Luding FAQ
Many thanks to Robert P. Smith for doing the original English version of this FAQ!
General Information
What is Luding?
Luding is a game database that contains several thousand games, designers and publishers. There are also links to discussion of games at more than 60 sites around the WWW.
Who is involved with Luding?
Luding was created by Mario Boller-Olfert (see The development of Luding.) Christian Scholz, a computer science student, contributed the graphics and also the first version of the scripts. There are many other people who have also helped out, including Bert and Dotty Hess, Knut Michael Wolf, Richard Heli, and others. Thanks to all!Also some (unfortunately not all!) publishers and designers send us information about their new games. Luding depends on such information - without them Luding cannot exist!
Why is Luding free from advertising?
Luding is a non-commercial site. It is hosted on Sun SITE Central Europe, a Sun Microsystems sponsored computer at the computer science department at the Rheinisch-Westfälischen Technische Hochschule Aachen. No money is earned with Luding.
What information can I find on Luding?
Luding contains information on board and card games, role playing games, and war games. The designer, publisher, year of publication, price, series, number of players, game length, as well as whether the game is appropriate for children or whether it is a collectible card game is listed. For war games there are fields for the setting, the game playing system to which the entry belongs, whether it is a stand alone module, rule book or source book. There are also links to discussion of the games on the WWW. These links use a compact notation (for example "DK" for Knut Michael Wolf's Spielplatz or "EFAQ" for the English-language FAQ). The first letter shows the language - D for German, E for English. P is for pictures of the game. The following letters give the source of the discussion (see our referring sites.) In some cases the abbreviation indicates the type of discussion instead of a concrete source:- DH or EH: German or English home page of the game
- DPI or EPI: Press info for a game
- DFAQ or EFAQ: German or English FAQ (frequently asked questions) about the game
- DRULE or ERULE: German or English rules and variants about the game
- DERR or EERR: Errata for the game
- DO or EO: individual reviews for which luding does not link to the entire site
A link on a site which is not a review has the type appended to its linkname, e.g. EZ-FAQ for an FAQ for a game on the site EZ.
Links are checked regularly, and links to reviews, which do not work anymore, are displayed in italic. If you have information about any of these links, please contact luding.
Also luding contains information on publishing houses (games published as well as address data) and designers (published games, links to a home page, alias, and a biography if available).
How do I find information or discussion about a game?
If you are looking for information or discussion about the game Bohnanza, you can find it by entering Bohnanza in the "Find game" field at http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/luding, and pressing Return. The search function returns all games in which the word Bohnanza occurs. The result includes the publisher, year of publication, series as well as links to discussions about the game.Instead of seraching from the Luding homepage, you can also select "english with frames" or "english without frames" on the homepage, and enter Bohnanza in the "Find game" field in the left menu, then press return. Third, you can click on "Find" in the same left menu, which takes you to a more advanced search.
How does the search function work in Luding?
All search functions in Luding are based on a string of characters - that means
that when you do a search using the string "mark"
in the title you will find "Market Madness" as well as "Samarkand" (and
numerous other games). Upper and lower case is always ignored. The
exception is when only one or two characters are used as a search string. In
this case only games will be displayed
which match the search string exactly. This allows searching for games
like 'Ra' or 'M' without getting hundreds of results back.
If using the exact search is unwanted, the % sign can
be used to extend the search string (see next paragraph) and therefore avoid
the exact search.
It is possible to input a % for any sequence of characters, for example with "man%l" you will find the games "Mancala", and "Thinking Man's Golf", although not "Manhattan".
In order to limit the search you can select the button "Title begins with string" - which can also be combined with %. Only those games (designers, ...) beginning with the appropriate character sequence are found (naturally it makes no sense to select "Title begins with string" and then begin the search with % as the first character).
The newest possibility is the so-called "Fuzzy search". With fuzzy search special characters (like foreign characters or letters with accent marks) are found. For example, when this button is selected "argern" will find "Igel Ärgern". This function can be combined with % und "Title begins with string".
On the search page, which you can reach by clicking in "Search" in the left menu, there is a button for "Fuzzy search". When this is selected the name of the game, the designer, the publisher are found as in the previously described fuzzy searches.
I am missing the rules to a game - where can I find them?
The first possibility, particularly for games that are still available: write to the publisher. If the publisher no longer exists or the game is no longer available then a post to the newsgroup rec.games.board might be helpful. Other sources for rules in English include http://www.sacredchao.cc/, http://www.boardgamegeek.com and (for older games in particular) http://www.gamecabinet.com/. Also, take a look at the Austrian site http://www.spielen.at. They have an email rules service, and their game collection contains about 12,000 games! You can contact them at office@spielen.at.I have a question about the rules of a game - where can I get an answer?
Questions about the rules of a game can't usually be answered. You can either try contacting the publisher or the designer, or post these questions in the newsgroup rec.games.board, in the German newsgroup de.rec.spiele.brett+karten, or in the Spielbox's (German) forum at http://spielbox.de/phorum4.I am looking for the game XYZ ... where can I find it?
Games that are still available (including imports) can often be found through web retailers (for example Funagain Games or Boulder Games.) You can also find a list of German retailers at KMW's Spielplatz.Sometimes games that are no longer available can be found through flea markets, classified ads in games magazines, or online auctions (such as EBay.) A further source is the newsgroup rec.games.board.marketplace.
There are also some stores that specialize in finding rare games, such as Crazy Egor's.
The best source of new, used, domestic and imported games is probably the gaming convention. There are many conventions around the country and the world, although the biggest convention in the world is the annual convention held in Essen, Germany every October.
I discuss board games on my web site. How can I link my reviews at Luding?
If you want to link your reviews at Luding, you must be registered. For a recording as a reviewer can be carried out, the following points should be met:- Links: The web page must use your own domain. Reviews on general review websites (Ciao.de, Amazon, YouTube, etc.) cannot be linked due to system limitations. It is a good idea to put your reviews on your own blog website.
- Continuity: The web page should already exist for some time and be regularly kept up to date.
- Inventory: The number of existing reviews should be at least 20.
- Quality: The content of the reviews should be useful to the readers of Luding.
Questions about the structure of Luding
What kinds of games are there in Luding?
There are the types board game, war game, role playing game as well as book and magazine. Board games are also split into the following subtypes: CCG (collectible card games) and children's games.Why don't you differentiate between board and card games?
For many games this distinction is not a problem, but there are also many borderline cases: games such as Showmanager (Premiere), Stimmt so! and Modern Art that are - despite the attached board - packs of cards. On the other hand there are Bohnanza and Verräter - where there is no game board, but the "feel" of the game is more similar to board games. In order to avoid such confusions no distinction is made between board and card games.
Background information on Luding
How did Luding develop?
Luding was brought into life by Mario Boller-Olfert as the database
GameBase. Later Mario designated the database as Luding and rented the domain name
www.luding.com. Luding contained information about games, discussions, publishers, and designers as well as information about the history of games and the game business (both domestic and international) as well as an extensive list of links. In 1997 Stefanie Kethers offered to mirror Luding (which still contained static HTML pages prepared monthly from the database) on the
SunSite computer, so that visitors from Germany would have shorter access times. So in 1997 the German mirror was founded. Approximately one year later Mario had no longer enough time to keep Luding current and wanted to give it to the Net. Stefanie and Jörg then took over operation of Luding. The first half of the year Mario's Access database was maintained, but it soon became clear that the database would operate better on the SunSite, a Unix computer. Thus Luding was changed to a MySQL database on Unix starting at time time of the convention in Essen in 1998. The most important innovation is that one can now search the database directly for information; previously one could only search the HTML pages generated from the database.
In 2001 Jörg developed a complete new design for luding and re-programmed all scripts, enabling Luding to display pictures of the games, press info and more information about each game (if available). At the same time, the
Fachgruppe Spiel, a group of game publishers in Germany, supported luding by financing the new URL "luding.org".
Please send comments and questions to: luding< at > luding < dot > org