In a short press release issued Tuesday, Wizards of the Coast (publishers of Magic: the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, and dozens of other games your mom told you were Satanic when you were a kid) announced that they are planning to shut down their fledgling “social networking for gamers” side-project Gleemax.

For those that don’t know, Gleemax was created by WotC, and designed to be a Facebookesque site designed for traditional gamers. Our own Jon Zungre first got to see the site in action back at GDC 08.

Why the powers-that-be at Wizards thought that regular Facebook was insufficient for the task, the world may never know. But as of July, nearly a year after the site’s alpha release in October of 2007, all it had to offer loyal gamers was a buggy blogging system, simple user profile pages, and generally unstable forum hosting - nothing particularly groundbreaking in the gamer world or otherwise. Read more…

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Have you ever played Magic the Gathering against yourself? I’ll tell you what, from one MTG player to another, it’s still kind of fun. But not as fun as when your beating your friend Steve’s goblin army the hell down over some chips and Mt. Dew — but what happens when Steve moves to freaking Jersey?

I talked to, Randy Buehler, from Wizards of the Coast, to see if there was a solution to my problem. Gleemax.com he told me, would cure all my ailments. And it’s balm would come in the form of a social networking site devoted to “thinking gamers” and the games they love. Read more…

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