Lucca Games
Lucca Games is the Italian salon dedicated to Intelligent Games (role games, board games, collectable card games and 3-dimensional wargaming) and Fantastic Imagination. Set up in 1993, in the course of just a few years the exhibition has proved to be an inspired idea: a policy decision that has succeeded in highlighting the close links between the world of games and the world of cartooning, bringing together new and old trends in culture and entertainment, from the traditional comic to computer graphics, fantasy sagas to simulated battles, illustration to board games, and narrative to game design. Over the years, Lucca Games has become the most important games exhibition in Italy and is one of the most important internationally. Why? Because it was conceived as something more than an ordinary games fair, seeking to unite the spirit and enjoyment that enlivens such events with the atmosphere of a great festival, a space for games and the imagination where visitors can play the part of the hero or meet a famous author or have the opportunity to preview and try out the next big releases. Acting as guides on this trip through the games medium are the cleverest game writers in Italy and the most successful publishers who come to the fair each year and mingle with young people from fandoms and clubs. Demonstration tables where everyone can try out the games under the guidance of expert animators; meetings and competitions; seminars on genre fiction; exhibitions of work by great fantasy illustrators and a Performance Area for Live Painting; a Meeting Room for quizzing artists of the calibre of Brom, Rick Berry, Phil Hale, Justine Sweet, Ciruelo, John Howe, Brian Froud, Larry Elmore, Angelo Montanini, Giuseppe Palumbo and Paolo Parente and with game designers and writers such as Richard Garfield, Margaret Weis, Joe Dever, Valerio Evangelisti, Alan Dean Foster, George R.R. Martin and Jervis Johnson. Finally, there are the prestigious Best of Show prizes, awarded to the best productions in the show. Lucca Games is all this and much more.
Info about Games 06
>> Download the Application form - Lucca Games (File PDF)
Issuing a challenge to the Show and being effective as a properly set-up Convention Centre – this is how the 2006 proposal for Lucca Comics & Games should be seen. As an important gamble, a solution that will allow us to develop the aspects of entertainment and fun that have given our exhibition public coverage worthy of the biggest international youth events, and a crucial driving force for the forthcoming winter market.
In the total rethinking of the event, Lucca Games has been allocated a single unified site linked to the Lucca Comics spaces. This is in order to continue to guarantee that the event has the functional features that provide the representativeness and availability that a large convention dedicated to games publishing must have. New areas will be allocated to free play, while the grassy area outside the Walls will provide an unusually evocative area for developing cultural aspects and significant growth areas such as Live Action RolePlay. After nineteen shows, this also required an adjustment to the application form and you will therefore find only the single booth unit, and not the double as previously. The full set of rules for gaming tables has been included. The redesigned form is divided into two parts: the column on the right is for business and publishing companies, while the one on the left is for associations and authors and artists, in accordance with Lucca Games’ policy of promoting fandom and auto-production in dialectic confrontation with the dimension of large crowds and large production.
This is how Lucca is opening itself up to international development as a result of the many close ties made in Essen during the International Games Fair and in Indianapolis at the Gen-Con. It is from this viewpoint that we can see the consolidation of external collaboration with the exhibitors of our event who are increasingly more active in the new global scenario, and the quantitative and qualitative increase of people involved in board games, imaginary fantasy and new merchandising areas such as producers of replica costumes and arms.
Within the context of our ever more up-to-date and varied exhibition-market, therefore, issuing a challenge to the Festival was essential. We needed to provide an exciting setting for its solid cultural programme and to identify appropriate structures so that it can best play its part as an important date in the European calendar. All operators in the sector look forward to it and Lucca Games has earned this after more than a decade of significant results.
Emanuele Vietina
Lucca Games Chief-Coordinato