Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne talks about some of the games he saw at ACD Games Day.

Spent a chunk of time uploading photos to the store website of new (and older) products that interested us at the ACD Games Day.  The opportunity to walk the exhibit hall is one of the most useful things I find I do trade shows.  To my mind, since the focus in the industry has shifted so extensively to new releases and promoting them, the opportunity to see older catalog titles with which manufacturers typically stock their booths as a backdrop to the newest releases helps to show us older titles that we missed the first go round or have forgotten to re-order.  Green Ronin's booth had their Wild Cards supplements for the Mutants and Masterminds game, a slow but steady seller for us but some of the expansions had slipped by during past orders.  Same thing with USAopoly's Muppet Yahtzee, which, prior to seeing it at their booth, we had no idea existed.  Any game that includes a Kermit the Frog dice cup, I want to stock.

Of course, most of the interest in the exhibit hall focused on the new releases.  Green River Games attracted a lot of attention with the new copper and blue d6 released in their IronDice series, especially the gold placated d6 that retails for $100 per die and which the company said it sold over a dozen of at last month's Gen Con.  While the new d6 colors were nice, the thing that attracted the most attention at the booth was likely their new line of d10s, some of which would make really great caltrops.  They range a bit on the pricey side but I also expected to have more difficulty selling the company's metal d6s, which has not been the case.

Also of note were the dueling The Walking Dead games, one based on the graphic novel from Z-Man Games, while Cryptozoic (showing a steady shift in emphasis away from the World of Warcraft TCG that launched the company towards board and party games) snagged the license for a different boardgame based on the television series based on the graphic novels.  Needless to say, the Z-man Games version features artwork from the graphic novels, including new illustrations by the series artist, while Cryptazoic's game used extensive numbers of stills from the series.

Cryptazoic's other launches also rely on licenses with Bazinga, the Big Bang Theory party game (which uses a judge mechanic similar to that popularized by Apples to Apples) and a deckbuilding game built around the Penny Arcade webcomic.  I had a chance to play it and, while the mechanics were sound, I'm not a big fan of the Penny Arcade strip so the references and cards made little sense to me.  I figure a follower of the series would find it much more entertaining.

Mayday Games actually had what I thought was the most interesting game at the show.  Though they had a shark themed game titled Get Bit and a zombie themed deckbuilding game called Eaten By Zombies (gets to the point, doesn't it), hands down the most intriguing game they offered was Toc Toc Woodman, an import from South Korea that has sold over 20,000 copies over there.  Somewhat similar to Jenga, Toc Toc Woodman consists of pieces covered with detachable tree bark, which then stack to form a trunk.  Players take turns striking the tree to knock pieces of bark off without toppling the tree.  Tricky to hit the trunk with the right amount of force and quite addictive gameplay; we expect to sell a number of these, if it hits distribution before Christmas.

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