An asteroid plunges towards the South Pacific.  Your mission: to prevent the extinction of Australasian animals. As a zoologist, you must outwit your opponents in a race to save the most creatures, if necessary by stealing their territory and animals.  Entire species depend on you, so you must be ruthless.  Ask yourself: are you tough enough? Are you the kind of Zoologist who is bound for victory, or destined to extinction?  Only Komodo knows!

Expect treachery as you fight tooth and claw to create the space and new habitat that your animals need to survive.

In Komodo, the species survival strategy game, the board is created from the multi-coloured Terrain tiles that are positioned during play.  With fifty tiles that can be rotated any way, the board configuration is different every time you play.  Ten types of Wild Cards allow many ways to mix things up when your tiles alone are not enough to outwit your opponents.

You can play Komodo as a competitive game in either Basic or Strategic mode. Spatial and numerical skills, strategy, cunning and a dose of sneakiness will all help you.  You can also play collaboratively as a team, sharing resources to fight off random threats in an attempt to save all the species. Instead of sneakiness you will need good communication, consideration and forward planning as well as  your spatial skills.

For 2-4 players      Age 10 +
      Plays in 45-60 mins

Komodo’s website.

The knives are out as you collect ingredient cards to assemble enough dishes to reach the winning score. This unique game will find you resorting to haggling, theft and even dumpster diving to create your tasty triumphs and sabotage your sneaky competitors!

Raid the Pantry features dishes from more than a dozen countries and cuisines — everything from tacos and Manhattan clam chowder to pizza and good old Kiwi pavlova — as well as fun and original action and ingredient cards.

Raid the Pantry can be enjoyed by anyone age eight and up.  You can play as individuals or in teams of two.  A typical game takes 20-30 minutes:  enough time to work up an appetite for your Sunday roast.

Raid the Pantry’s website.

Button Up in Fiordland is a fun and fast-paced board game with a simple conservation message. It is printed on canvas, making it very durable, good for traveling and easy to post.

Button Up in Fiordland is a simple game aimed at young players. It is a very good first board game and one that young children can quickly learn to play independently.  Due to small parts (buttons!) an adult should be present when preschoolers are playing.

This game is ethically made. The  games are  colour-printed in Christchurch and come with thirty recycled buttons, four hand painted stone counters, one dice and a sheet of instructions and information about the animals and plants featured in the game. Games are packaged in a fair-trade drawstring bag.

Button Up in Fiordland website.

We are pleased to announce the following winners:

New Game of the Year 2011 – Toppletree by Matthew Lazenby and IQideas

Teacher’s Choice Award 2011 – Kiwi Quiz by Edugames

Children’s Choice Award 2011 – Time Zone by Edugames

Thanks to our independent panels of judges who assessed the games entered for these awards.

More information can be found on the 2011 Awards page.

BattleCry is on Feb 17-20, 2012 at the ASB Arena in Auckland, having run almost continuously since 1984!

Their main focus is roleplaying and wargaming, but they’ve got various boardgaming events happening as well.

“Come along and attend BattleCry, Auckland’s largest all-round weekend gaming convention. On hand will be all manner of roleplaying, wargaming, cardgaming, and live-action tournaments and events, as well as a collection of stalls and displays of gaming materials. We welcome all comers, from experienced gamers to those of you out there that are merely curious as to what it is all about.”

More info at the BattleCry site.

Grow 4 in a row but don’t topple on your go!

What do you get when you cross Connect-4 with Jenga? A game that everyone wants to play again immediately after they’ve finished their first game!

A delightfully tactile, action-packed game that builds to a nail-biting conclusion as players take turns adding to an ever growing tree – that becomes more unstable with every move!

Younger children can also enjoy Toppletree as a construction set to build their own creations.

Toppletree IQideas web page

This one has all the stuff in it that kids love- poos, wees and vomit! Seriously, it’s a fabulous romp through digestion and food, and another great collaboration with Romina Marinkovich of Moa Hunt fame.

More info at the IQ Ideas site.

It appears very simple: lay out the lovely wooden tiles in a grid, start peeking at them and moving them around, and yell “Happy Sheep” when you think you know where four tiles in a group that are all black or all white.

Except it’s astonishing how you can be wrong and there’s lots of laughter and good-natured ribbing!

Simple to learn but hard to master, surprising amount of strategy, and it plays so quickly that you tend to have quite a few games in a row.

For 2-4 players and aimed at 6 to adult, it also comes with rules for a very basic game for 3 and ups. More info at www.happysheepgame.co.nz.

You’re poised on the emerald pitch at Eden Park for the Final of Rugby World Cup 2011. It’s the dying moments of the game. The score is deadlocked and the crowd is screaming. The ball is passed out to the back line: the outcome hinges on what you do next!

Five Men Standing is the official game of Rugby World Cup 2011. It’s for both lovers of the glorious Game, and those who have never held a Rugby ball in their hands. Fast paced, competitive, and with no sissy turn taking, this is a game of frantic action and fun!

The Five Men Standing game comes complete with two Country Team packs (which can also be purchased separately), rules, scoring tokens, a combo ranking chart, a draw sheet and felt bag.

You can find out more at the official Five Men Standing website,

And note that they’ve a prototype playtesting session on Saturday at 3pm, so if you’ve got a game in development it’s a great opportunity to put it in front people who will give you incisive feedback.

Here’s the spiel, directly from the Wellcon folk themselves:

This year we are located at:
Student Common room, Level 1,
Student Service Trust Building1,
Massey University, Entrance E,
Tasman Street, Wellington

There is plenty of parking right out front of the Tussock bar and cafe which is the ground floor of the Student Service Trust Building, so we strongly advice that you enter from the Tasman Street side unless you are taking public transport.

If you are taking public transport the number 10 bus is the best. It does not run directly down Tasman street, so you can attempt to walk through Massey from the other side or get off near the top of Tasman street and walk to Entrance E or simply walk from Adelaide Road where a bunch of buses such as the number 1 bus travel.
http://www.metlink.org.nz/timetables/bus/010

Food will be available on site over lunch each day (12 – 2 approx). Drink and snacks will be available for the duration of the convention from us or from a bank of vending machines. We will also take prepaid orders (approx $10) for dinner each night. You are welcome to bring your own food to the venue. Food and drink don’t mix with board games, so please don’t eat or drink at the game tables. We have a special breakoutroom for eating.

There will be a number of features:
Trading session (Sunday 12pm): Bring along those unwanted games
Prototype play-test (Saturday 3pm): Open to anyone keen to play or demo prototype games, be sure to bring your latest creation.
Pub quiz (Saturday 7.30pm): Test your gaming and general knowledge in a 30 minute quick fire quiz.
Family session (Sunday 2.30pm): Especially for families with kids ages 5 -10 (discounted admission)

Published designers will be on site during the weekend, as will some of your favourite vendors. We will have more volunteers this year to organise and teach games. This is all in addition to our excellent game library crammed full of gaming goodness.

While stocks last we will be giving away our commemorative dice for free to any first time attendees and anyone that travels from outside of the lower north island. Bring a friend that hasn’t been before and you also receive a free dice. Otherwise you can pick up your dice for $3 each (limit 5).

The Admission fee is $5 a day flat rate with discounts for families. This is effectively nothing. You can’t go to a movie for $5, a 12 year can’t satisfy their hunger at McDonalds for $5, you can’t hire rollerblades or bikes for $5. Nether can you rent a new release video, buy a magazine, or even drive up the coast for $5. It’s scandelous, it’s outrageous, it’s incredibly cheap.

Of course some might say you can sit at home playing games with your mates all day for nothing. But the fact is most of us won’t and can’t and most of us want to play something we don’t already have. You get to immerse yourself in games … if you want.

And really importantly there are prizes galore. Your expected value of prizes is likely to exceed your entry fee, meaning that statistically WE ARE PAYING YOU TO COME AND PLAY GAMES. We have Pixelpark and Seriouslyboard both on board (drum roll please), and we hope to have a presence from our Friendly Local Game Stores too.

To fast track your registration you will want to register by sending an email to our special registration address wellycon2011@gmail.com , with your home town, names of the people attending, which previous Wellycons you have attended and your Boardgamegeek user id if are a member. This will ensure you avoid the queues and can get into gaming as quickly as possible.

We are ready and rearing to go for a fantastic weekend of gaming. Check out the schedule above and be ready for prizes, personalities and plenty of Pandemic. Bring some friends and some games and we’ll see you there.

Full program
Saturday
9am Setup
10am Registration
2pm Tournament
3pm Prototype demo and play test session
5pm Prize giving
6.30pm Pizza dinner (orders confirmed by 5.15pm)
7.30pm Pub quiz

Sunday
10am Registration
12pm Trading
2.30pm Family session
5pm Prize giving