There are book companies which publish entire novels online as a marketing gesture. It's worked pretty well for at least one of them, Baen Books www.baen.com. The theory is that if a customer likes the books that Baen provides for free, they'll be more likely to pay money for the books that Baen provides not for free.

The world's largest publisher of board games makes the rules for all of their games, including many out-of-print games, free on the Internet.

On the other hand, when it comes to Winsome games, the only reason that people would buy them is for the rules, since the components generally are things which anyone could manufacture with a photocopier, some construction paper, and a rainy afternoon. So if Winsome posts the rules to their games, they are dependent upon the good will of buyers to not make their own, better, copies of the games, and it's pretty clear that Winsome Games doesn't believe that customer good will exists. On the other other hand, anyone could borrow a copy of Pampas Railroads from a friend, make a photocopy, and have their own copy after that rainy afternoon of paper cutting. There's no way to stop that, and there's nothing magical about the Internet on that score.

As an interesting side note, I will point out that Hexagames once published a very nice wooden edition of Claude Soucie's game Lines of Action and sold out the print run despite its fairly hefty price tag. This is relevant to the conversation because the rules to Lines of Action have been readily available through hundreds of public libraries since the 1970s and the game can be played using a standard checkers set. Obviously, there are players who will pay for a "real" copy of a game regardless of its availability for free.

Replacement parts for games http://svgames.com/parts.html

The Games on Board website (www.gamesonboard.com) had a Carcasonne PC game still in beta and online multiplayer versions of Modern Art, Kahuna, Euphrates and Tigris and a downloadable copy of Through the Desert. Someone has ported the Bughouse (4 player team chess variant) to Zillions http://www.zillions-of-games.com A new website for Battlefield Terrain Concepts. http://battlefieldterrain.com/ Napoleonics version of Warhammer?! http://www.geocities.com/templar72/Nappys/Nappys.htm http://www.tankrider.com/RBINaps.htm. 1:72 scale plastics www.hobbybunker.com. They specialize in plastics. For Talibans try MJ figures, thy are Peter Pig compatible

http://www.thegamershaven.co.uk/mj/index.htm. The Well Rounded Player http://www.spotlightongames.com/list/intro.html http://www.carcassonne-online.de/ carcassonne.kochmedia.com. The new Jocfain mystery game is now available at www.jocfain. com. The Web-Grognards http://www.grognard. com/titlep.html gives some variants. The PanzerBlitz forum at http://hometown.aol.com/ssbtdoom/pbone.htm Dragon Hunt http://faidutti.free.fr/jeux/dragonstones/dragonstonescontest.html Norwegian board gamer site: http://www.brettspill.no

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