The first ever CubeFest has been announced! Taking place in London this Saturday, the event will feature a talk and Q&A session from members of Mind Candy - the team behind the cards - with lots of time for card swapping, heavy-duty speculating and heated debate over JebJoya’s new hairstyle. PlayLounge is a hop, skip and a jump away for those wanting to stock up on new cards, and there’ll even be some MC-sponsored buffet action. With your humble author also in attendance, what’s not to like? Check out the Unforums thread for further details - and see you there!

(There’s also a smaller event in Portland, OR, if that’s more your side of the Atlantic…)

A new website! Kurt, one of the puzzle-card scribes at the Academy, hid his website address in the semacode background of this puzzle card, leading to The Path Of Least Time, his vaguely under-the-radar (you guessed it!) weblog.

In other news, players have discovered that the current crop of cards are part of an “advance release”, with only 66 of the 256 cards currently on sale. There’s no indication yet of when the full, 256-card deck will be made available. Oooh… you tease, MC!

Sentinel editor Michiko Clark was indeed interviewed on Talksport Radio in what was considered to be a broadly informative fashion - an MP3 recording is available here.

Meanwhile Pietro’s Maze (see the previous update) was cracked open in a slightly unscrupulous manner. It revealed a long, dreamlike piece of prose. apparently describing Pietro’s visions during his coma. A hint from the Clark interview led us to discover that the writing could be broken down into little chunks and used as URLs on the Salk family website, revealing a long collection of emails and personal notes between Pietro and “The Advisor”, a shadowy figure who claims to have been been part of the Cube Theft conspiracy. You can read the full logs here. If you scroll down to the bottom of that page, you’ll notice that some of the logs are password protected and have not yet been accessed. You can join in the effort to crack the passwords at the Unforums thread.

Moving on, The Sentinel ran a new editorial slating the “ridiculously inept” Mind Candy, to hilarious effect - but the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed a little bit of extra information in the article…. Cards go on sale worldwide on July 13th! They’ll be available from the previous mentioned Nine Stores and also by mail-order from Firebox.

The next day, though (Friday 8th July) Scarlett announced that the cards would be made exclusively available from the London store, Playlounge, later that day! Like the good Cubists they are, a few players managed to get there promptly to have their photos taken by the MC guys, and to buy the first ever packs of PXC Cards. There’s now a whole new sub-section on the forums, devoted to solving the mysteries within the cards.

Finally, we’ve discovered a host of new sites, linked to below. Enjoy!