Thursday, December 21, 2000

by the Wunderland Toast Society

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What's New is that this page will be stale next week (like many things prepared for the holidays). That makes this the last Wunderland update of the Millennium! Also:

• GinohnNews: Merry Grimble and Happy Goo to All!
• Rash Rants: It's its!
• 4 new Tombstoners

Happy Holidays! As Tirade says, the time has come for us to play, so we are knocking off work today and shan't return to it until the year 2001. (Wow, that used to sound like such a far distant time...) Since there isn't now enough time left to be sure of receiving newly mailed packages in time for the holidays, we are closing shop and beginning to tackle the job of preparing for our own holiday celebrations. (However, if you've just got to have a Fluxx deck shipped somewhere this week, we'll stop our playing long enough to fill any Rush Service orders that come in.)

Secondary and rushed though they've been, our own holiday plans are shaping up pretty well; the major components of Secret Project 44-CC (this year's Universal Holiday Gift) arrived right on the scheduled last minute (they look great, too!) and we're busy doing the final assembly on those, along with making and buying other holiday gifts, as I imagine most of you are doing right now as well.

Meanwhile, we're starting to see how sales of our games have been in game stores during our first holiday in wide-spread distribution, and it sounds like they've been flying off the shelves. Numerous game stores and even some of the Distributors that supply them have been seeing their supplies sell out as soon as they get them back into stock. Fluxx and Chrononauts in particular have been selling out in game stores as fast as they arrive. We're hearing reports of people coming in and buying 3 or 6 copies of Fluxx or Chrononauts at a time, instantly selling out the store's entire supply. One retailer says someone cleaned him out of all 15 copies of Chrononauts right after he received them! The sad part is, game stores across the country would be selling tons of copies of our games this weekend, if only they had them in stock; but instead, many stores are now sold out, and there's not enough time now to restock. In short, our holiday sales have been simply grand, so except for the stress of our final holiday preparations, and a increasingly bad case of sleep deprivation, we're all smiles here at Looney Labs.

The new issue (#14 - Jan 01) of Top Deck magazine just hit the newsstands, and check out the incredible photo-laden review they printed for Icehouse! It reads just as beautifully as it looks, too... reviewer Will McDermott raves about the set and the games included, with great quotes like "Icehouse by Looney Labs was just about the coolest game I saw at Origins 2000." And we got a preview of the Chrononauts review they were planning for Issue #16, and it's just as wonderful!

In a seemingly unrelated story, Wizards of the Coast was downsized this week, letting go 10% of their 1000+ employees, and tragically, one of the casualties of this reorganization is that Top Deck, which is published by WoTC, shall be published no longer. It ends with the next issue, which means issue #16 (with the Chrononauts review I just mentioned) will never come out! Bummer! Fortunately for us, we've gotten permission to reprint both the Icehouse article above and the Chrononauts review I just mentioned, so they'll be available here on the site sometime in January. And perhaps Jesse Decker can get another magazine to publish his Chrononauts review...

Happy Holidays, and have a great time during National Play Week! See you in 2001!