War on Terror Blog
Wednesday 15th November 2006
Ex-MI6 boss Richard Dearlove: Will play WoT with son...
A last minute tip-off and we hear that Sir Richard Dearlove, ex-head of MI6, is presenting a talk at a prestigious Cambridge University entitled the 'War on Terror'. It's too much to resist, and we take the opportunity to present him with a copy of the game.
Due to the fact that half of the TerrorBull team was swanning around London on a birthday related jolly, and that the tip-off was too late to get Cambridge press involved, Andy T has to find a last minute drunken photographer called Ben to come along and record the moment for blog history.
Sir Dearlove stated that all acts of terrorism are a means of communication, but when pushed on what the 'July 7th terrorists' were trying to communicate, he drew a blank.The pre-talk meeting in the pub goes well, bumping into two random Cambridge characters. One of which already knows about the game and wished us well, the other, by the end of the drink, determined to buy a set and use it to teach his students English.
Arriving at the talk a little late and a little drunk, Richard is already underway explaining the complexities of the 'War on Terror'. It seems to boil down to purely religious motivation that CANNOT BE NEGOTIATED WITH. Early on Sir Dearlove states that all acts of terrorism are a means of communication, but when pushed on what the 'July 7th terrorists' were trying to communicate, he drew a blank. Doesn't fill us with a lot of confidence that being in charge of of 'Secret Intelligence Service' means you know what's going on.
He went into depth about the risk of a biological attack, rather than nuclear or chemical; how new evidence shows that Al-Qaeda is more organised than we thought; how difficult it is for governments to relay evidence of the threat and not be seen as scaremongering...
But at the end of it all, he was more than happy to receive a free set of War on Terror, the boardgame, maybe slightly confused. Even though he confessed to not play games too often, he said he'd give it a shot with his son. He didn't even mind having his photo taken, "as long as it's not used for promotion". Luckily Ben was drunk enough to guarantee a piss-poor photo that could never be reproduced anywhere, ever.
We're hoping that he'll endorse the game as the most realistic modern world liberation game in existence. Who better to judge than an ex-MI6 boss - someone who's already written a fair few secret messages of his own.
Other news! The games have cleared customs and we're off to our UK warehouse tomorrow to inspect the shipment. Games are arriving at people's doorsteps in n.America right now, with UK games following shortly.
- posted by TerrorBull Games on 15 November 2006 - 0 comments
Monday 13th November 2006
Delivery Update: WoT hits dry land!
The last month has felt like a small eternity. But the waiting's over! It's here! The War on Terror cargo ship has docked!
Unless they get destroyed by customs (nothing would surprise us), the games should start getting delivered next week. And the games in the States are already at the warehouse - they should be going out tomorrow.
Exciting times. This website's going to be updated slightly too - for starters, we're going to have an 'evil gallery' for people to send in their balaclava shots.
There have been a couple of interesting developments here at TBG HQ. A possible documentary may be on the cards. And we're talking to people about proper distribution in North America. If either leads to anything, you'll certainly know about it.
But it's not all fun and games (is it ever?) - unfortunately both Borders and Fopp in Cambridge have backed out of stocking the game. In both cases, the Cambridge managers have been over-ridden by 'head office'. In Fopp's case, the instruction was not to stock any board games. However, in Borders' case, they received a direct order from head office not to stock War on Terror, the boardgame, since it might "upset customers". (Unlike any of the other products they stock). They've been added to the Coalition of the Unwilling.
Our hopes now lie with independent games shops. We'll hopefully have a list of stockists on the site in the next couple of weeks.
And in other news, we read in the Independent that young Muslims are being groomed as suicide bombers through the use of - amongst other things - board games. Well it wasn't us. It's not even out yet.
- posted by TerrorBull Games on 13 November 2006 - 0 comments
Thursday 26th October 2006
Sorted! Distribution woes all gone
A couple of weeks ago, the rug was pulled out from under our feet by our shipping and fulfilment partner getting cold feet at the last minute.*
We're happy to say that's now all behind us. We've found better companies to work with and ones with a sense of humour to boot.
We now have an exciting partnership with a fulfilment company in the States who really knows what they're doing. As a bonus, they can ship to Canada too, so no more excuses and moaning, we can now post to Canada for the same price as the US.
Because we're astonishingly nice chaps, we're going to refund the difference to those people in Canada who have already ordered. We think we have everybody, but if in a few days, you feel you've missed out, just get in touch.
* Thanks to everyone who contacted us with useful leads and advice (like, 'get a contract' - yeh, cheers, we worked that out ourselves).
Order update: 1,151 games
- posted by TerrorBull Games on 26 October 2006 - 0 comments
Monday 23rd October 2006
Essen toy fair protest
We'd become accustomed to not being very popular and being banned from every major toy fair in the world. It's become a sad fact of our strange, new existence in the world of games and toys. We shrugged and moved on.
But one guy refused to take it lying down. He was angry at the whiff of censorship surrounding Essen's decision to ban the game and he wanted to make his voice heard. That man was Sjap Horwitz from the Netherlands.
War on Terror is sick and ridiculous, but a game about Europe's first urban guerrilla terrorists is fine and dandy What he and four other friends did was make 5 t-shirts to wear at Essen, all with various messages of protest. It's just a shame we weren't allowed there to see it, but if you can just picture 5 fully grown men walking around a toy and games fair with "I want my War on Terror" and "Stop censorship: give me War on Terror" scrawled across their chests and backs... Genius. Here's Sjap's own account of the fair:
"We started looking at games, and to people who tried to read our shirts, we explained what it was all about."
"We talked to quite a few people, and everybody had basically the same reaction: it's a stupid ban!"
"I bought an expansion for an existing satirical game with a suicide terrorist card in it... I Also talked to a Swedish guy who had made a satirical card game about the RAF (not the Royal Air Force, but the Rote Armee Fraktion) - talk about a dodgy subject in Germany, but no, no problem at all."
Quite amazing. War on Terror is sick and ridiculous, but a game about Europe's first urban guerilla terrorists is fine and dandy. As we've said all along, we're not so bothered by the decision of being banned alone, it's the double standards applied that leaves us scratching our heads.
Sjap went on to say how he confronted Dominique Metzler, the Essen Spiel organiser and author of the 'sick and ridiculous' quote:
"She completely refused to discuss anything with me, she kept saying check the website (I guess she meant the discussion on the Spielbox.de forum. I just checked it out and the vast majority of posts support WOT, so I don't really understand.)."
"She walked away from the counter, so I had to shout, "you have absolutely no sense of humour"."
"It's kind of weird that the person responsible, the person in charge, refuses to clarify/justify her opinion on the matter. Pretty weak, I'd say."
Cheers, Sjap. Sounds like we missed out on some fun. Oh well, maybe next year ...
Sjap also snapped some pictures of the convention being held in the hall nextdoor. It's a seemingly harmless Teddy Bear convention, but if you check out the gallery you'll see a sinister overtone to those furry fellas.
All we can wonder is, why wasn't this banned too?
- posted by TerrorBull Games on 23 October 2006 - 0 comments
Friday 20th October 2006
Ship Ahoy!
Finally, somewhere out there on the waves there's a boat with a big metal box full of War on Terror, the boardgames. So we're on target, the games will be shoved through mail boxes starting the week of the 19 November.
Depending on quite where you are in the world, it may take a little longer to get to you. As soon as we have firm dates for UK, US, Canada, Europe and 'elsewhere' we'll be letting people know via email and this website.
The media circus rolls on... Another day trip to London and we had fun and met some very nice people for our Televisa Mexicana interview. And a piece in today's Guardian has already created some interesting leads, more of which you'll hear about in good time.
We've also found a great venue for our launch party in London and we're still trying to work out how to use the TerrorBull Games video camera.
- posted by TerrorBull Games on 20 October 2006 - 0 comments
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