PLAAY Connect 02.28.23
We're getting ready to head out to Vegas for the Dice Tower convention, but before we go let's get you caught up on all things PLAAY-related!...
Dice Tower West
Sam and I are leaving (early!) Wednesday for Vegas, driving (with a vehicle full of games, we're vendors this year not just exhibitors), back Monday. ALERT: MAIL DELAY! We'll be in Vegas Thursday 03.09.23 through Sunday 03.12.23 with a travel day on either side. So, any orders for print products during that time frame will ship Tuesday 03.14.23. Digital delivery will continue uninterrupted while we're away.
We have TWO DTW sanctioned tournaments, one for Score Cards, our new PLAAY NOW game created by Mike Fitzgerald, and one for HMG, both Friday the 10th, both with prizes for the winner! Full info about Dice Tower West can be found here...
PLAAY Dot CON 2023 Update
We made a blog post about this on 02.15.23, with all the latest scheduling and plans…
PLAAY Games at the Baseball Hall of Fame!
Plans are coming together for our live on-location event at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, 10.14.23! We'll be able to offer a Cooperstown-area hotel location (Comfort Inn and Suites in Milford, NY) as our event "hub," with a discounted room block. We have the hotel conference room booked for game-playing both Friday and Saturday evenings! We're thinking of holding the "Fall Classic Pre-PLAAY" on Friday night at the hotel, then doing a game event with the HMB Cooperstown Cards Saturday afternoon at the hall of fame. Let us know if you're thinking of coming, we're limited to no more than 24 gamers at the HOF (we currently have 16 planning to attend).
New Products in the pipeline...
• Score Cards: Our card game collaboration with celebrated game designer (and PLAAY Gamer) Mike Fitzgerald is now on the PLAAY Games site! Score Cards will debut at Dice Tower West, and will go live on PLAAY.com Memorial Day Weekend to kick off "The Summer of NOW!" In the meantime, Dan King, the Game Boy Geek has reviewed the game, watch it here!...
• 1998 25th Anniversary commemorative set for HISTORY MAKER BASEBALL: We're pretty excited about this concept, we feel like it's the "sweet spot" involving attractiveness, playability and price point. It's designed more to remember the season in a vivid, colorful way, with enough players to have a reasonably deep experience. Each team gets 24 players, 12 pitchers and 12 batters, presented in team colors with action figure illustrations. Each team is contained on a single page, giving you more flexibility for storage and game play. We demoed this on our 02.23.23 stream, you can take a look at them here. Our plan is to release these cards on (or about) Opening Day. Spoiler Alert: we do have plans for a second vintage baseball season card set in this formula later this summer--an all NEW vintage season, one we've not yet carded...
• Stock Car Racing 75th Anniversary card set for RED WHITE & BLUE RACIN': We've once again teamed up with Jerry Minks to create a very cool "all-time great" card set based on 75 years of professional stock car racing. This will be a unique set, different in presentation than our standard pro season sets. We're hoping to have a demo put together sometime in April so you can see it on YouTube, with the card set being made available around Memorial Day weekend.
• Binge Week Golf for HISTORY MAKER GOLF: Similar to previous "binge weeks," this time it'll be all about GOLF! We'll have new course collections NINETEEN and TWENTY, a re-vamped (color) all-time greats card set, re-visited Augusta National course cards and a new HMG PLAAY mat! Binge Week Golf is on the schedule for the week of 04.22.23! More info soon!
“Free Free Twenty-Free!”
I've been busy going through all the free stuff files we've posted over the last fourteen years (!!), and with the idea of re-organizing everything to make it a little more "accessible"--this week I've been culling through the files to find the ones that people would still want to download. And on 03.03.23 (that would Friday, March 3rd), we'll make as much of that stuff as we can available again (as well as some NEW "free stuff!"). Program Note: We'll give you sort of a "users guide" to Free-Free-Twenty-FREE, Thursday evening 03.02.23 on the PLAAY Games YouTube Channel!
ViDEO ACTiViTY!…
No YouTube streams while we're in Vegas, we'll be back in studio 03.23.23 for the Interprovincial (Canadian) Pro Football Conference Season Opener! The two new expansion teams (Pacific Whalers and Manitoba Moose) square off for early bragging rights--one of these teams will begin its existence with a victory in its first game! Tune in at 6pm MDT, 8pm EDT on the PLAAY Games YouTube Channel!
• If you missed it, here's what we streamed in February!...
02.02.23 "Score Cards" with Mike Fitzgerald: Mike joined us live in-studio to introduce and play his new card game.
02.09.23 “Big Game Pre-PLAAY” with SECOND SEASON EXPRESS: Our version of Kansas City vs. Philadelphia, we put the new-concept team sheets from last month’s CONNECT on the game table to give 'em a test run.
02.16.23 “AVC Hawaii Hundred,” RED WHITE & BLUE RACIN’ SCRAM season opener: Wayne Montana's Farewell Season kicked off in Hawaii, it was a VERY exciting race on the beaches of Waikiki with almost a dozen different race leaders!
02.23.23 Baseball (and other) News Show: Sort of a video version of the newsletter in some ways, includes video of the upcoming 1998 commemorative baseball set.
Community Contributors
• James Cast's Tabletop SportCast Podcast has now reached triple digits! I got to be James' guest for his 100th episode, we talked about the sports board game hobby from a lot of different angles. Listen in here!
• James Cast is also coordinating a community play-through of the 2023 SCRAM season. Our streamed version of the AVC Hawaii Hundred was the first race of the project. James says, "19 races are scheduled (55%) with 13 races already completed (38%). This past weekend we saw our first two-time winner, as Geoff Daly Jr. took the checkered flag at the Get-A-Job.com 300 to follow his win at the Southern 600. He now sits just five points behind our co-season points leaders, Julee Justus and Ray Swisher. Phil Yanez and Jordy Pettis round out the Top 5.
• Bill Sauerbier has started a new video series, "Does it Play!?" Each episode, Bill does a quick overview of a game, providing background, insights and game play tips. Bill kicked off the series with a review of our holiday offering, FIRST CONTACT: Your Town from PLAAY NOW! Check it our here!
Hoops Questions…
We got e-mail from Jon Bridge, who's been enjoying our fictional College Hoops PLAAY-Down set, "Love the different teams and players, I have had fun picking up on some teams that may be influenced by real schools (like the Carolina Blue Heelers, very clever). This has gotten me thinking (especially as Midwest Metro Hawks bears a strong resemblance of my Marquette Golden Eagles) of possibly making my own teams based off real life college teams. Question: Does the "How-To" guide translate to making college players and teams, or is it more for pro teams? The thing that to me would factor in would be taking teams from different conferences, so how strength of conference, etc. influences ratings.”
“Second, the last overtime game I played had the first instance of this: what do you do when you an overtime timeout? Since you only go with four players and four FAC's in OT, would you put the fifth starter back in like you would a time out in regulation? Or would you leave it at four cards and just roll the dice for coach quality?”
ANSWERS: Yes, the "how-to" covers both college and pro creation, although it does not address the strength of schedule issue—you'll have to figure that out on your own. Seems like people break down into one of two camps on this. Some want to rate players relative to the same standard, so a small college team that plays in a lesser conference would get fewer base qualities than Penn State or Marquette. The other camp (of which I am a member!) would use the "golden die" idea we offer for the soccer game, where a die roll legislates how often the underdog team gets to reference its qualities. This makes it much simpler to rate teams, everyone uses the same standard.
As for the time-out in overtime (very cool!) I would play it that the fifth starter comes back in. Makes for some unpredictability, and could be quite memorable!
Pro National Golf Tour Project Results
Harvey Couch shared the final standings and stats from his 2021 Pro National Golf Tour, "I got this set at last year’s Con and completed in early 2023 (just in time for the release of the new set). I've really enjoyed this set--I hope you keep it going (even if it’s every two years). Anyway, I did a nine event regular season (with the four traditional majors) and a three event playoff." Here are Harvey's results: event, course (M for major)(purse), winner.
1 • PLAAYers Championship, TPC Sawgrass ($20 million), Fabio Antonucci.
2 • The Masters, Augusta National GC (M)($15 million), Dustin Emerick.
3 • Sun Coast Capital, Heritage Harbour Town Golf Links ($8 million), Allain Zelderloo.
4 • PNG Championship, Firestone CC (South) (M)($15 million), Trent McAdams.
5 • Classic Bank Invitational, Bay Hill Club and Lodge $($12 million), Dustin Emerick.
6 • U.S. Open, Pinehurst No. 2 (M) $17.5 million), Trent McAdams.
7 • The Greenbrier Classic, The Greenbrier, ($7.5 million), Justin Wallis.
8 • The Open Championship, Royal Lytham and Ste. Annes GC (M), ($14 million), Kevin Percival.
9 • Amicable Insurance Classic, Bethpage Black ($8 million), Adam Trenchard.
PLAYOFF: St. Jude Championship, TPC Southwind ($9 million), John Reasoner.
PLAYOFF: BMW Championship, Whistling Straits ($9 million), Justin Wallis.
PLAYOFF: TOUR Championship, East Lake Golf Club ($9 million), Nick Yarlot.
• For a (very impressive and very) complete report of Harvey’s project, click here!
"Mistakes, I've Made a Few..."
• Heard from fellow Coloradan Bruce Bergquist the other day, "History Maker Golf, Special Results Level Two: Par 3, #13; Par 4, #24; and Par 5, #16. This is a misunderstanding of the rules of golf. It is not a penalty if the ball falls off the tee -- whether or not the wind blows it off or the golfer accidentally knocks the ball off with his club, etc. The ball is simply not in play until the golfer makes an actual stroke at the ball. Until then, no penalty.”
I told Bruce that I didn't remember the specific thought behind this reading, but was thinking that if a golfer tapped the ball with his club, it's a stroke. That's the way it works once the ball is in play. If a player accidentally moves the ball anywhere AFTER the tee shot, it IS a penalty. So a practice swing in from the fairway that brushes the ball is treated far more severely than the same result from the tee box.
Anyway, we'll amend that result in the next printing of the golf game book. I haven't decided whether to preserve the result (decider die "bullet," something happens from the tee that triggers a penalty stroke), or changing the result where, say, the wind blows the ball off the tee and the golfer gets frustrated and becomes STORMY. In any case, thanks for the heads-up, Bruce!
• Randy Sivigny e-mailed us about the spelling of Brooks Koepka's first name in the 2022 Pro Season cards, “You called him 'Book.'" Ah yes, the evils of auto-correct. Duly noted, we'll fix this.
• As we were running Race Week for our Hawaii Hundred stream--and I meant to mention this ON the stream, but forgot--I noticed that Brooks Billovich's trophy symbol was silver colored, when it should have been bronze. (As you may know, this year we've added a printed notation of the trophy symbol type in addition to the color--Billovich's notation says BRONZE.) We fixed that right away, but maybe a dozen copies of the set escaped PLAAY HQ with the mixed-up color.
• Finally, Jeff Curtis and Shawn Kauffman pointed out an error on the Series FOUR Famous Fall Classics cards, stray names at the bottom of the 2007A Boston cards. This is an Excel-generated automation error where the first name cell from the previous line is subbed in for the bottom-row player experience qualities. Ugh!
Sincere apologies for the inconveniences, blessings upon you if you can live with these errors, but if not please feel free e-mail and we'll send you a corrected card!
FREE!
• 2023 Interprovincial Pro Football Conference cards: Created by Lenny LaFrance, these are the teams our IPFC co-op group will use to determine the 2023 Cartier Bowl Championship. The league kicks off March 13th, we'll stream the opening weekend finale between the league's two new teams, Pacific and Manitoba, March 23rd.
• 1994 World Cup Soccer cards: This package was put together by PLAAY gamer Timothy Smith, they have a different look to them (by design). 24 teams in team colors, plus schedules, team cards (with instant results grades) and roster cards.
• HISTORY MAKER BASEBALL “Express” Game Day: This idea was hatched by Pete Adams, a streamlined version of the full HMB “Game Day” process for use with the “express” version of the game. Designed to be printable (black and white) and foldable, you can fit it in your “express” game envelope with the regular game boards. Pete’s still tweaking this, so feel free to provide input!
And, don’t forget—MORE free stuff on Friday 03.03.23! (Free Free Twenty-free!)
Photo Finish
From Harvey Couch, "I was getting ready to play some "FIRST CONTACT: Your Town" with my seven-year old. While I was laying out the cards, he was playing with his magnetic building sticks and I looked over and he had made PLAAY.com. LOL! I had to snap a picture and share.”
Have a great month, we’ll see ya online! PLAAY On!