“We are hiring out freelance graphic designers, artists, modelers, animators because crowdfunding demands that it looks really good right out of the gate,” said Peter Vaughan…Cardboard Alchemy’s co-founder.

Critter Kitchen wound up raising a million dollars from more than 13,000 backers on Kickstarter. But the campaign was in development for eight months before raising a single crowdfunding dollar.

The Cardboard Alchemy team sent prototype copies of the game to reviewers, introduced it at events, and designed merchandise to entice backers to pledge more money.

“I do think that there is space for new creators to successfully crowdfund,” said [Eric Eikmeier, co-owner of Geeky Teas & Games in Burbank, California]. “That said, it’s a lot harder for them to rise above the noise floor, because there are large companies who are primarily using Kickstarter as their engine to drive new game sales as compared to somebody with a dream and computer.”

This stamp release marks the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, described by its owners as the World’s Greatest Role-playing Game, that has become a cultural phenomenon. By inviting participants to imagine themselves as wizards, warriors and other adventurers in exciting and treacherous fantasy worlds, Dungeons & Dragons opened doors to whole new universes of creativity for generations of players.

The pane of 20 stamps features 10 different designs that highlight characters, creatures, and encounters familiar to players of the game. Greg Breeding, an art director for USPS, designed the stamps and pane with existing illustrations.

From new players to distinguished guests, the day celebrated the spirit of bridge, breaking geographical barriers from Paynesville to Warrnambool and Wodonga. Highlighting inclusivity, Victoria’s highest masterpoint earner (10,000+ MPs) partnered with a player boasting just 10 masterpoints!

So inclusive!

The occasion was also a chance to celebrate Victorian Bridge which is home to the first Vice President of the World Bridge Federation Executive Council, the World Bridge Federation Chief Tournament Director, the world’s most popular bridge YouTuber, and the world’s most popular bridge Podcaster. In addition to this, Victoria continues its reputation as the education state with one of the world’s largest bridge book collections, the Bourke Collection in the State Library.

Erwin Glonnegger was a game designer and writer from Germany who taught European adults to play. Without Glonnegger, Europeans would probably not be enjoying Memory (Concentration), Malefiz (the German game of Barriers), or even jigsaw puzzles.

Glonnegger was a key figure at Otto Maier Verlag, better known throughout the world as Ravensburger, one of the largest game companies in Europe, which is headquartered in Germany. In 2010, he said in a radio interview that his wife thought he was married more to Ravensburger than to her.

Ravensburger began as a book publisher in 1883 and produced its first game, Voyage Round the World, in 1884. Through the end of 2015, Glonnegger, who began working there in 1949, was still playing the games he introduced through the company.

In a 1997 interview, Glonnegger was cordial, open and conversational. He talked about how he worked in a bookshop during World War II and played forbidden games in a back room at night. The shop sold books criticizing the Nazis, which necessitated careful staffing, and anyone applying for a job at the bookstore was required to play a game of Monopoly since “more could be learned from that than any written job references or certificates”. He started at Ravensburger as a representative for its educational books. Traveling through Germany, he saw many old Ravensburger games sitting unsold in the attics of shops. He bought them and used them to build the wonderful Ravensburger games collection. Eventually, he was moved to the company’s games department, that becoming his total responsibility in 1959; he was now in charge of Ravensburger’s complete line of games. It was that same year that he discovered and published the game of Memory.

With the Ravensburger games collection as a start, he wrote books on game history worldwide. Because of his experience as a book editor, he sent copies of new game releases to journalists, the same way he had with new books; this resulted in the first time that articles about games appeared regularly in the press.

On a 1964 trip to the U.S., he went into toy stores, literally stumbling over piles of jigsaw puzzles for adults. He tried to introduce them into Germany, but was turned down by the Ravensburger board; they said that such an idea was unthinkable for a company associated with educational material because even illiterates could assemble puzzles. As a result, he had his first puzzles made by the Dutch company Jumbo, then packed them in a box with the Ravensburger logo. He asked shops in Northern Germany (far from the Ravensburg home in the south) to sell them without telling the Ravensburger bosses. These first jigsaw puzzles needed an instruction leaflet on how to assemble them as Germany had hardly seen any puzzles since World War II. They sold well and fast — and that seduced the Ravensburger board to get into the jigsaw puzzle business. Ravensburger became the initiator of the European jigsaw puzzle craze; they were – and still are – the biggest producers.

The Marshall Plan that followed the end of WWII resulted in a rapid increase in prosperity and, in the 1960s, gave Europeans higher income and more spare time. That’s when Erwin Glonnegger introduced games for adults in the Ravensburger line, and shortly after, the German “Spiel des Jahres” (SdJ – Game of the Year) prize was initiated. Glonnegger was one of the first in the business to recognize and acknowledge the role of game authors, developers, and inventors in the industry, and he developed contacts with games inventors worldwide; he was responsible for the release of David Parlett’s Hare and Tortoise, the first game to win the SdJ award (1979). In 2013, he was awarded the Dau Barcelona Award, an honor given by Spain’s Barcelona community for his lifetime achievement in games.

Erwin Glonnegger readied his gravestone long before he died, and it shows the Memory game at the top. He was the man who brought that game into the Ravensburger program after Jumbo had refused it. Mr. Hötte, one of the directors at Jumbo, said he still regretted having passed on it, because this, along with the puzzles, was the game that was the “eternal seller” for the Ravensburger company.

Glonnegger, in a video interview, said people will always have the desire to sit at a table and play games with each other and not with a machine: “The type of games I hold in high regard will never die out.”