This guy’s comic series is spot-on in illustrating how a typical RPG plays out. He describes the strip thusly:

Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign.

Here’s the first comic strip, and the index so far.

Article from 1up:

Microsoft continues pushing forward with their Xbox Live Arcade releases, and while the world scrambles to download their free copies of Texas Hold ‘Em before they have to fork over real-world cash, Microsoft’s already planning some more interesting releases that aren’t HD-filtered versions of old school classics.

In a press release covering the Leipzig Games Convention, Microsoft revealed that European board games Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne and Alhambra would all be appearing on Xbox Live. There’s no word on pricing or release dates, but chance are they’ll show up before the end of the year.

Wired has an article about game design and game theory in Survivor:

While tweaking Survivor, he closely studied John Nash’s game theory in order to better engineer the hysteria and emotional blowouts of each season’s finale.

“What Nash’s theory predicts is that whenever you have a group of people competing, they collude to squeeze one guy out, again and again, until there’s only two guys left,” Burnett notes. “Yet when there are only two of us left, we’re surprised when one of us fucks each other over. That’s the fun part. It surprised John Nash himself, but it happens every time.”

Apparently, internet wunderkind Wil Wheaton (from ST:TNG fame) once pitched the idea of a Celebrity Dungeons & Dragons show to Comedy Central:

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/cdd.html

Goddamn I would love to see Ricky Gervaise tearin’ ass on a troglodyte while fiendish-but-fair Dungeon Master Ali G rolls a new random encounter with the Whores of Troglodon from behind his shitty soda-splattered screen.

Shannon Appelcline (whoever that is) has a post about a gaming version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon using Faidutti. Don’t miss the involved chart further down in the article.

Update:
From the name I thought Shannon was some uber-geek female. However, a quick Googling reveals he’s a guy. That makes more sense. Any woman should have better things to do than drawing maps of the professional relationships of a B-level bath-shunning game designer.

Can I get a show of hands of who is going to be in Ohio in April? I will for the latter half of the week…

Someone wasn’t satisfied with the Rock/Paper/Scissors triad, so they expanded the number of allowed gestures by 22. The variant is called RPS-25, and you can see what beats what here. You can also find how the 300 outcomes are spoken here. A sample:

• Water short-circuites Nuke
• Sponge intrigues Alien
• Monkey flings poop at Woman
• Dynamite explodes Rock

Useful.

Knizia has developed a game based on Sudoku to be offered at Essen this year. I wonder what novel auction mechanisms he will re-use…