Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois.  This week, Thorne talks about three new product announcements.

First, I wanted to thank Mark Santillo for his lengthy response to my column on price and value.  He is correct that I did not provide any suggestion on how store can create value and his letter had a number of good suggestions that stores should consider (if they are not already doing so) in order to differentiate themselves from competing brick & mortar and online stores.  I would also like to agree with Dan Barnett of Walt’s Cards that the data collection requirement by Konami was not difficult to comply with; I just wanted to point out the level of data collection and restrictions of the Konami event compared to the WOTC one.  We did get some strange looks from the Storm of Ragnarok Sneak Peek players when we asked their age, but no resistance or complaints from them about giving it.  I do not know how this compares to stores across the country but of our participants, only one was under the age of sixteen.

Several product release announcements caught my attention this week.  Pirate Fluxx from Looney Labs hit the shelves on Friday, so not exactly a product announcement.  Still this one does bring the Looney empire to eight Fluxx games, with only Martian Fluxx selling comparatively weakly.  I can foresee another trip to the pop culture well by Looney later this year or early next.  Maybe Gothic Fluxx?  Steve Jackson Games' Chez Goth and Munchkin Goth prove that goths and those that know them have a sense of humor about the scene.  The Buffy the Vampire Slayer license sill has legs, as shown by the success of Dark Horse’s line of Buffy comics and trade paperbacks.  Not sure how much the license would cost but it would certainly be a worthy follow-up to Monty Python Fluxx.

Next in importance, the announcement by Fantasy Flight Games of the release of Blood Bowl: Team Manger in April.  Games Workshop has sold Blood Bowl for almost two decades now and, though retailers can only stock the game through GW Direct Sales (at a less than desirable discount, I might add), Blood Bowl does still have a devoted following, with a surprising number of stores throughout the country running leagues and tournaments on an irregular basis.  Combining the Blood Bowl name with the currently hot deck building game genre should produce a significant bump in sales in April.  We already have customers pressing us for more details on the release date and mechanics of play.

The third major announcement also comes related to a Games Workshop product line.  I, of course, refer to the extension of the licensing agreement between Games Workshop and Warner Brothers Studios of the Lord of the Rings franchise, which coincidentally brings with it The Hobbit trademark, also, coincidentally the title of a highly anticipated movie the first part releasing in 2012.  I have much higher hopes for this than I do WizKids' Lord of the Rings games, as I discussed a few weeks ago, mainly because Games Workshop will piggyback upon a hotly anticipated release (a little over 1.1 million hits on Google for “Hobbit movie” as I write this), as opposed to the WizKids license, which hasn’t had new primary materials released in over a decade.  WizKid’s game will have the advantage of a cheaper buy-in, while Games Workshop will get the huge pop in buzz from the movie and, like last time with their Lord of the Rings games, brining in people not familiar with their other miniatures games but who will want to see (and buy) The Hobbit miniatures.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely  those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.