Session Report Up - Empire Builder, and links

The latest JSGC session report, wherein I rip into Empire Builder after my first play, is up here. Games played: Empire Builder, Age of Steam, Winner's Circle, Taj Mahal, Tikal, Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation x 3.

There sure seem to be a lot of links to board games popping up. Boing Boing had two yesterday:

One is the story of the development of the board game Viktory II, originally cited on RandomDude, and then cited by Boing Boing. I sent this link and the source to Best of Board Games yesterday, and it showed up here. I wasn't cited, however, and neither was RandomDude, so I assume that the editors must have found the article themselves or had received other submissions about it before I sent it to them. The developers used Settlers of Catan hexes for the initial version of the prototype.

The other one is the now ubiquitous story about Monopoly's addition of a credit card reader to one of its versions, cited here, for example, and on Boing Boing here. I wrote about this already back in May, and it's strange to see old news suddenly surface like it's new news. Board Game Geek has several dozen threads about it, and none of them by anyone who actually likes Monopoly, so why are they talking about it?

As long as we're linking (some of this is old news):

This site is run by video game players who will charge you $45/hour to come to your house and teach you to be a better video game player (via Joystiq).

This site has mock motivational posters all based around RPG wisdom.

While this site sells:

(They say "Sin All You Want, We'll Print More")

Yehuda