May 29, 2005
Au Jeux
Well, knock me over with a fleur. I just learned that Time's Up, a game I developed about 5 years ago, just won the French As D'or (Golden Ace) award for best game of the year (it's eligible because the French edition was first published this year). Now, given that the award is announced in Cannes, you might expect I got flown to attend a lavish red carpet gala with fine foods, tuxedos and sequined gowns. If you're more down to earth, you might think I was notified via an excited transatlantic phone call from the French publisher, or perhaps an equally gushing call from my American publisher.
No.
I found out via a little pop-up from my RSS aggregator, courtesy of Rick Thornquist and Gamefest. Welcome to the glamorous world of board games.
I'm embarrassed to admit that I have no idea how the As D'or gets awarded, or what the criteria are. Is it a jury, a magazine editorial board, a popular vote? I dunno. Nor do I know what kind of significance it has, although I'm sure it's nothing like the Spiel des Jahres in Germany.
I am relieved to note, however, that it has quite the spiffy logo, indicating they're at least a big enough deal to hire a professional designer to craft their public image.
Frankly, *I* would have voted for Puerto Rico. But thanks-- er, merci-- to everyone who didn't.
Posted by Peter at May 29, 2005 10:17 PMFYI, this a jury of 10 persons (professionals) who gave the award.
Posted by: ReiXou on May 30, 2005 12:31 AMGrats! Love the game.
Posted by: Dave on May 30, 2005 12:32 AM... and last year winner was Ticket To Ride (Les Aventuriers du Rail in french).
Posted by: ReiXou on May 30, 2005 01:56 AMcongratulations!
Posted by: cz on May 30, 2005 06:02 AMCongrats. You're the Jerry Lewis of game designers!
Posted by: Mark L on May 30, 2005 08:22 AMRock'n'roll!
You certainly could make this an excuse to visit Cannes next year. I once saw a brochure from their annual games festival and it did look very good. Not sure whether the games festival has anything to do with the award, but you'd've thought so. If it does, hassle your publisher to sponsor a tournament and go along as a special guest!
Your next challenge: you have a year to learn French...
Posted by: Chris M. Dickson on May 30, 2005 10:19 AMSid Sackson's FOCUS won game of the year in Poland once, and he found out about it in similar fashion.
So, you're in good (nay, great!) company.
Posted by: Stephen Glenn on May 30, 2005 11:49 AMUrgh. Whatever you run your commenting on cuts out nonsensical HTML tags. Obviously the first one was supposed to have a [Cartman] and the second a [Jerry Lewis]. How annoying. :)
Posted by: Chris Lemon on May 30, 2005 01:04 PMCongrats!
I'm curious - for the foreign editions, does someone at the local publisher go through the names and make substitutions?
Posted by: Dan Blum on May 30, 2005 02:13 PMThe really surprising thing is that not only did Time's Up win the Jeu de l'Annee, but as of Sunday, it is also the new EU constitution! Congratulations, Peter!
Posted by: Dug Steen on May 31, 2005 07:52 AMLOL Dug!
Yeah, Peter, I would have voted for Puerto Rico too! :-) But Time's Up is a great game and you did a great job with the name selection, so I'd say the honor is well deserved. Congratulations!
Posted by: Larry Levy on May 31, 2005 09:08 AMThanks for all the kudos. To answer Dan's question, I had nothing to do with the revision of the game for the French market. I assume that the French team took the original list of names, eliminated any they felt were too American, and replaced them with names we'd think are too French. Fortunately for them, I made a point of avoiding pop-culture-of-the-moment names in the basic set, so they shouldn't have had to replace much. I'd be curious to know how many names changed.
Posted by: Peter on May 31, 2005 03:48 PMHi I'm cedrick from Repos Production,
We've made the development of the european version of Time's Up!, here are some answers to the name selection :
We started a new list, we selected more than 1000 characters very popular from all domains (sport / history / artist / movies / music / tv...) then we made people voting unsing a small software (vote from 0 "i don't know" until 5 "I know the character and what he did"). Then we took the best known characters.
This list was the basic one, then french editor asmodée remove / change some names (around 100 I guess) to had more french characters.
In Belgium we took this previous list, removing around 200 french character to include 200 popular characters from Belgium which is not easy for a so small contry...
Then France and Belgium whom are speaking the same language get different version of Time's Up!
each one is really localized to the place it's played.
That's all, and once again, congratulation to Peter for this marvellous game !
cedrick c|: )
Posted by: cedrick a sombrero on June 1, 2005 12:17 AM