PLAAY CONNECT 05.22.25

TODAY: "Ladies and Gentlemen...This...Is...The XHL!"

Join us this afternoon as we launch OUR brand of hockey! We'll give you a look at the cards, the XHL-themed game board and PLAAY mat, run down the franchises and then go over the suggested rules innovations for both full-play Hockey Blast and "express!"

NOTE that we'll stream at a DIFFERENT, earlier time today: 2pm MDT (4p EDT), on the PLAAY Games YouTube channel! Join us live, or watch the archived footage when you have the chance!

Recap: Digital 2 Dice CON '25

What an awesome weekend in Connecticut playing games and hanging out with gamers! Kudos to D2D CON hosts Dave Gardner and Mike Canestrari for putting on an incredible event. Get the "PLAAY take" on the event in our blog post, published yesterday.

PLAAY Dot CON 2025 Countdown

We're just over a month away from our OWN convention, PLAAY-Dot-CON 2025! This will be our eighth convention, our biggest and best-ever. We'll have ONE more "official" update for attendees, happening in the next couple of weeks. For now, here are a couple of quick things...

• If you sent in your flight arrival times and are hoping for a ride share, we will send out specific e-mails about that in the next couple of weeks, separate from the final e-mail update. We should be able to help out most of the folks who expressed interest in a ride-share or carpool.

• If you are arriving early (that is, before Thursday 06.26.25), please let us know! We want to be able to provide a preliminary head count to Enchanted Grounds for our Wednesday afternoon "Early Bird" gaming get-together.

• Convention merchandise is now LIVE on the PLAAY Games Site, under the Miscellaneous page. We've got a couple of t-shirt options, a convention hat, and several cool custom items. There's even a flowered tropical sports shirt and two pieces of gear from our fictional sports universe--Nick Concannon's Southern California XHL jersey and Xavier Etter's Florida jersey from the Basketball League of America! NOTE that all our gear is provided by third-party vendors, and will be mailed to you, NOT picked up at the convention. It's not a super-quick turnaround, anywhere from a week to ten days is typical. If you want to have your gear in time for the convention, you should probably order no later than June 10th.

• The convention's first organized event will be a big fishing tournament with our new printed/boxed version of Reel-Time Pro Fishin' Game. We'll stream a tutorial for the game about a week before the convention--this is different than previous conventions where we held the tutorial on-site at the convention just before the event. IMPORTANT: if you want to participate in the fishin' tournament, please watch the tutorial stream! We need you to be ready to fish at 10am Friday morning!

• The annual History Maker Baseball Time Machine Tournament will feature TWO divisions, PAST and FUTURE. The "Past Division" is BYOT (bring your own baseball team, any regular-season team PLAAY has published, real-life or fictional). The "Future Division" will play with the 20xx LEAP cards, which we will provide. ALL games will be full-play HMB.

Get Those Tackle Boxes Ready!

We're excited for the official print version release of our holiday game, "Reel-Time Pro Fishin' Game!" You may have noticed that the page for the fishin' game is live, and you can sign up for the wait list.

We'll also be offering three different Lake Expansion Bundles, each bundle will include four different custom fishin' holes of varying personalities and degrees of difficulty. We should have these posted in the next couple of weeks.

Truckin' '76 is Rolling Your Way!

Here's a sneak peek at the truck token that will come with the game! We're expecting to have this game ready to roll by the end of August--stay tuned for more details!

Coming Soon: 1985 USFL for SECOND SEASON Pro Football

We mentioned in our news show a couple months ago that we'd have sports game card set releases for all four major pro sports: baseball (Kurt Bergland's 50 years of Baseball Greatness), hockey (the XHL), basketball (2024-25 Pro Season) and football (1985 USFL).

Welll...all that's left is football! We've gotten most of the work done on this set, and the first round of proofing. Our goal is to have this set available before the 40th anniversary of the final USFL championship game (which was held on July 14th, 1985).

FREE STUFF!

• Dave Gambrill's 2024 Pro Season for COLD SNAP Canadian Pro Football Game: Once again, Dave has meticulously re-created last year's Canadian pro season in team sheet form, ready for you to download, print and PLAAY!

• Rob Gallamore's 2025 Pro Hockey "Final Four" for HOCKEY BLAST: Rob's our "go to" guy for hockey cards, and will be creating the ratings for the official card set release later this fall. For now, these cards (in excel-formatted PDF presentation) will allow you to pre-PLAAY the championship cup semi-finals and finals along with the real thing.

• Pete Adams' "Derby Day" Feud/Fume Chart for DEMO DERBY SMASH-DOWN: This is the chart we used at D2D CON as outlined in our blog post, you can try it out for yourself on your own game table! (Let us know how it works for you and what things we might do to make it even better!)

• History Makers Who Served Cards for HISTORY MAKER BASEBALL: It wouldn't be Memorial Day Weekend without remembering the men from baseball's past who served in the military, many of them major stars of their era. This download includes the roster expansion created by PLAAY Gamer Brian Hoxsey last year, which added a couple dozen new players to the set.

Errata Fixes

We're far from perfect, and these slipped past the proofers and into production...

• From the 2024 Pro Season card set, here's color and B&W versions of 2024 KC's Kyle Isbel.

• From Kurt Bergland's "50 years of Baseball Greatness" cards for Ted Simmons (should be •STOIC not •ACTIVE) and Merrill Kelly (corrected spelling). We’ve also included a card for Davey Lopes that clarifies his •PATIENT status.

Apologies!!

Community Shout Out: Lenny LaFrance

We have some amazing people in our community, and it's only right and good that we recognize them! Most of us know Lenny LaFrance, he has been a contributor and participant in the sports game hobby in general and the PLAAY universe in particular (Lenny does the annual IPFC update for Cold Snap, the "Weekend Baseball League" for History Maker Baseball, among other offerings). Lenny serves in law enforcement in Eureka, CA and was just honored as the Crisis Intervention Team Law Enforcement Executive of the Year Award by CIT International for their upcoming annual conference which will be held in Anaheim, CA from Aug. 11-13, 2025. You can read more about this honor here. Congrats, Lenny--we are PROUD of you!

Hockey Blast Express Question

In anticipation of our XHL release, I thought this would be a good clarification to point out for the "express" version of the hockey game. Jon Bridge asked, "On the red visitor scoring chance card, number 66 says 'choice home player scores goal!' I assumed this was a typo that should read as choice visitor player scores goal since it's the visitor scoring chance chart. Or, is this correct, and something crazy and weird happened off of the visitor scoring chance that led to a home goal?"

It's NOT a typo, just sort of a "home ice advantage" where the home team gets a crazy bounce of the puck and an unexpected goal. Thanks for asking!

Photo Finish

Jason Laumeyer sent us this photo of some custom PLAAY merchandise that his sister created using logos we provided. Pretty cool, huh? I especially love the FTTM training center and "Stu Barton School of Golf" shirts!

• Thanks for reading along, hope to see you in the chat room for one of our upcoming streams including tonight's welcome to the XHL stream! We appreciate you being part of our incredible community of gamers, and wish you a safe, restful and enjoyable holiday weekend...