Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois.  This week, Thorne continues his Gama Trade Show reporting.

Like most people at the GAMA Trade Show, I toted around most of the promo items and flyers in a handy dandy Mayfair Games bag.  Now, time to go through it and take a closer look at interesting items from the show.

As mentioned last week, the hottest item, at least in terms of retailer interest, was IronDice from Green River Games.  Almost every retailer I spoke who had seen them, had ordered them, usually stocking them pretty deep.

Something I thought pretty cool (and useful too if your store does a lot of business in out of print/collectable D&D products) was the Ultimate Unofficial Collector’s Guide to D&D from Gamers Rule.  The company released three volumes so far covering Original and Basic D&D, Mystara and Greyhawk and Advanced D&D 1st Edition.with the name, stock number, original price, description from the back cover and front cover illustration, along with the TSR logo at the time.  Authors James and Deborah Hunton also provide interesting annotations to a number of entries, such as that G3 Halls of the Fire Giant King, served as a tournament adventure at the 1978 Origins.

Reaper Miniatures showed off the new boxes the company has shifted to for its boxed sets.  Instead of cardboard boxes and foam padding, Reaper now packs them with eggshell style foam inside a plastic carrying case with handle and snap lock closures.  When they looked into the costs, Reaper says they found the plastic cases just slightly more expensive than the cardboard boxes and provide significantly more protection and look better on the shelf.

AEG showed off Nightfall, their new entry in the deck building category and nearly every retailer at the show carried home a copy, courtesy of the company.  A couple of mechanics make Nightfall stand out from competing deck building games.  Nightfall allows, nay encourages, attacking other players, something the more competitive players will welcome.  Attacking a player successfully allows the attacker to add wound cards to the victim’s deck.  When the wound pile exhausts, the player with the fewest wound cards wins.  Instead of having to wait for their turn, the chaining mechanic allows player to play every turn, as long as they have a card they can play into the current chain, meaning players can almost always do something, rather than sit waiting for their turn.

Got a demo deck of the Faceeater card game from Variant Media as well.  Faceeater plays a lot like gin rummy with players striving to collect sets, straights and runs of cards.  In a twist on traditional rules, the dealer sets the requirements at the beginning of the hand for a player to go out i.e. must have two sets of three, limit of four sets or one run and one straight of three, etc.  The cards depict varying horror movie archetypes such as Environmental Disaster, Alien Probe and the Pug of Doom (well maybe the Pub of Doom isn’t an archetype but it sure is cute, in a disturbing kind of way, and I expect it to appear as a t-shirt pretty soon).

With a pre-order, Looney Labs offered a copy of their new IceDice game, bringing back the company’s trademark plastic pyramids for another go-round.  The game plays pretty simply:  collect pyramids, as dictated by rolls of the dice, and complete three matching sets of pyramids.  IceDice comes packaged in a pyramid shaped nylon storage bag that looks nice on the shelf but creates a much larger footprint per game than Looney Lab’s other games do.

And here’s a catalog from GHQ, makers of Micro Armour, who pulled their lines out of general distribution years ago.  Missed seeing their booth at GTS 2010 so I happily picked up a new catalog and will have to see if there is enough interest locally to justify carrying them in the depth an order from the company requires (no minimum order but $400 or more for free freight).  Also interesting to see the company will not accept any new applications from online only stores.

That’s only getting through a small portion of stuff in the bag.  There was quite a bit more material to go through in there.

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.