At every convention, there seems to be a group of people who can manage to spoil what is otherwise a really pleasant game experience.  I doubt that any of them do this intentionally.  (If they do, we should make it a point of returning the favor.)  Here’s how to recognize them.

1. The Social Networker
   A Social Networker is easy to spot.  The Social Networker will start taking cell phone calls, text messages, and drive-by visits before the GM has finished explaining the rules.  They’ll interrupt the game every few minutes to take a call from the kids, text their buddy, or discuss where they’re going for drinks later that night.  They’re often the one who makes a one-hour game run 90 minutes.
2. The Skunk
   You don’t have to spot The Skunk.  You’ll smell them long before that.  This person clearly doesn’t believe in daily showering, deodorant, or general hygiene.  Fortunately, these are relatively rare.  Unfortunately, they’re not extinct. 
3. The Daydreamer
   The Daydreamer’s mind isn’t on the game you’re playing.  You can spot a Daydreamer by listening for phrases like "Oh, it’s my turn?" or "Wait, I’m the red one, not the blue one."  The Daydreamer is the one who’ll move your pieces around and not realize it until the next turn.  They can be frustrating, but are usually harmless.  (If I’ve had a rough night, I’m likely to be this guy…)
4. The Enforcer
   The Enforcer listens intently while the rules are explained, and tries to read the rulebook quickly before the game starts.  If anyone, including the GM, forgets or tries to modify the rules, The Enforcer will step in.  The offending party will have to give in to The Enforcer’s demands or enlist the group to beat down The Enforcer’s will.
5. The Expert
   The Expert signs up for an "introduction" game with months or years of experience playing the title.  As the game progresses, The Expert will regale you with stories of how different strategies allowed them to win in the past.  The Expert will use superior knowledge of the game to crush the players who are just trying to figure it out.  When the game is over, The Expert will often become the next kind of player… The Sore Winner.
6. The Sore Winner
   The Sore Winner enjoys gloating after a victory.  They will tell the others around the board all the boneheaded moves they made that cost them the game.  They’ll explain how their strategy was destined to win, and yours could only lose.  They may even do a happy dance or pump their fist in the air.  Generally, they’re only a nuisance at the end of the game.
7. The Sieve
   The Sieve has probably never mastered a game more complex than checkers, yet they will sit down to play Warhammer 40K or Axis and Allies.  The GM will constantly be explaining the rules to them, offering strategic advice, and practically playing the game for them.  If they manage to win the game, you’ll walk away feeling cheated.
8. The Infector
   The Infector isn’t feeling well.  Their nose is running.  They’re sneezing.  They look like they haven’t slept for days.  Worse, they sneeze into their hand – then move the pieces on the game board around with the same hand.  Even if you walk away from the table without picking up the bug they’re carrying, you’re still likely to feel a bit queasy.
9. The Comparator
   The Comparator has played a lot of other games like this one.  If another game has a nicer board, better playing pieces, a cooler box, better rulebook, neater way of handling something, or a different anything, The Comparator will tell you all about it… in detail.  Repeatedly.
10. The Sore Loser
    Just as The Sore Winner makes it a point to explain how inferior your strategy and playing style are, the The Sore Lose blames you for his defeat.  The Sore Loser lost because the dice rolled better for you, or you cheated during a critical part of the game, or your poorly executed strategy ruined their ability to execute their perfect one.  The Sore Loser feels destined to win the game and cheated when they lose.

Know any other gamer types?  Post a comment. 

Having attended many game conventions and played many more games at them, I’ve realized that one of the most frustrating aspects of the larger conventions like Origins and Gen Con is being able to actually FIND the game I’ve signed up for.  I don’t think I’ve walked away from a convention in the last 5 years without a ticket to a game I couldn’t locate.  That always leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and a determination never to sign up for another event run by the same person or group.  I’m going to assume that this isn’t what GMs want.

With several years of convention experience under my belt, I present the following suggestions for helping players easily find your game events at a convention:

1. Make your game mastering group visible, if you have one.
   Rogue Judges and Red Shirt Games are two groups that do this right.  When you step into the board game area, there is no mistaking where these two groups are.  Rogue Judges has a huge banner in their area (see image below).  Red Shirt has a large red shirt-shaped sign.  If you have a game with them, it would be hard to miss where it is.  I’ve had trouble finding games when the ticket says "Exhibit Hall A.  John Doe Gaming" on it.  If John Doe doesn’t have a sign up, or it’s not very visible, I’ll never find him.  And next year I won’t be signing up for any of his games because I wasted money on a ticket to one this year.

   
   It’s not hard to find a Rogue Judges game!

2. Make the game table easy to find.
   Gen Con Indy 2011 had a great system for this.  In the board game room, each table had a brightly colored plastic tablecloth on it with a number affixed to it.  When you picked up an event ticket, it said "Red Table #12".  Stepping into the room, you could identify the tables with a red tablecloth and head toward them.  The numbers made it easy to find the specific table.  I can’t tell you how many games I’ve missed at conventions because I couldn’t find the table (since the ticket only said something like "Exhibit Hall E"). 

   
   Colored tablecloths and numbered tables make locating a game easier!

3. If you’re running multiple events, post your schedule prominently.
   This is another area where Rogue Judges does an excellent job.  In their area, they post images of the game box, the game title, and a list of times they’re running that game.  If you have a really good experience at one of their games, you’re able to quickly find other games they’re running.  It’s extra work to set this up, but could result in your games being more well attended.

   
   Rogue Judges’ event schedule is easy to find

4. Have table signage in place, even when you’re not running a game.
   Even though I run this web site and keep up to date on games that are being released, I still don’t recognize every game out there.  I may walk by a game in progress that looks interesting.  If there is a box visible, or a sign which shows the name of the game, I’ll be able to find and sign up for a future session.  The image below shows a table where three different events are run, with a sign describing each event and the planned schedule. 

   
   Signage makes it easy to see what is played on this table, and when.

5. If you’re relocated, make it easy for players to find the new location.
   Convention organizers sometimes need to relocate games at the last minute.  Unfortunately, they don’t often do a good job communicating this to the players.  If your game was originally scheduled to take place in one location but has been moved to another, it’s a good idea to post a sign in a prominent place that lets players know where to find you.  To the extent that convention rules permit, placing a sign at the entrance to a game area you were supposed to be in can be a big help.

None of this is exactly rocket science, but it’s disappointing how many times a game is difficult or impossible to find.  A few simple changes would have made the location process much easier.

If you have additional recommendations, please share them in the comments.

It’s been a few months since I last posted updates to Gamer Hotsheet.  I spent most of November trying to write a novel for the NaNoWriMo contest (and succeeded).  December was spent with holiday preparations and last-minute transition training for a co-worker who retired at the end of the year.  The start of this year has been spent on various projects at work and at home that have, quite frankly, left me too tired to even THINK about gaming.

With the spring cleaning underway, I realized it was time to start clearing the decks and getting Gamer Hotsheet back online.  As you can see, I’ve posted a number of new articles today.  I’ve got more planned for the rest of the week, so check back later or connect to our RSS feed to watch for the new stuff when it becomes available.

I’m planning to attend Origins 2011 and Gen Con Indy 2011 this year.  Whether I get to any other gaming events or conventions will depend on scheduling and what needs to get done at work.  Hopefully I’ll see some of you there!

I’m looking forward to GenCon in a couple of weeks, if my work responsibilities don’t require me to cancel my hotel reservation and stay home.

Hopefully you like how the site’s working now. For those who are new here, I scan the web sites of literally thousands of game-related companies for news items. When I find something that seems interesting, funny, useful, etc., I post a short blurb linking back to that item. Hopefully, the blurb is short enough that you can read it quickly and detailed enough that you can decide whether or not it interests you. I post the blurbs by general category: Game Accessories, Board Games, Card Games, Miniatures and Miniatures Games, PC and Online Games, Role-Playing Games, and Wargames. If you subscribe to my RSS feed, you can easily get the information of interest to you.

I also have a “Game Deals” category. When I find a discount or deal on a game-related item, I’ll make sure the post containing that news item gets flagged to be part of this category on the site. If you monitor that RSS feed, you’ll be aware of the latest deals I’ve seen on games on the web.

How many game related sites and pages do I monitor for news? Here’s a rough estimate (for some sites I monitor multiple pages, so the actual figures are probably a little less than quoted here):

• Game Accessories: 85
• Board Games: 825
• Card Games: 117
• Miniatures: 490
• Miniatures Games: 156
• PC and Online Games: 92
• Game Retailers: 101
• Role-Playing Games: 156
• Wargames: 151
• Game News Sites and Blogs: 34

That works out to around 2,200 sites and/or pages that I’m monitoring. I won’t list them all here, but here are a few examples from each of the above categories, to give you an idea of where I’ve placed them in the list:

• Game Accessories: Active Minds Solutions, BradyGames, Chessex, Crystal Caste, Dragon Forge Design, Dwarven Forge
• Board Games: 4th Street Software, Acorn Games, Alderac Entertainment Group, Asmodee Games, Phalanx Games, Strat-O-Matic
• Card Games: Archetype Games, Bandai, Gozer Games, Ship of Fools Games, Upper Deck Entertainment, Wizards of the Coast
• Miniatures: Acheson Creations, Bend Sinister Miniatures, Copplestone Castings, Naloomi’s Workshop, Thunderbolt Mountain
• Miniatures Games: Aberrant, Eureka Miniatures, Games Workshop, Rackham Games, Starfleet Universe, Urban Mammoth
• PC and Online Games: 2K Games, Activision, Codemasters Software, Interplay, Matrix Games, Shrapnel Games, THQ
• Game Retailers: Alternative Armies, Alliance Game Distributors, Funagain Games, Ravenstone Games, Warpath Games
• Role-Playing Games: 0One Games, Chaosium, Exile Game Studio, Goodman Games, Paizo Publishing, Studio 2 Publishing
• Wargames: Ad Astra Games, BayonetGames, Columbia Games, Multiman Publishing, Omega Games, Two Hour Wargames
• Game News Sites and Blogs: About.com Games, Board Game Central, Game Publishers Association, Wargames Illustrated, Web-Grognards

Depending on the time available to me each evening, I scan one of the above groups of sites to see who’s posted something new. Then I read each of the updated sites to build the news items for that particular group for that evening.

As I become aware of interesting new sites or find that a site I’ve been monitoring goes offline, I update the list.

When I go to game conventions, I’ll post what I’ve seen, heard, played, and enjoyed.

When I play a new game and have a particularly good or bad experience, I’ll tell you about that also. Where possible, I’ll do full reviews.

Periodically, I’ll post updates like this to let you know what I’m thinking about the site, changes I’m planning on making, etc.

Thanks for dropping by!

Tonight I finished going through the first batch of 1,000 new URLs for my scan list. I also started going through the list of 3,000 that I added after that. The list of 3,000 was whittled down automatically to 2,400 by the software I’m using. I’ve made it through the letter “A” links in that list.

Tomorrow night I hope to take a moment to post some more actual game news and perhaps a final Origins 2010 report.

Last night, I put my scripting skills to work and created a script to compile a list of game-related web sites from a variety of lists on the web. As a result, the list of sites I’m able to scan for news is now INCREDIBLY larger than before. I had been scanning around 400 sites for news items. The script built a list of around 5,000! To be fair, there are duplicates there, dead links, and probably quite a few non-game sites picked up in there. It will take some time to sort all that out, but I’m excited to consider how much more info I’ll be able to bring you now.

The bad news is that I had a bit of an accident today. I fell off a ladder and dislocated my left shoulder. I also managed to bruise, scrape, and twist various other body parts. Spent much of my Father’s Day in an emergency room. But the shoulder’s been put back in place and the rest will heal. In the short term (a few days, hopefully), I’ll be making only modest posts since one arm’s in a sling and I’ll be on prescription meds.

I started this site several years ago, after visiting the Origins Game Fair in Columbus and wanting to do something to give back to the community. I thought it would be nice to collect and report on information from all the game manufacturers and retailers I knew of.

My original intent was for this to be a daily news site, with postings about every single game news item I could find. That proved to be too ambitious once I got married, had a home to maintain, and other responsibilities. I scaled back a bit and dropped my coverage of gaming areas I wasn’t personally too familiar with, like roleplaying. Then my mother became ill. She died of melanoma in 2008. Two weeks after her funeral, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. This site became the last thing on my mind. Things at work also heated up. The entire management chain above me was changed. My job responsibilities changed. There was a lot to learn, and again, this site became the last thing on my mind.

Now, I’m past the cancer. The job’s still pretty intense, and it probably will be for a while. Things are busy at home, too. So I’ve adjusted the site’s focus again. Daily gaming news is still much too ambitious. However, I’m planning to post at least twice a week during the “non-convention” weeks of my year. Each of these posts will be a sort of “headline news” update of what I found out in the gaming world since the last update. During the “convention” weeks (specifically Origins and Gen Con Indy, but there could be others someday), I’ll post much longer narratives, game reviews, and other items of interest.

With Origins coming up next week and Gen Con in a couple of months, I thought it might be good to look at Gamer Hotsheet’s visitor stats. After all, it might not be worth updating this site if no one out there is reading it… right?

Fortunately, it looks like you ARE reading it, for which I thank you. According to the server software, there have been 24,078 unique visitors since I brought the site online on this server. There were 1093 unique visitors in May 2010, and so far this month 935. Those (roughly) 1,000 unique visitors in May looked at a total of 10,000 pages (or about 10 pages each). Several hundred people seem to be subscribing to the RSS feeds, which is one of the reasons I switched to WordPress a while ago (my previous server software didn’t offer those).

This site’s busiest days so far were in September 2009 and early April 2010.

Here’s a breakdown of the visits by a variety of categories (since the site was brought to life on this server), as accumulated by the StatPress plug-in:

Operating System	Visits
Windows XP	65803
Windows Vista	41322
Windows 2000	10334
Linux	10022
Windows 98	6644
Windows NT 4	5870
Windows Server 2003	5735
Mac	4648
Mac OS X	3752
Windows 95	2566

Browser	Visits
Internet Explorer 6	50074
Internet Explorer 5	17814
Firefox 3	15553
Internet Explorer 7	10297
Thunderbird	7128
Internet Explorer 4	6496
“Generic Gecko”	5075
Firefox	4712
Opera	3453
Internet Explorer 8	3136

So, the breakdown of visitors to this site along operating system lines is about 88% Windows, 6% Linux, and 5% Macintosh. The variety of older Windows versions was surprising to me. I expected XP and Vista, being two of the more-current releases, to be high on the list. I didn’t expect to see Windows 95, 98, or even NT 4 on the list. Windows Server 2003 was also a surprise, though it could be that this is how Windows 7 is being reported.

Browser-wise, it was much the same. Internet Explorer clearly dominates the numbers, but Firefox makes a strong showing. It’s possible the “Generic Gecko” is Chrome and/or Safari.

The most-active domains referring people to this site (apart from search engines) are podfeed.net and longbowgames.com. I remember seeing Longbow’s Hegemony game a while ago and being very impressed by the demo. It appears the game is available from them now for $29.99. I may have to add that to my wish list…

Now that updates on the site are getting more regular, I’m hoping the traffic will increase along with it. If you enjoy what you’re seeing here on the site, here are a few of the things you can do to help (and to encourage me to keep doing it):

• If something posted on this site is relevant to a blog post you’re writing, a game forum discussion you’re taking part in, etc., feel free to link to this site. Quality links like those will help bring traffic here, which will make me happy and encourage me to keep running the site. (But please do not “spam” links into unrelated discussions or forum posts. Those don’t help.)
  
• Let your friends know about this site on Twitter, Facebook, etc., especially if they’re fellow gamers.
  
• The news items I post here come from an automated scan (followed by a manual review) of changes to about 400 game-related web sites. If you’re with a game publisher or game-related manufacturer and I’ve never mentioned you here, it’s likely I haven’t encountered your company before or have lost track of your web site. You can correct that by posting a comment on a relevant page here. Make sure to include a URL to your “news” page or somewhere on your site I can watch for information about what you’re up to. I’m brainstorming a good way to allow you to submit news items and emails without compromising my main email accounts with spam. (I used to have a specific email address for this site but took it offline due to cost and disuse.)
  
• Remember that this site is sponsored by advertisers. Letting them know you saw their product here when you make your purchase would let them know we’re helping them out.

That’s all for now. Time to do a check to see if I can find any interesting news for you…

Since last I posted on this site, so much has happened in my work life, home life, the economy, and the gaming industry. I won’t bore you with all the personal details, apart from saying that the pace of my life seems to have increased tenfold lately and shows no signs of slowing down. That’s made regular updates of The Gamer Hotsheet nearly impossible to do. I’m going to adjust the site’s news format slightly, to see if this helps make it easier to post on a regular basis and provide you with valuable tabletop gaming news, commentary, and reviews.

Shortly, I plan to post an update on the companies I am expecting to see at this year’s Origins 2010 convention and the products we can look forward to seeing from them. Rather than regurgitate the things I find on their site, I’ll give you the sort of “headline news” version in a few sentences and link to the original source of that news so that you can read it first-hand and draw your own conclusions.

I’m hoping to follow that same headline news format for my other daily and/or weekly posts as well. When something I read interests me enough to research it further, or I get to demo/test it, etc., I’ll post something lengthier about it here. I’ll also post detailed coverage of the game conventions I attend as well… so it’s not going to be just a big link-fest here.

If you like the new format, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up to date with new postings.

Mike Salsbury
Editor/Writer
Gamer Hotsheet

It’s hard to believe it’s January again, but I have to admit a certain amount of relief in having 2008 behind me.  In March 2008, I had two surgeries back-to-back to correct 3 different problems. On September 11, my mother passed away after a two-year battle with cancer.  A week after her funeral, I was diagnosed with a different kind of cancer.  In October, I underwent another surgery to remove the cancer, along with my thyroid.  Through late November and December, I was taken off medication, placed on a restrictive diet, and given a dose of radiation to kill remaining cancer and thyroid tissue.  It’s not over yet, but I hope the worst is behind me.

The last few weeks I took a break from blogging, including this site.  I spent some quality time with Grand Theft Auto IV, which I finally beat yesterday.  I spent a little time with Spore, and a title from Valve’s Steam service called “Space Trader” that wasn’t bad (but not great, either).  I’ve also caught up on a bunch of television programs my TiVo collected for me, including the last couple of seasons of Stargate Atlantis.

Looking ahead to 2009, I plan to post more game reviews, more World of Warcraft tips as I learn new things about the game, more wargame news, and more game news period.  I plan to attend at least Origins 2009 and Gen Con Indy 2009, and other events if I can.

I have a netbook now (an Asus 1000H) that will allow me to do some blogging on my lunch hour at work, and an iPod Touch that could help out in a pinch where there’s WiFi access.  With any luck, this will help make the stream of news a bit more consistent than in the past.

If you have any recommendations for The Gamer Hotsheet in 2009, please feel free to post them in the comments for this article.  I’m open to anything that will make this a more interesting and useful site for you.

The following article was imported from our old content management system on 08/10/2008. It may contain missing links and missing images which we do not plan to go back and correct.We apologize for any inconvenience.

When I originally envisioned The Gamer Hotsheet, I saw it as a daily gaming news site, covering pretty much any game you might see, buy, or play at Origins, Gen Con, or other national shows.  I kind of saw this site as a year-round exhibit hall, a place where manufacturers could post news about their new products, sales, and contests.

In the first few months, I had a lot more free time to devote to the site, and I could actually add articles pretty much every day.  Now, more than a year later, I’ve become far busier in my spare time and am simply not able to keep up a daily news schedule – especially since I’ve had little or no help.  A weekly schedule has been working for the last few weeks, so I’m going to try to maintain that, with updates more often as time permits (i.e., rarely but occasionally).

I’ve decided to make one important change to our gaming coverage, effective immediately.  We will no longer be covering news about new miniatures.  I don’t think I can hope to do this as well as sites like The Miniatures Page already do it, and the time is better spent on other content that seems to generate more readership.  So, while I will cover miniatures GAMES here, and I’ll let you know about any sales or deals on miniatures I run across, I won’t be covering specific miniatures from this point on.

I plan to continue covering the World of Warcraft MMORPG, as we seem to get at least as many hits on that content as other news on the site.  Since I’m still playing WoW and still learning things on occasion, that should continue to be of value to a large number of readers.

I hope to add coverage of Pirates of the Burning Sea as I learn more about that MMO.

And, of course, I’ll continue to cover Origins and Gen Con Indy as I have in the past. 

The following article was imported from our old content management system on 08/10/2008. It may contain missing links and missing images which we do not plan to go back and correct.We apologize for any inconvenience.

I took a break from Gamer Hotsheet starting around mid-December.  This was in part due to being very ill (some sort of flu bug) and in part due to a need to figure out a future direction for the site.

I started the site with the idea of, in essence, re-creating the dealer rooms at Origins and GenCon.   That is, I wanted you to be able to come here any day of the year and have a pretty good idea what new games your favorite company is putting out, what new miniatures are released, what RPG supplements you can pick up, etc.  That meant that I needed a way to identify when new things came out. 

I found a freeware program called "Page Update Watcher" that did a pretty good job of tracking changes to the news pages and product lists on about 600 game manufacturer and game news sites.  In around 5-10 minutes it could scan those sites and tell me where I might find news.  About 20% of the time, it was wrong.  The other 80% of the time it was right, but if the site’s layout changed dramatically it would be unable to adapt automatically and would permanently report that site as "unchanged".  Unless I happened to be on the ball and notice, for instance, that I wasn’t seeing anything new from a company, I effectively stopped reporting about them.  That wasn’t good.

I invested pretty much the entire year’s ad revenue in a new product, a shareware tool called "Check & Get" which does a far better job of monitoring web sites than Page Update Watcher is capable of.  As a result, I’m staring at another 86 potential articles to post on the site tonight.  Check & Get is helping me in another way, which is that it highlights the part of the page which changed since the last scan, making it easier than ever for me to determine if a particular change is really something newsworthy or not.

Since it appears that I’m going to be covering more news than I was in the past, I’m going to have to break the job down a little better.  Toward that end, I’ve broken the list of 600 game sites down by name, into five alphabetized chunks.  Each weeknight I’m going to try to cover just one chunk of sites.  That should make the task more manageable and allow me to keep this site pretty current without breaking my back writing 100 articles a night.

There are several of you who’ve submitted articles for the site in the past.  I expected the server software to notify me that articles had been submitted, but it wasn’t doing that.  As a result, I didn’t know to check in your articles.  Those of you who have submitted legitimate articles in the past have been upgraded to "publishers" on the site and are now allowed to make your articles go "live" when you’re ready without my need to review and approve.

If any other readers would like to become regular contributors, email me and let me know and I’ll set you up also.  The email address to use for this particular request is my first name (mike) followed by my last name (salsbury), followed by an at sign, then "gmail.com".  That address should reach me any weekday and should result in a pretty rapid response.

As always, thank you for your continued readership of this site, thank you for patronizing our advertisers when they offer products of interest to you, and, well, thanks for keeping the gaming hobby alive!

The following article was imported from our old content management system on 08/10/2008. It may contain missing links and missing images which we do not plan to go back and correct.We apologize for any inconvenience.

I’ve been asked by readers why this site is so heavily laden with articles about RPGs and miniatures. I’m sure some of you have wondered if those are my gaming interests and if that’s why the coverage of other areas, such as wargames, is relatively light. The truth, sadly, isn’t even as interesting as that.

To get the news I publish here, I rely on two sources: Google Alerts and manufacturers’ web sites. Google Alerts sends me an email any time it detects news about wargames or board games. I also use another tool to scan about 400-500 game-related sites to find anything new, then filter manually through all that “potential news” to find what might be of interest to you. Because this is a hobby and not a full-time job, I can’t spend lots of time each day scouring other offline sources, making calls, etc. Maybe someday the site will take off to a point where I can, but so far it hasn’t.

I personally enjoy most facets of gaming. I like a good wargame. I like a good miniatures game. I like board games, card games, PC strategy games, and RPGs. Bottom line, I like a good game and I’m not too particular what “kind” of game it is. This site’s “shotgun” coverage is a reflection of that wide-ranging interest. I don’t intentionally sleight any facet of gaming here. Nor do I intentionally leave off any particular manufacturer. I try to treat the little “one-person shop” as well as the industry leaders in terms of coverage. Actually, I’ll probably bend over backwards for the little guy, to help them make it big if I can.

But the sad truth, from my perspective on this side of the computer screen, is that the most active parts of the hobby gaming industry right now seem to be RPGs and miniatures. If I scan the Internet every day, I am almost always guaranteed to find that some foundry has released a new miniature, and some RPG publisher has put out a new supplement or title. It’s rare, by comparison, that the wargame publishers put out anything new. But if they do, and I find out about it, I definitely cover it. I’m not saying that I think other parts of the industry are dying, or anything of the sort. I think it’s simply that the amount of work required to produce a totally new tabletop wargame (with maps, counters, rules, etc.) is probably substantially more than to produce (for example) an RPG map in PDF form or a new miniature. I also think there are many more businesses actively producing miniatures and RPG items right now than wargames. As a result, we should expect to see (and do) more RPG and miniature releases than new wargame releases. Since I cover a sort of “survey” of the industry, you should expect to see (and do) more RPG and miniatures coverage here than wargame coverage… not because of any bias on my part.

The following article was imported from our old content management system on 08/10/2008. It may contain missing links and missing images which we do not plan to go back and correct.We apologize for any inconvenience.

Since returning from Gen Con, I haven’t posted any significant updates to The Gamer Hotsheet (GH). I apologize for that. One reason is the downtime of my main laptop (which contains the primary copy of the software I use to identify game news updates on the Internet) after attempting to reconfigure it for some non-GH activities. Another is that I’ve been trying to take some free time and learn a bit more about the Lord of the Rings Online MMO (LOTRO) and World of Warcraft (WoW) to share with you here.

The laptop downtime should be ending pretty soon, as I’ve sorted out what was going wrong. I’m hoping to bring it back to life tonight and get some news up. But I’ve got some family responsibilities to attend to that may prevent me from doing much tonight.

The learning about WoW is underway, though largely finished. When it’s done, I should (I hope) be able to present a guide to how to effectively level up certain trade skills that I’ve not found detailed elsewhere on the web. But that means getting my own characters’ skills to the max level possible, which I have yet to do, then replicating that on a new character.

The learning about LOTRO is underway as well, but is much farther behind. It will require more time to understand the game and its philosophy, after which I hope to provide a review and contrast relative to WoW.

I haven’t abandoned GH, though I did walk away from it for a little while to sort some things out for myself. I will be getting back to it very soon. Thanks for bearing with me during my short absence.