More games…and a Starcraft Tournament!!

Yesterday, our End-of-Year fundraiser for Heifer International passed the $300,000 mark with 10 days to go, and we’re still adding awesome stuff to our Lottery Library, including some games, both tabletop and spectator. What do we mean by “spectator,” you may ask. Well, how about a very exciting:

StarCraft Tournament

Yes, that StarCraft. The original. The Big Cheese. The StarClassic. Last year’s Overwatch Tournament was so much fun for winners and losers alike (but probably more for the winners) that we’re doing another tournament! This year we have 10 teams signed up to compete with each other in a knock-down, drag-out StarCraft tournament starting next Monday, December 4, and continuing on Wednesday, December 6, starting at 8:00 p.m. CST on our Twitch channel.

Our Teams*:
Unattended Consequences (Pat Rothfuss & Max Temkin)
The Doubleclicks
The House Theatre of Chicago
C-Team from Acquisitions Inc.
Cards Against Humanity
Paul & Storm
Iron Galaxy
Geek & Sundry
RunFanCast
Mikey Neumann

*team availability isn’t guaranteed & could change–these are busy folks

So how does this help raise money for Heifer International? Well! We’ve set up Team Pages for every StarCraft team (you can click their names above to be taken right to their page), and starting now, we encourage you guys to donate through their team page to advance their ranking. The team who raises more money via their Team Page will get an advantage during play, and the other team will likely get slaughtered. You know, for charity!

We’ll be playing the original StarCraft in Team Melee Mode, no macros allowed.

The games will be streaming on the Worldbuilders Twitch channel for your viewing enjoyment! There will be more information on Pat’s blog and appearing on Twitter as the tournament days draw near. Support your favorite teams. Join us for the streams. Outer space is calling–are you brave enough to answer?!

Big thanks to Kevin Budnik for the tournament illustration, and to Tom, Trin, and Alex over at Cards Against Humanity for doing he heavy lifting to get this StarCraft Tournament into orbit!

Video game tournaments aren’t the only thing we have for you guys. We mean, it’s gonna be a blast, but once it’s over and everyone is celebrating the winning team with a virtual, text-based ticker-tape parade, how about heading home and playing some award-winning tabletop games? Which award-winning games, you might also ask? Well, you can probably already see the image below, so let’s talk about that…

Monte Cook Games

Monte Cook Games are beautiful (look at that Numenera art!!), feature innovative game mechanics, and exist for one purpose: to bring tabletop gaming to everyone across all backgrounds. Inclusivity is key in everything they design. And guess who donated a bunch of awesome games to our lottery this year!

They sent us over a hundred copies each of both their award-winning Numenera, and their equally amazing No Thank You, Evil! to include in our Lottery Library. Both games feature slim, no-nonsense rulebooks that put the game itself front and center. Character creation and even dice rolling are so streamlined you might think you’re missing something, but really both mechanics open up the already amazing worlds in each game and encourage you to do exactly what you came here to do: play.

Both games place the focus on storytelling and exploration. Numenera is a post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-apocalyptic (yes, really) world filled with remnants of eight previous world civilizations. No Thank You, Evil! is more traditional fantasy, and definitely geared toward all ages, but still with almost limitless possibilities. Like maybe roasting huge marshmallows with dragons:

(And No Thank You, Evil! scales by player, so if you’re six or 96 you can play together and have just as much fun!)

We’re stoked to have a bunch of Monte Cook games to send out in our lottery. It gives us that warm, glowy feeling now that we can introduce you guys to some fantastic role-playing goodness!

Mayfair Games

Mayfair was the first game company to approach us with a donation for our lottery, way back in 2013. If you haven’t heard the story of how they surprised Maria with our most massive donation to date, take a look at this video that we love more and more each year, wherein Maria had to rent a forklift during a blizzard just to unload 18 pallets of Mayfair Games:

If you’ve been in a game shop over the past 30 years, you’ve seen their games. Their games have been helping to keep tabletop gaming alive and recruiting lifelong gamers who are now old enough to have kids of their own.

Every year, Mayfair sends us so many games we actually have to do some serious warehouse rearranging (even in our new office, we don’t have the space). This year, they sent us a whole bunch of games we can’t wait to play, like Entdecker (explore the vast, mysterious sea), Domaine (claim the countryside…and your opponents’ land), Monuments (build monuments that stand the test of time and bring you glory), Test of Fire: Bull Run 1861 (North and South face off at Manassas Junction), Clash of Wills: Shiloh 1862 (it starts with a surprise attack!), and Heart of Africa (play against other trading companies in the heart of Africa).

There’s a distinct historical bend to these games that give them a wonderful gravity, and Mayfair’s beautiful games all feature top-notch production and design. Get ready to beef up your gaming shelf with some awesome tabletop goodness!

Auctions

We also have a few games on auction that you might be interested in. We have a special Legendary Edition of Brotherwise Games‘ Boss Monster, complete with Kickstarter-exclusive cards that are extremely hard to find these days. Paizo also sent us a beautiful (and impossible to get) special edition of the Starfinder Core Rulebook that you might need, signed by their staff, and they also sent a limited employee-only edition of the Pathfinder Bestiary, complete with gold-gilded pages, signed by artist Wayne Reynolds.

Whew! So if anyone asks if Worldbuidlers takes our games seriously, you can say we sure do! Now, as much as we really want to play some games after all that, we have to get ready for tomorrow, where we talk about some more wonderful authors…