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Dispatches:
News from Atlas Games
Special Ops Drawing
Atlas Games is pleased to announce that Antonia Cabal of Milwaukie, OR, is the winner of this quarter's Special Ops prize drawing. Antonia will get to choose a prize from among the rare and and one-of-a-kind Atlas Games items reserved for the Special Ops drawing.
Special Ops is Atlas Games' corps of loyal fans who organize and run demos and tournaments at retail stores and conventions across the country and around the world. At the end of each quarter, Special Ops demo team members who have run a game in the last three months are entered into a prize drawing for special Atlas items. The next drawing will be September 28th, and will feature a choice of prizes such as press sheets and original art from our popular Ars Magica, Feng Shui, Penumbra D20, and Unknown Armies RPGs, and from card game favorites like Dungeoneer, Lunch Money, and Once Upon a Time.
Atlas would also like to welcome the following new recruits:
Josh Dixon
Rob McCarthy
Claudio Molina
Patrick Murphy
Nathan Young
Thanks for being a part of Special Ops!
If you're interested in joining Atlas Games' Special Ops demo team, just fill out and send in the application form at
www.atlas-games.com/specialops.
To request a demo at your convention or retail store, send in the demo request form located at
www.atlas-games.com/pdf_storage/SOdemorequestform.rtf.
Pieces of Eight Makes Diana Jones Shortlist
Atlas Games is pleased to learn that
Pieces of Eight has made the shortlist for the seventh annual Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming. The committee comments:
"It's a perfect example of a game that is simple to learn but fun to play for beginners and long-time gamers alike, it can be played just about anywhere, and it offers layers of customization and strategy found in few games of any kind, as well as an elegance for which all great game designers strive."
Pieces of Eight is one of only three games on the shortlist, and the winner will be announced on Wednesday, August 15th.
Pieces of Eight Wins Origins Award
The Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design has announced that
Pieces of Eight has won an Origins Vanguard Award. The Vanguard Awards are given for unique and innovative products that either don’t fit the regular colleges or that stand out so much from previous products that they deserve even further acknowledgement. Vanguard Awards are given out only rarely. Needless to say, we're thrilled by the news, and hope that the public will take this opportunity to check out Pieces of Eight.
40 Years of Gen Con at Press
The 40 Years of Gen Con book went off to press on Saturday. It's been an ENORMOUS project from the logistics side, with over 120 contributors and almost 250 images in the book. But it's also been hugely rewarding ... I think this history of our hobby is an amazing chronicle, and I was astounded at how many things I learned about Gen Con during the process of editing and laying out the book. Peter Adkison's reaction in his approval of the first chapters sums it up, I think:
"This looks fabulous, guys. My face is flushed and I'm fighting back the tears. This is a really great thing we're doing. Gamers all over the world will really appreciate how we're documenting history. Some of those pictures are priceless. And I love how the credits are laid out like the stats on the Gen Con dragon. (right?)"
Okay, so maybe the credits weren't consciously designed to look like stats for the dragon (they DO kind of have that shape about them, though) -- the point is that it's at press, it'll be available at Gen Con, and it looks great!
Our thanks to everyone who helped us with this project -- the folks at Gen Con LLC, all the publishers who sent us cover images (even for last-minute requests), everyone who submitted themselves to Robin's interviewing, those who contributed stories and photos (visit
www.GenConHistory.com to see whose were included in the book), Ian Livingstone and Mike Carr for their rare early Gen Con photos, and Wendy Wyman for interrupting her vacation to take a photographic tour of Lake Geneva for us. You've all helped to create an amazing book, and I think you'll be impressed come August.
Pieces of Eight Review
Michael Erb, with the Parkersburg News and Sentinel in West Virigina, just posted a review of
Pieces of Eight to Board Game Geek. Michael says, "Pieces of Eight is a very fun, piratey-feeling game with good components and a lot of replay potential. The game is quick to learn, easy to play and very portable. ... If you are into pirate-themed games or wanting to try something a little different than the standard board or card game, I would definitely recommend giving Pieces of Eight a try."
Read the review now!
Mike Stackpole on Pieces of Eight
In the most recent Comics & Games Retailer magazine, New York Times best-selling author Mike Stackpole had this to say about Pieces of Eight, in his "The Winning Edge" column:
"I've long pointed to Atlas Games'
Pieces of Eight as a good example of a game that packs small and plays big. Stack a set of coins, hand it to a prospective player, let him learn the powers of the specific coins as he goes, and within 10 minutes, he'll want more coins and to play again. It's a great tool for getting folks hooked on a fun game that really benefits from a tactile feel."
Pulp Gamer Reviews Seismic
We just got word that Pulp Gamer has up a new review of
Seismic. They say: "Good luck with your construction in this fault zone. If you think you can shrug off the risk and build the longest roads, you will do very well in Seismic. Jeremiah tells us about this great opportunity for a family game and is still working to figure out a good winning strategy." Listen to the entire review at
www.pulpgamer.com.
Atlas Hacked
This morning we were notified by our website host that they'd been hacked, and that we should change our FTP passwords. After getting a tip from Atlas Forum user Kurt Konegen, we also checked all the files on the site for unusual activity. It looks like the Forum's index page was changed this morning by persons unknown, along with every other index file on the atlas-games.com, genconhistory.com, and pieces-of-eight.com websites. No other files were compromised, and we've replaced all of the hacked index files with our backup copies as of 4:30 pm CST. So, we should be back to pre-hack status except for the genconhistory.com Forum and Gallery, which are now disabled while we work on them.
It turns out that the hacker's file was actually a redirect link to another web site. So, if you tried to access any of our sites today and got redirected somewhere, that was it at work and it would probably be a good idea to run a virus checker on your computer.
Thanks to Kurt for emailing us right away, and sorry for the trouble.
Abyssal Update
The long-awaited
Feng Shui supplement,
Glimpse of the Abyss, is now laid out and pretty much ready for press. However, since this book is so long past its original expected release date, and the size, price and format changed from its originally expected form, we are soliciting our distributors from scratch, giving them a chance to send out information on the product to all of their retailer just like they would for a product announced for the first time. To allow enough time for them to do this right, we've set September as the month for the release of the book. Having the ready-for-press materials waiting to be mailed, I'm pretty confident that this time we have the release date right...
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