World of Warcraft's official site has posted a Q & A with the Blizzard design team, providing details on the major feature of the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion, the Death Knight hero class.  According to the article, Death Knights will be a primarily offensive class with a variety of attack spells and melee abilities at their disposal.

On the Death Knight's group role:  "Tanks play a critical role in any group, such that without a tank, you really don't have a group. We think that adding another tanking class will make it easier for players to form viable groups for dungeons and raids, but that won't be at the expense of existing tanks."

Regarding the Death Knight's ability resource: "…the Death Knight's spells and abilities will be fueled by a new type of resource mechanic - the rune system - which will be different from mana, energy, and rage.  This rune system is highly original and unlike any other class in World of Warcraft, but at the same time it is very consistent with the lore and core abilities of earlier incarnations of the Death Knight in previous games."

Hinting at the Death Knight's abilities based on past descriptions in Warcraft games and lore: "Just looking at the many manifestations of death knights in previous games and in Warcraft lore provides a lot of ideas for spells and abilities that will give players a feeling of familiarity with what the class is about.  At the same time, the way we introduce this class gives us an opportunity to add some awesome new stuff to the "modern" Death Knight's bag of tricks."

Arnaud Urbon and Ludovic Vialla, creators of Khronos, are back with a new game from the same publisher, Editions du Matagot, and the game is called Utopia.

Here’s a brief description of the game:
The rich king of Utopia invites princes of the greatest known civilizations to come and live in his city, bringing all the diversity of their civilization’s architectural style.
You are one of the King’s ministers and you have to accommodate the princes as they arrive at the city gates. Each step in the construction of the city earns you notoriety.
The first player to reach 50 prestige points finishes the game and the player who has most points wins.

For more details on the game—along with pics of the cards, figures, gameboard, monuments, and wonders—visit the Utopia website, which has text in both English and French.

Pillars of the Earth, designed by Michael Rieneck and Stefan Stadler, has won the Deutscher Spiele Preis 2007.
Here’s the rundown of the top ten, along with the number of points they scored:

- Pillars of the Earth, by Rieneck & Stadler (Kosmos / Mayfair) - 3957 points
- Notre Dame, by Stefan Feld (alea / Rio Grande) - 2980 points
- Vikings, by Michael Kiesling (Hans im Glück / Rio Grande) - 2576 points
- Yspahan, by Sebastien Pauchon (Ystari / Rio Grande) - 2298 points
- Zooloretto, by Michael Schacht (Abacusspiele / Rio Grande) - 1293 points
- Arkadia, by Rüdiger Dorn (Ravensburger) - 1222 points
- Imperial, by Mac Gerdts (Eggertspiele / Rio Grande) - 1177 points
- Leonardo da Vinci, by Acchitocca (daVinci / Mayfair) - 1016 points
- Thebes, by Peter Prinz (Queen / Rio Grande) - 965 points
- Colosseum, by Wolfgang Kramer & Markus Lübke (Days of Wonder) - 855 points

Four of the five Spiel des Jahres nominees, including the winning title Zooloretto, placed in the listing, although the highest any of these titles finished is fourth; The Thief of Baghdad is the only nominee outside the top ten.

Burg Appenzell, designed by Bernhard Weber and Jens Peter Schliemann and published by Zoch Verlag, won the award for best children’s game as well as the game with the best rules presentation.

The awards will be handed out at a ceremony during Spiel 07 in mid-October.

Europe is missing out on the FIFA 08 madness (the long-awaited console demo is out!) due to last minute technical issues.  PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 owners in North America and Australia however can take to the pitch with EA's latest FIFA title today.
A post on the official FIFA 08 forums broke the news to the fans: "We're sorry to have to tell everyone that the FIFA 08 demo won't be launching in Europe today as was expected.  Although the demo is being released in North America there were a couple of issues which we couldn't get ironed out in time to release today despite working through out the night to get these sorted."
We'll just have to wait a bit for the demo which features seven playable teams, including Barcelona, AC Milan, America, NY Red Bulls, Manchester United, Marseille and Bayern Munchen.

Merscom released a PC version of Reiner Knizia’s Ingenious in the first half of 2007, but that’s only the first of many creations to come out of this relationship, according to a press release from Merscom.
Merscom and renowned board game designer Dr. Reiner Knizia announced that Merscom will develop and publish multiple Xbox LIVE Arcade, Nintendo DS and PC games based on concepts created by Reiner Knizia.  Merscom will work with Knizia Games to create interactive games exclusively for the company as well as utilize existing Knizia board games and as-yet-unpublished board game concepts.  Merscom plans to begin releasing the titles in early 2008.

Days of Wonder has announced the Memoir ‘44 Air Pack expansion.
The Air Pack contains eight painted airplanes, a departure from the unpainted figures included in the base game and previous expansions, new airfield terrain tiles, six new obstacles, a comprehensive 120 card summary deck, and a book of all 64 scenarios released to date, with many scenarios being updated or revised thanks to the wealth of expansions that have been released since Memoir ‘44’s first appearance in 2004.
Naturally you need a copy of the base game to make use of the Air Pack, and some scenarios require terrain tiles and figures included in one or more of the expansions.  Memoir ‘44 Air Pack will be released in both English and French in November 2007.
For a complete list of components, visit the Air Pack webpage at Memoir44.com.

In celebration of Command & Conquer's 12-year anniversary, Electronic Arts has made the Gold version of the original real-time strategy game available for free download.
The original game, first released in 1995, was developed by Westwood Studios and spawned a phalanx of sequels.
EA said it is providing the C&C Gold ISO disk image, which the company said would run on Windows XP if burned to a CD-ROM. You can visit the official Command & Conquer Web site for more information about the free download, the series and EA's C&C strategy for the month of September.