February 19, 2005
At last: TAMSK will be reprinted

It has taken about 2 years, but here's at last good news for those who have been trying to track down a copy of TAMSK without result: TAMSK will become available again! If all goes well - and why shouldn't that be the case? - it will be ready in May.

We are very happy to announce this news, because the plan is to release the last game of Project GIPF before the end of the year, but it would be difficult to consider the Project complete if not all 6 games would be available. Now things look good. The production price has been the main problem for a long time, but that is finally solved. The new TAMSK will retail for about the same price as the old Schmidt Spiele version: between 35 and 40 Euro. At least in Europe, that is. The difference between the Euro and the US Dollar may result in a higher price in some exotic places, though.

We have looked into the possibility to have to new TAMSK in a box of the same size as the other 4 games (as we did with the new version of GIPF in '04) but that appeared not to be possible. If things would be made smaller to let it fit in a smaller box, the game play would suffer too much from it; it would make moving the hour-glasses and putting the rings on theboard too awkward to do under time pressure. We have also tryed to find more precise hour-glasses, but again without success. As told before, more accurate timers would make the game at least twice as expensive and that would make it unsellable. So, again we were confronted with the same question as in the beginning: either TAMSK with these hour-glasses or no TAMSK at all. And just like back then, we decided to go for it. To avoid that some will be not happy with the tolerance after having purchase a copy, we will mention the product description we get from the manufacturer of the hour-glasses in bold letters on the back of the box, including the time differences that may occur in the most extreme cases.

TAMSK-it.

(We hope that not too many have paid a lot of money for a TAMSK the last few months, because we were informed that somebody in the US paid $150 for a second hand copy - a sum that the man had been prepared to paid in the assumption that TAMSK was definitively out of print. We were sorry to hear that.)