Background and History
Button Men is a game designed for fan conventions and other public venues. It can be played almost anywhere on short notice (provided the dice are at hand), and games are quick to complete. Buttons are meant to be worn on clothing, bags, or other accessories, advertising that the wearer has a button to play with and is open to challenges. Buttons also frequently advertise something else, such as a company, a webcomic, or another game. The Sluggy Freelance set of buttons, for example, features characters from that comic, and the Brawl set features characters from another Cheapass game. In 2000, Button Men won the Origins Awards for Best Abstract Board Game of 1999 and Best Graphic Presentation of a Board Game 1999.
Button Men can easily be extended simply by creating more buttons. It has continued to be so extended since its inception; as of 2004, over 200 buttons have been printed. Many are by now out of print, though many others are still available, primarily via purchase from the Cheapass Games web site. Companies other than Cheapass must pay a licensing fee to use the Button Men artwork in distributing their own buttons.
Button Men Online, a website developed by Dana Huyler and officially endorsed by Cheapass Games, allows users to play games over the internet via a web-based interface with e-mailed notifications. Button Men Online features most of the printed buttons, an additional 250+ "buttons" that exist only on the site, and a random button generator. In 2003, Button Men Online won the Origins Award for Best Play-by-mail Game of 2002.
In 1999 Pyramid magazine named Button Men as one of the Millennium's Best Games. Editor Scott Haring said "This game just gets more and more impressive every time I look at it. ... the idea is so simple, and the strategy so subtle . . . I've never figured out exactly how to master this game, and I suspect that's because there is no good way to do so."
In 2009, Thrust Interactive released an iPhone version of the game in collaboration with Cheapass Games.
In 2011, Cheapass Games began "ransoming" their older and out-of-print games in an experiment to apply the "freemium" business model to board games. Button Men was revamped into a trading-card format that can be easily printed on a standard inkjet and cut apart for gameplay. The original base set, "Soldiers" and the first expansion set, "Vampyres", have both been released in this new format and made available for anyone to download, print and play with at no monetary cost.
Read more about this topic: Button Men
Famous quotes containing the words background and, background and/or history:
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)