you want to own (such as a coal-fired power station) and then establish grid connections and start powering those house. The more houses you power, the more money you make, enabling investment into more efficient generations and wider grid connections.
The game takes place over a number of rounds, and each round is divided into three phases. In the first phase, you will bid against the other players to secure the best power generating assets. This phase gives an interesting set of choices. Do you bid up assets you don’t want, making your opponents overpay? Do you go compete with opponents for the same power resource? While coal is cheap, if everyone is using coal it stops being cheap quite quickly (sound familiar?).
In the next phase you make your grid connections and in the final phase you power as many homes as you can. The game ends when a player can power 15 or more homes, which is a lot easier than it sounds. I guess you could see each ‘home’ as a suburb rather than an individual house. The game takes place on a map, and laying your grid connections to give yourself the maximum number of connections for the cheapest price is a sure path to victory. Just be sure you don’t get cut off by your opponents!
Power Grid is a fun, tactical game best played with 5-6 players. There’s a lot of nuance, and thanks to the different generators, different resources, and a double-sides board with two separate maps, no game plays like the last. If you find yourself getting bored, there are additional boards you can buy and also new sets of power generators to fight over. Power Grid is best suited to players 12 and over, as even though the game is broken down into phases, it is fairly complex.
Power Grid is one of over 300 board games available in the LXG games library.
If you liked this review you may also like our reviews of:
Cyclades
Dominion
Settlers of Catan
There is a new program on at The Edge, starting in December. Called Converplaytions it’s a series of talks all about gaming, followed by some playing of games.
From the website: “Gaming stereotypes have led us to believe that gaming is the domain of the introverted, male geek. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Throughout this talk series you will discover how game theory is embedded in your everyday life, hear from the women who are using alternate reality games to make richer learning experiences and take a tour through the ages, exploring gaming in all its guises.”
There will be some games from the LXG games library on hand too, as we have agreed to lend a few board games for the duration of the series.
The first one is on 11 December, with a ticket cost of $10.
The committee is also seeking a volunteer to speak on games at the Converplayion on 29 January.
November 26 update: Club games available are: Dominion, Settlers of Catan, and Ticket to Ride.
November 28 update: The club will now e providing a speaker for 11 December, not 29 January. David K from LXG will be talking about board games past, present and future.
Another Tabletop video that should be of interest, this one involves our library game Pandemic:
At LXG we play a lot of different games. As well as our large games library, members bring in their own games, so there is always something different being played. At the October meeting, games being played included:
Agricola
Blue Moon City
Caylus
Cosmic Encounter
Dominion
Dominion Intrigue
Eldoria (Pathfinder RPG)
Formula DE
Hey That’s My Fish
Lords of Waterdeep
Mage Knight
Magic: The Gathering
Munchkin
Pandemic
Puerto Rico
Ra
Rise of the Luftwaffe
Settlers of Catan
Sitting Ducks
Thunderstone
Ticket to Ride
Ticket to Ride: Marklin
Tsuro of the Seas
War Machine
An interesting quarterly update from the people at ICv2. The hobby game boom that kicked off earlier this year has continued and looks to be sustainable as far as these things can be: “Longtime industry insiders are comparing the current market to the Pokemon boom era around 2000, but with the difference that sales are good across the board rather than dependent on a single title.”
Another interesting point was that Kickstarter is seen as a positive part of this boom. Rather than replacing retailers with Kickstarter drives that effectively allow people to per-order cheaply, Kickstarter is creating buzz around products that drives people into stores to buy them when they become available.
LXG has been a beneficiary of this game boom too- our active memberships are currently at the highest they have ever been, so if you have a new game you’d like to play, we have the venue!
ICv2 measures sales in the hobby channel in the US, from distributors to retailers. In a category breakdown:
Magic: the Gathering remains the top selling collectible game.
Settlers of Catan is the most popular board game, with Ticket to Ride, Small World, Eclipse, and the second edition of Descent making up the top 5.
Munchkin is the top card/building game, with Dominion, 7 Wonders, Ascension, and Quarriors also selling well.
Warhammer 40,000 is still the top selling miniatures game, with War Machine, Warhammer Fantasy, Hordes, and Malifaux following.
Pathfinder remains the top selling RPG, followed by Dungeons & Dragons and Dark Heresy.
For Anyone Travelling to London
I have just recently returned from a holiday in the UK. While in London, I found a board games club called ‘London On Board’. It was quiet on the night I rocked up, announcing, “Hi, I’m from the League of Extraordinary Gamers in Brisbane, Australia.”
This certainly broke the ice (and gained me a few la-de-da comments). There were several tables of more serious board games eg Agricola, taking place. I was made extremely welcome at a table of 5 people and another newby to learn ‘Bunny, Bunny, Moose, Moose’. During the night, we also played 7 Wonders with an expansion and ‘Cash N Guns’. It was a great night with lots of laughs. Of course, being in a pub, you could get drinks and food. Even my non-board gamer husband was kept amused.
The club meets in and takes over the basement of The Red Herring pub several nights a week. Check out their website for details as they like an RSVP if possible, because the place only holds 50 people comfortably (http://www.londononboard.com).
Thanks ‘London On Board’ for a great night!!
Leanne Jones
It’s official; PAX, the biggest gaming convention on the planet, is coming to Melbourne in July 2013. This will be the first time PAX has been held outside the US so this is a very exciting announcement.
The two PAX conventions in the US attracted 140,000 attendees, so let’s hope they make some extra space in Melbourne for all the new people! What is unique about PAX is that it is a grassroots convention, started by a couple of guys writing a popular web comic that wanted together gamers together. It is now larger than any commercial gaming convention in the US.
PAX is not really a convention in the GenCon mould, it’s more a celebration of gaming and gamer culture. LXGs favourite board and tabletop games will be represented in force. You can follow all the developments on the PAX Australia Facebook page and see what is being added, discussed, and asked for.
The PAX conventions in the US feature a large tabletop area, with dozens of tables and hundreds of games you can sit down and play at any time during the convention for free. This is something LXG have been adding to every local convention we can get to, but we find organisers here regard it as something of an oddity rather than a core feature. Expect no such attitude from this one. If you want to start saving your pennies now, you have until July!
In an interview with The Verge, Robert Khoo of Penny Arcade sheds some light on why Australia was chosen as the first international destination for PAX, when Europe may have seemed more obvious: “Khoo said the idea of doing a show in Australia first popped up after they noticed how much of their merchandise was being shipped to Australia. Both PAX East and PAX Prime also share surprisingly high attendance from both Australia and New Zealand,”
High dollar for the win!
As well as the tabletop games area, PAX routinely features a console gaming area, a PC gaming area, a handheld gaming lounge, a convention floor, panels, music concerts, and more happy gamers than you have seen before in your life.
This will be an excellent event for Australia, and if it can kickstart some more gaming conventions around Australia, then so much the better. Regardless, PAX will be a great event by itself.
October 22 edit: Tickets now available!
The Penny Arcade Report has an article that will be of interest to all budding game designers. This one covers the genesis of the board game Crows, from initial design and playtesting, through to production and finished product.
From the article: “I’ve prototyped dozens of board and card games over the years. It’s a really interesting and exciting process, but it can also be filled with the pain and heartbreak of unrealized ideas. That’s part of game design: Everything you get excited about won’t necessarily make a great game. The challenge of prototyping and design is to flesh out your idea and see if you can actually make it fun.
I would guess about 25% to 33% of my prototypes end up being fun. I think that’s a pretty good batting average, and most of my professional designer friends have similar results.”
Check out the full article here.
The genesis of LXG
(go back to the previous part)
So, what was happening in the rest of the gaming world, while I was at Auran? The good news was that the Brisbane convention scene was still alive, with Auran continuing to sponsor the BIG weekend.
The bad news was that, in 2002 Tanelorn called it a day. Attendance at the club was not an issue; everything was still good there. However, the cost of insurance had sky-rocketed. The Tanelorn committee had always insisted on paying liability insurance to protect its members from injury claims and most venues required their users to have the appropriate level of insurance in place.
Tanelorn could no longer afford these costs and its members went their separate ways. I continued running a DnD campaign still as well as enjoying playing board games within my social network. I was continuing to play old favourites like “Battletech” and embrace the plethora of games coming out of Europe. But I missed the vibe of the club scene and had to wait another two years before LXG was to come together.
After Auran, I returned to working at the Queensland University of Technology, in the Law Faculty, but it took about six months to find that work. One of the good things that came out of that period of unemployment is that I began to seriously put my filing cabinet full of notes together about “Eldoria” and create a campaign setting that could be published. I had continually revised the background over twenty years and now I stripped out the things that didn’t work in order to create the final definitive version of my world. It wasn’t an easy task and I stumbled on writing and re- writing through 2003 and into 2004.
Now as years go, 2004 was a very good year. I had nearly finished the manuscript for what I was calling, “The Encyclopedia Eldoria” and I sent out a few feelers on web-based forums to see if anyone would like to publish my work. To my amazement, a small publishing group from the USA contacted me saying they would like to fund the printing of the book. I was soon under contract to deliver a finished product in 2005.
I needed an illustrator and was able to get Bob Jones, one of Auran’s best artists to agree to create images for the book. Bob’s work was complimented by a number of illustrations by Nigel Bell, who is one of LXG’s talented club members.
While all this was going on in the background, rumblings were underway to start a new club in Brisbane. Auran had finally gone under and the BIG weekend was in decline, however the club scene was being invigorated by the “Queensland Gamer’s Guild”, who had inherited the running of the event. They used profits from previous BIG events to run gaming tournaments and club nights. The old “Warhounds” club had imploded over another bought of political in-fighting and new miniatures clubs were evolving from their remains (clubs such as Blind Pig based at Mt. Gravatt).
Then, out of the blue, some of the miniatures enthusiasts who had joined Tanelorn, in its later years, approached some of the original Tanelorn members about restarting the club. The main interest of the miniatures people, Ken Rimmington and Adrian Roberts, was to have an association in place to run a new series of Warhammer tournaments in Brisbane.
The Queensland government had worked out some deal with insurers and the levels of public liability insurance needed for a non-profit association was reduced in 2004. Everyone got together to nut out a new kind of club; one that actively promoted gaming to families (as many of us now had younglings over six years of age).
We pondered over a new name and came up with nothing. Then, as the “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” was on at the movies at the time, it was jokingly suggested we call, ourselves the “League of Extraordinary Gamers”. The name stuck and LXG was born.
I found a great venue at the Sleeman Sports Centre that was air-conditioned (gamers traditionally had to put up with Queensland summer humidity at venues that they played in). Relishing the prospect of playing in a cool venue, Ken and Adrian dubbed their new tournament ‘Air-Con’ and were very successful in attracting sizeable crowds to their events.
LXG was a hit and began to attract new members at each successive meeting. However, although the venue was great, there were many competing groups chasing the space and we ended up being moved to another place on the site because a fringe church group were willing to pay twice what we could afford. Then we started getting moved from that venue as well!.
At times other sporting events were scheduled there and it was a sporting complex after all. The constant moving of LXG around the Sleeman Sports Complex meant that membership dropped off. Without a constant location on the site, both people already in the club and potential new members, missed meetings as they couldn’t find us. It was time to move on to another location.
By chance, in 2005, I was attending an open day at Cavendish Road State High school; checking out the place as a possibility for my daughter’s future education. While my wife was interested in what facilities were available for my daughter to use at the school, I was interested in what facilities were available for LXG to use! The assembly hall looked great and after I phoned the administration and got the OK for us to store miniatures tabletops and games on-site, LXG moved from the Sleeman
Centre. And that’s where the club has been ever since.
LXG existed as primarily a miniatures club at that time, with a minority of members interested in board games and CCGs. The club hosted two tournament weekends each year; Legends of Summer and Legends of Winter. These were reincarnations of the old Air-Con event held at the Sleeman Centre and mainly catered for Warhammer enthusiasts (although there were few board game competitions in targeted titles). Winter Retreat was also a big part of the LXG calendar and the club was using the Storm King Dam facility at Stanthorpe from 2005-2009.
In 2007 I was successful in obtaining a $12,000 grant from the Queensland Government to purchase a library of board games and this really turned the club membership around. A selling point of LXG was that members could borrow games from the library. As a result, membership rose and the club’s focus began to lean more and more to board games.
Since 2007 LXG has won numerous grants for storage cabinets, computers, library software and more games. This has given me and all club members access to heaps of new titles. Favourites I have had over the past five years include Memoir 44, Ticket to Ride and Twilight Imperium.
Coming up next – the final installment!
