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Wednesday, July 20th, 2011

New Products: Seven Dragons Shuffle Hands promo card Aquarius Dragon promo card New Notes From the Lab New Pano Gallery: Origins Robin's gallery of Origins photos Big Experiment #12 Medallion Gallery How Does This Andy vs. Everybody Thing Work? Our Looney Pyramids Safety Testing Story Cardlists for Aquarius & Seven Dragons

Seven Dragons reviews by: Wired's GeekDad and GeekMom Ruthless Diastema Perpetual Geek Machine Blogcritics 2D6.org The Game Whisperer Fear the Boot Session Impressions Black Gate Pirate Fluxx reviewed by: Gametastrophe LGM Gamers 'IceDice' Delayed Until September Video Review of Chrononauts Interview with Andy on Ninjas Vs Pirates Podcast

5 Questions about Aquarius/Seven Dragons Can you make yourself Walk the Plank? Can Skullduggery cancel Plundering or Trash a Keeper? Who becomes Zombie Boss during a tie? How powerful is the Telepathic Translator vs. Use What You Take? Who's Not Dead Yet? Can you Kill Time in the middle of Performing a Miracle? What happens in 1974 if you save Lincoln while WW3 is happening? Whose Parents Never Meet when each player has 2 ID cards? Can you Camouflage one thing at a time, or one thing per turn?

We're back from another great Origins! It was the best ever in various ways, but also a bittersweet success, given our unknown plans for the future.

Here's a list of my 10 favorite moments from the convention:

• Winning another Origins Award! (It's always hard to top that feeling...)
• Totally dominating an exciting game of Are You a Werewolf? in which I led the charge three times in a row against the werewolves (yes, there were 3, it was a 17 person game) after Jacob Davenport had lead 3 unsuccessful charges and gotten lynched
• Going into the finals of the Icehouse tournament with a medallion and the highest rating (well done on the final victory Jake!)
• Fighting Joshua Kronengold to a draw in the Homeworlds tournament finals, requiring a special tie-breaker game (which I lost in a far less satisfying match -- well done, Josh!)
• Helping Robin negotiate the best price for a big box of vintage Magic: The Gathering cards she wanted to sell off
• Tracking down the button vendor selling "But I Don't Wanna Swap!" buttons and posing for a photo after buying one
• Having a really good laugh with James Ernest while on a food run to North Market (the thing he said that just about killed me was "Oh sure, we're all going to travel the world in our magical 'moving caves'!" ....but maybe you had to be there...)
• Getting to the end of the con with only 4 copies of our newest game unsold
• Playtesting games on the final night, after most folks had gone home (in particular, the Babylon 5 briefing I got from Tim Eller, Steven Black, and Shin Blue)
• Listening (as I drove home) to a reading of all the nice comments people wrote on our feedback forms about the 15 new games I was allowing folks to playtest at the con

But those are just my mental snapshots. For actual snapshots, please check out Robin's gallery and my own Pano Gallery. And look for other Big Experiment 12 reports at the Looney Labs Fan Club!

Thanks so very much to everyone who helped make Big Experiment #12 a big success!

As soon as we got back from Origins, the focus was on finishing up Star Fluxx, and it's now at the printer! Woo-hoo!

I'm really excited about this one -- I think Star Fluxx is the best version of Fluxx yet, and will be a difficult act to top. The theme is near and dear to my heart and I'm really proud of how I was able to intertwine the classic elements of sci-fi around the most refined version of the game to date.

As usual, Derek Ring has done fantastic artwork for us, as you can see from this preview collage I put together, featuring the final art for 9 of the Star Fluxx Keepers. (Click on it for a higher-rez version!)

For more sneak peeks, head over to the Fan Club website, where you can see the cover art and, if you are a member of the Demo Team, you can even get a look at the rulesheet and some of the cool new cards that will be in the game.

Star Fluxx blasts off on September 30!

Thanks for reading, and have a great Whenever!