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I won’t be at PAX, but a product I worked on will debut there this weekend: the Marvel Super Hero Squad Online CCG. The brilliant people at Lone Shark Games (Mike Selinker, Teeuwynn Woodruff, and James Ernest) and the Amazing Society (Devin Low, et al) did all the heavy lifting on this one, but they brought me in — along with Monte Cook and Andy Collins — to help with writing a bunch of text on the cards.

If you get out to PAX, keep your eye out (possibly near the Gazillion booth) for sample decks and promo cards and sign up to join the game’s first-ever tournament. That’s right. This is an actual cardstock game designed to go along with the online MMO game before the video game version even launches.

If you’re near Madison, Wisconsin, this weekend instead, stop by and hang out with me at Geek.Kon. I won’t have any cards, but we’ll find some fun.

Here’s something else I worked on that never made it over to the States: Inazuma-Oh! (That’s “Lightning King” in Japanese, I’m told.) It was originally a Japanese set of customizable racing cars that clipped together in three different levels. You mixed and matched layers, then rammed them into each other to see which could dish out or take the beating best.

At the request of Playmates Toys, I came up with a new set of factions and names for the various cards, along with the framework for a storyline to tie it all together. Tomy apparently put out the toys in Europe, where they failed to set the world on fire, so they never hit shelves in the US. Despite that, I had a lot of fun working on it. Here’s hoping they come back someday.

Now that I’m done running around for the summer, my son Marty has stepped up to give me a hand with clearing out my closets and attic, which are clogged with old games, books, and more that haven’t seen enough love over the past few years. He’s putting them up on eBay for me, one at a time.

Part of the impetus for this is that a small disaster struck while I was at Gen Con. The quad boys’ bedroom sits directly over my office, and their toilet overflowed. The water rained down into my office and wrecked the ceiling and the carpet below, along with a set of paneled doors in between. It also took out a few comics and games in the closet behind those doors.

Fortunately, I had my laptop with me at Gen Con, besides which I always keep a continuous backup of all my data both onsite and off (I use BackBlaze for the latter). We’re insured, and that’s covering everything, less the deductible. The real drag is not being able to use my office much until the work is complete.

Getting forced out of my office made me want to clear out more room in the house. We’re in a good-sized place, but with seven of us it sometimes feel packed to the gills. The best fix for such clutter is to get rid of things we’re not using. To that end, we’re having a yard sale on August 28 to clear out the kids’ old toys, bikes, clothes, and so on. My extra games, comics, books, and such, though, are headed for eBay.

I set up a widget to show off what Marty’s posted there. If you have requests for certain things I might have, let me know and I’ll see if I have any to spare. And if you can, give my old games a good home.