Tag Archives: gencon

Tsuro Celebrates 20 Years with a Big Competition and a Grand Prize!

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Tsuro is one of my all-time favorite board games.

Ever since I first saw it played on Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop YouTube series, I was hooked. I bought my own copy a year later, and for over a decade, it has been in regular rotation on board game nights. I’ve included it in every Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide since I started the blog.

Tsuro is a beautiful, simple game that only takes about twenty minutes to play. You can play with as few as two players or as many as eight. It can be the centerpiece of a game night or the perfect palate cleanser after a more stressful round of another game.

In Tsuro, each player adopts the role of a flying dragon soaring through the sky. Players choose from the tiles in their hands in order to build paths on the board, representing their paths through the sky.

Naturally, these paths will eventually intersect, and you need to be careful to avoid colliding with another dragon or following a path right off the edge of the board. (Both of those scenarios cause you to lose.)

And despite the potential for competitive gameplay, I’ve found most Tsuro games to be peaceful affairs, each player watching their dragon token loop and swirl across various intersecting paths, hoping to be the last one standing on the board.

Calliope Games, the publishers of Tsuro, are celebrating 20 years of dragon-soaring gameplay this year. And not only are they releasing a special 20th anniversary edition of the game, but they’re hosting a celebration at this year’s Gen Con: the First Annual Tsuro National Championship!

On Saturday August 1st, players will convene in Hall D at 6 PM, competing in two preliminary rounds before those with the highest scores advance to the finals.

The winner will receive this gorgeous Limited Edition version of the game (valued at $350, the Luxury edition!), and every participant will receive a copy of the new 20th anniversary edition (pictured above, which also looks beautiful).

You can click here to reserve your seat and compete! I’m bummed I won’t be able to attend, but I’ll probably be picking up a copy of that 20th anniversary edition for my shelf (to sit alongside the other four editions of the game I have).

And yes, they ALL get played.

Good luck to everyone competing! And here’s to many more years of Tsuro and the spirit of gameplay it represents.

So, to mark this lovely anniversary, I’ve got a little puzzly challenge for you.

How many words (five to seven letters long) can you make that include all the letters in TSURO at least once? And let’s exclude plurals to keep it manageable.

I came up with 22 words. Can you top that?

And while I’m asking questions, what board game offer your best chance to compete for a national championship, fellow player? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.

NBC: Novel Board-game Content

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book rock

By the late 2000s and early 2010s, NBC’s Must See TV Thursday lineup was a thing of the past, but they were still putting out quality comedy content. My Name Is Earl, The Office, Community, Scrubs, Parks and Recreation, and 30 Rock all had loyal followings.

And you’d be surprised how much puzzle and game content ended up on those shows.

The Office featured in-house Olympics and betting games, as well as a Da Vinci Code-esque prank. Community had two Dungeons & Dragons-inspired episodes (which I should really cover at some point).

But those last two shows — Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock — both featured made-up games that either spoofed or were inspired by modern board games.

(Yes, we’ve previously covered the Valentine’s Day scavenger hunt from Parks and Rec, but there were two other scavenger hunt moments, as well as the many game references made by the character Ben Wyatt.)

Parks and Recreation had The Cones of Dunshire, and 30 Rock had Colonizers of Malaar. Both of these games are much more elaborate takes on Settlers of Catan, a board game about resource management that is considered one of the top titles in modern board games.

In one episode of 30 Rock, executive Jack Donaghy is struggling with his position, given that NBC is under new ownership with Kabletown, and he finds refuge in a game of Colonizers of Malaar with the writers for comedy show TGS.

Jack believes his business acumen will make the game an easy victory, only to find the play experience strangely similar to his current problems at work. He flees the game for some fresh air.

Later, Jack returns to the game, inspired. He makes a seemingly ill-advised move — playing a fire card in a desert wasteland — that turns the game on its head. The fire turns all the sand into glass, a much-needed resource, and suddenly he’s back in control.

His success in the game inspires him to do the same with his new employers, and Jack leaves, reinvigorated.

The game itself allowed for a few silly throwaway lines, but Jack’s gaming experience was a clever way to allow him to reach rock bottom and rebound. Like many newcomers to a game, he struggled, found his way, and later triumphed, his day improved by playing the game.

Plenty of board game fans have had similarly joyful experiences.

Colonizers of Malaar, as far as we can tell, is a marketed game in the 30 Rock universe. The Cones of Dunshire from Parks and Recreation, on the other hand, is created by character Ben Wyatt and initially treated as a mistake, a nonsensical result of his boredom and frustrations.

The game becomes a running gag in the show. Ben leaves it as a gift at an accounting firm that he has been hired by (and walked away from) several times.

Later, we find out the game has been produced, and Ben stumbles across it when dealing with a dotcom company. He mentions that he invented it, but is shrugged off. He then proves not only his gaming skill but his authorship of the game when he beats the dotcom bosses in a tense playthrough.

It’s mentioned once that a gaming magazine called Cones of Dunshire “punishingly intricate,” a point that makes Ben proud.

Part of the fun of Cones of Dunshire is that the viewer never really understands what’s going on, so supposedly dramatic moments can be played for laughs. (I also appreciate that the name of the game is basically a fancy way of saying “dunce hat.”)

And, in the sort of cyclical storytelling that could only happen in a nerdly pursuit like board games, the company that made Settlers of Catan — Mayfair Games — produced a giant version of the game as part of a charity event at GenCon.

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A Kickstarter campaign for a limited run of the game was launched twice, with copies costing $500 due to the insane complexity and number of pieces for the game, but it ultimately failed to reach its goal.

Nonetheless, these two fictional games made an impact on both the characters of the show and the fans as well. What more could you ask for?

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