Welcome back to the News Collider, collecting the best, most interesting and strangest tidbits of board gaming news from around the tabletop gaming community.
This week we take a look at the rise and rise of solo modes in board games, a quick look at the Kid’s Game of the Year Award winner and the new album and record label from Critical Role.
KINDERSPIEL DES JAHRES WINNER ANNOUNCED
The judge’s votes are in and Magic Mountain (or Zauberberg) has been revealed as this year’s Kid’s Game of the Year 2022 thanks to its “innovative marble mechanism,” and “attractive game structure.”
This cooperative game for up to six players sees players racing wizards down the mountain trying to reach the base before the witches do. A bag of will-o’-the-wisps (marbles) are drawn and rolled down the slanted board on one of six channels inlaid in the board, if they strike a wizard, that player gets to move down the mountain.
Other nominees for the award included:
Auch Schon Clever (Also Very Clever – a kid-friendly version of Ganz Schon Clever) and Quacks & Co. (s kid-friendly spin-off of The Quacks of Quedlinburg)
ORIGINS 2022 ATTENDANCE
The figures are in, Origins Game Fair 2022 drew in a total of 11,689 gamers over the weekend of June 8th-12th.
This is 57% down on their pre-pandemic figures and also means that the UK Games Expo keeps its seat as the third-largest gaming convention in the world.
CRITICAL ROLE RECORD LABEL
Yup. You read that right, Critical Role, the folks who started as a bunch of voice actors who streamed their Dungeons & Dragons games and went on to launch the biggest Kickstarter of all time are now launching a record label; Scanlan Shortholt Music.
And why not?
The label will naturally be focused on ambient fantasy music to play whilst you’re tabletop gaming, their first album; ‘Welcome to Tal'Dorei’ will feature 17 original tracks inspired by their first campaign.
The album is available to purchase now on Steam (of all places) and all your other usual places as well as to stream on Spotify and the like
SOLO GAMES ARE AT AN ALL-TIME HIGH
Reddit user FaradaySaint has done a bit of analysis on Solo Gaming and has discovered that solo games, or games that support single players have been on the up and up, and hit an all-time high in 2021.
Using data scraped from BoardGameGeek, their analysis of games with over 100 ratings shows that since 1999 there was a lowly average of only 20 games published with solo modes, fast track through the advent of Kickstarter up to 2019 where 220 one-player-plus games were published (obviously the industry en masse hit the pandemic and shipping speed bump but the overarching trend shows that solo modes are becoming more and more important for board games.
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