Every year brings with it a great list of game events to look forward to. You can use my game events calendar or my interactive map of game conventions to help plan your schedule for 2011. I hope to see you at some of these great game conventions!

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The Kickstarter project for the board game 1955: The War on Espionage is officially a success. More than $8,500 has been raised, well above the $7,500 goal set by Nicholas Vitek of Living Worlds Games.

1955: The War of Espionage was designed by Kevin G. Nunn (VeloCity, Duck! Duck! Go!, Nobody But Us Chickens). Read more about the game and the Kickstarter effort to fund it (Kickstarter helps connect people looking for funding to produce creative projects with people willing to fund such projects) in our interview with Vitek.

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A new expansion for the popular family strategy game Ticket to Ride will feature an alien and a dinosaur and will be available next month, game publisher Days of Wonder announced today.

Alvin & Dexter: A Ticket to Ride Monster Expansion can be played on all Ticket to Ride maps. The monster figures turn any location they occupy into a "city in chaos" -- blocking routes from being built into or out of that city. In addition, at game's end any destination ticket to a city inhabited by either monster is worth only half its normal point value.

Game publisher Days of Wonder has announced their first game of 2011, Cargo Noir. As a fan of noir fiction and movies, I'm very much looking forward to it based on the title alone.

No details have been released yet, but a video preview of Cargo Noir (the first in what the company says will be a "series of mini movies") hints that the game is set in 1954 Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and it involves organized crime and a smuggling operation. Sweet.

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