Exit: The Game Advent Calendar – The Mystery of the Ice Cave
- Designers: Inka and Markus Brand
- Publisher: Kosmos
- Players: 1+
- Time: 5-10 min/day x 24 days
- Played with review copy provided by Thames and Kosmos
Advent calendars are a well-entrenched tradition in Germany. Each October when I head to Essen for SPIEL, the stores are already jammed packed with Advent calendars of all types. The first printed Advent calendar originated in Germany in the early 20th century with Gerhard Lang. When Gerhard was a little boy his mother made him a calendar with 24 small candies attached to cardboard, one for each day before Christmas. Lang grew up to operate the Reichhold & Lang printing company where he printed the first Advent cardboard calendar with 24 little pictures. A few years later, the company printed the first calendar with the little doors that everyone loves to open. The first chocolate Advent calendar appeared in 1958, but it was in 1971 that Cadbury joined the race and launched its own version in the UK. Cadbury produced Advent calendars intermittently from 1972 to 1986, but it wasn’t until 1993 that they finally became a mainstay.
Tokyo Game Market: the Catalog
This may seem like an odd post to lead off the end of this week with. Friday, I’ll post my biannual piece about titles I’m looking forward to at Tokyo Game Market (TGM) – which takes place on Saturday and Sunday. This time, I’ll (finally) be going in person! For this first trip, I’m expanding Friday’s piece into three separate articles. Friday’s will be what it usually is. Tomorrow I’ll talk about various parts of my preparation – such as how I research which games I’ll buy and what my packing plans are. But today, we’re going to talk about the TGM catalog.
This probably seems like an odd place to start, but there are some captivating bits of the catalog from afar, and I had to know what it was like. What role it could play in preparation. Traditionally, I’ve seen advertisements for each booth at the fair posted to Twitter. They look something like this:
For a long-tail chaser like myself, my mind wonders at what sort of stealth titles may be in the catalog from booths which aren’t on Twitter or don’t add their information to the Game Market website.
Perhaps in the west, the catalog is best known as your admission ticket to TGM. It is available at local game stores and other such places in the weeks leading up to the show. Traditionally, the ticket to the show was built into the cost of the catalog and entrance to the show was simply holding a copy of the catalog aloft as you walked in with throngs of others doing the same.
At this point in a pandemic, things are different. Tickets are now electronic. The catalog comes with a big yellow warning that it is no longer a ticket.
But let’s find out what’s inside!
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