You won’t often find many unboxing posts around Dice Hate Me, but every now and then a game comes along that warrants a little more attention to component detail. Glory to Rome is definitely one of those games. Since most of us have waited a cesar’s lifespan to get the game, and because I’ve received several questions about the game’s components, I now present a pictorial overview of the innards of one unbelievably beautiful black box.

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Hello dear readers! Monkey238 and I have returned from Origins 2012 a bit weary, but incredibly happy as we met many of you and made lots of new friends along the way. We worked hard from 10 to 6 every day in the Exhibition Hall running demos of Carnival, VivaJava and Compounded, teaching the joys of Lucky Dice (and awarding awesome prizes!), and just generally spreading the Dice Hate Me Games love around the con. After the Exhibition Hall closed for the day, we also got a chance to do quite a bit of after-hours gaming with a great group of people in Cartrunk Entertainment’s Unpub area in open gaming. The easiest way to share our adventures is through pictures, so come on in and browse the action gallery!

The calm before the storm; we gathered in the lounge of the Hyatt with (from left) Shawn Purtell, Fred MacKenzie and David MacKenzie to get a little devious in Nefarious.

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We live in an age of the reborn gold rush. It’s happened many times through the course of history; whether it’s the search for spices in the Orient, the great American gold rush of the 1840s, or the race to build the best and brightest dot com in the 1990s. Now we have Kickstarter. And just like in those days of yore, many enterprising individuals have been frantically strapping on their digital boots and wading into the crowdfunding flood in search of the newest treasures.

I mention this analogy to make note of the meta when I talk of the theme of Legend of the Lost Dutchman. In the mid-1800s, Jacob Waltz is rumored to have discovered a vein of gold in the Superstition Mountains so large that it eclipsed the finds of many other treasure hunts, and he relayed the story of that lost mine to a man shortly before his death. The true facts of Jacob Waltz’s legendary treasure are still unknown, but it hasn’t prevented generations of treasure seekers from searching for him and his rich legacy. Now Crash Games has created a game based on Jacob’s legend and seeks a notably smaller sum for funding in the digital gold mine that is Kickstarter. But is there treasure for the seeker inside the Dutchman box, or will many players instead be lost and bewildered?

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There are certain things in life that instantly and easily lend themselves to interpretation and adaptation in a board game. Farming, naturally. War, racing, and buying/trading on the stock market are practically games already. But until recently, one of the only recourses an entrepreneurial zealot had at the game table was to roll dice and move a little Scottie past Go. Enter crowdfunding; suddenly, games about business and start-ups became not only viable, but incredibly meta, making funding such entrepreneurial ventures possible. Startup Fever hit Kickstarter last spring and found gangbuster sales, while Briefcase tore through Indiegogo earlier this year. Now, Tasty Minstrel Games has entered the startup fray with Ground Floor on Kickstarter. And I’m here to tell you, unlike the tiny infrastructure that typically accompanies the budding businesses depicted in the game, Ground Floor is anything but tiny. This is big business, with a capital big.

In Ground Floor, players take on the roles of young business owners trying their best to improve the prestige of their startups through advertising, shrewd manufacture and pricing, improvements to infrastructure, and careful monitoring of the economic climate. If that sounds like a lot to keep track of, it is – but in an often-delightfully thinky way.

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When I first joined the ranks of the hardcore gamers lo so many years ago, if someone had asked me what the most prolific theme in gaming would be in 20 years my answer would not have been farming. War, maybe. Space travel, most certainly. But raising pigs, picking radishes/squash/bok choy, and figuring out the best price I could get out of my bundle of hay at the county market would not have been the first things that popped to mind. And, yet, here we are, in the future, and farming is everywhere. I can’t fully explain the allure, and robots do most of the harvesting these days, but we all flock to farm-themed games like a murder of crows to a cornfield.

At least, Phil Kilcrease certainly does. Phil is the founder of 5th Street Games, publisher of the fun titles Castle Dash, The Crow & The Pitcher and the recently-Kickstarted Farmageddon. See? Farming! And now Phil has a new farming project up on Kickstarter – My Happy Farm. This one’s a bit different, though; My Happy Farm is a Ukrainan import and has a distinctly Euro bent lurking about the barn.

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Dice Hate Me Games is proud to announce today that a new title will be joining the growing ranks of our board game family – Compounded!

Many of you may already be familiar with Darrell Louder’s Compounded from our mentions on The State of Games and from coverage of Cartrunk Entertainment’s Unpub events. For those who may be unfamiliar, Compounded is a game about building chemical compounds through careful management of elements, a fair bit of social play and trading, and just a bit of good old-fashioned luck. It’s fast-moving, accommodates two to five budding chemists, and is a lot of fun. We fell in love with it the very first time we played, and Darrell has spent months since then refining the gameplay and gathering tons of feedback at various Unpub events and beyond.

Darrell and Compounded will be at Origins Game Fair next week, so if any of you are planning on attending the convention, make sure you stop by the Dice Hate Me Games booth (#809 in the Exhibition Hall) and check out the newest member of the family! And we’ll be sharing much more about Compounded and when you can expect it to hit your lab tables in the coming months, so stay tuned!

Dear readers, I’m here to report,
On a game of mysterious sort,
It’s more magical than strange,
Fairies, goblins may change,
The way you lay cards down for sport!

Yes, yes, my poetry may be atrocious, but I choose to rhyme without reason simply to express how Goblins Drool, Fairies Rule is far superior to my lame limerick. Goblins Drool, Fairies Rule (hereby to be known as GDFR), is a game by David Sanhueza of Game-O-Gami, recently released on Kickstarter. I was lucky enough to be involved in the development of the Kickstarter campaign and, so, have been privy to a lot of the hard work that David has put into bringing GDFR to gaming tables.

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