REVIEW: Stone Age (Rio Grande Games)

Rio Grande Games
2-4 players
ages 10+
60-90 minutes
$45
Originally released: 2008
Designed by Michael Tummelhofer

The conversation went something like this:

ME: I got a new game and we're going to try it out tonight. It's called Stone Age.
FAMILY: Yippee! Sounds good! Battling cavemen! Wooly mammoths!
ME: Well, no, not really. Actually, it's what's called a worker placement game.
FAMILY: [blank stares]
ME: No, really, it's a great kind of game. You have little guys and they're, um, your workers, and you place them on the board and collect stuff, and then, well ... you place them again, but maybe in different locations on the board to get different kinds of stuff.
FAMILY: [uncomfortable glances at each other]
CHILD A: Placing workers is not fun. It's not even a game.
ME: Oh, yes! It's a very rich class of game! There's Agricola, and-
CHILD B: Can't we just play Dominion again?

Needless to say, we played Stone Age, much fun was had by all, and I learned a valuable lesson: never, ever use the phrase worker placement game among children or people who are not familiar with Eurogames. Seriously: kiss - of - death. Maybe call it something else, like a "Resource Acquisition Simulation".

In Brief
In Stone Age, players try to sustain and improve their tribe by gathering food and resources, adding new members, making tools, increasing their agricultural output, constructing buildings, and enhancing their civilization. This is done through a very simple mechanic that involves placing workers on certain spaces on the board and then resolving the actions for each of those spaces. Victory points are earned in several different ways, and the person with the highest number of victory points wins.

Components
This is the usual sturdy, well-crafted product from Rio Grande. The board condenses an immense amount of information into a limited space without making it seem crowded. There are 40 wooden people and 68 wooden resources (brick, wood, gold, and stone), as well as tiles for huts, food, and tools. The art is good and does a lot to extend the theme.

There's a lot of dice rolling in this game, so something really needs to be said about the Stone Age dice cup, a "leather" cup which is designed to look primitive. It is, without question, the worst-smelling game component in history. There may have been that one time when Sid Sackson dropped a copy of Acquire in his septic tank, but ... no, the Stone Age dice cup is worse. It smells like someone left a skinned polecat in a car on a 100-degree day with the windows up.

Gameplay
Stone Age is a hard game to summarize. Although it's fairly easy once your grasp the essentials, there are a lot of choices and resolutions for each turn. I'm just going to run through the basics.

You begin the game with a tribe of 5 workers, a bit of food, and a player board representing your village. People take turns placing these workers in specific locations on the main board. Each location yields some different result during the resolution phase. Some spaces have limited slots for workers, so people may be competing for a choice job during any given round. The locations break down like this:

The notorious Stone Age dice cup

• Hunting grounds (any number of workers): Gather food, which is used to feed your tribe during the feeding phase.
• Four different resource areas (up to 7 workers each): Gather wood, brick, stone, or gold, which is used to buy civilization cards and buildings.
• Tool maker (1 worker): Make 1 tool. Tools are used to increase the total value of your dice rolls.
• Hut (exactly 2 workers from a singe tribe): Add 1 worker to your tribe,
• Field (1 worker): Move your marker 1 space up on the food track. This automatically gives you 1 extra food each turn.
• Building tiles (1 worker per building tile): You pay for a building tile with resources, and then immediately add a certain amount of points to your total score. The building tile is moved to your player board. You can only buy 5 buildings in the course of the game, so plan wisely.
• Civilization cards (4 cards are laid out on the board, and you can place 1 worker per card): Once a card is paid for, it is taken by the player and replaced from the stock. These cards provide two kinds of bonus during the final scoring phase. Cards with culture symbols (writing, healing, pottery, art, and music) are worth 5 points for each unique card, while cards depicting different kinds of workers will add multipliers. For instance, if you have civilization cards depicting a total of 5 tool makers, and you have 4 tools, you earn 20 victory points at the end of the game. 

Food and resources are calculated by rolling dice, with 1 die rolled for each one of your workers placed on that resource. For instance, if you have 4 workers on the hunting grounds, you roll 4 dice. The total value of these rolls is then divided by various numbers to determine the total yield. (Food rolls are divided by 2, wood by 3, brick by 4, stone by 5, and gold by 6.) Thus, a roll of 24 on a food space would give you 12 food, while a roll of 24 on a gold space would give you 4 gold.

Each turn is played in rounds. First, everyone takes turns placing workers, then everyone resolves their workers' actions, then everyone feeds their tribe from the store of food. Food is measured simply: 1 food for each member of your tribe. If you don't have enough good, then your start paying out resources or even losing victory points.

The game ends when 1 stack of building tiles is exhausted, or when you cannot fully replenish the civilization card layout. People calculate their final score, and the winner is the person with the most victory points.

Food tokens

Verdict
This is a great worker placement game. It's a bit easier than some, which makes it perfect for families, but there's still plenty of room for strategy and planning. There isn't a great deal of player interaction. Other players may take some spot you want, but other than that there is no trading or real competition, except for points.

There is a lot of dice rolling and simple math in the game, so if you fear the dice, you might want to give this one a pass.  (Seriously, though: don't fear the dice, people!)

Strategy comes from finding the right balance between sustaining and growing your tribe, and earning enough for the point-generating cards and tiles. It's very hard to judge who's winning at any given point, since cards can remain hidden until the final scoring phases. Someone lurking at a 100-point deficit can suddenly lap the track once they calculate all their multipliers.

This points up one weakness in the game: the score can go very high, but the track only goes up to 100 points. That means you will almost always lap the scoring track, sometimes more than once. There's no simple way to mark which pieces have lapped the track, unless you put a coin or chit under their markers. It's not a big issue, but it's something we had to account for.

The theme works well with the mechanics, but I imagine you could place this in any number of settings with few changes. It could just as easily be themed to Colonial America or Ancient China. The stone age setting adds some flavor, but it's not integral to the design.

The design, however, is quite strong, with everything coming together nicely. It's a colorful, entertaining take on worker placement.

Kasparov on Watson

In my post about the Jeopardy-winning supercomputer Watson, I remarked that Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov "wouldn't last five minutes against Ken Jennings." That was no slight against Kasparov, who may well be the finest player in the entire history of Chess, and is proving to be a charismatic political figure in post-Communist Russia. It's just that the skill set and knowledge base needed to succeed at Jeopardy is far more diverse and complex than that required to succeed at Chess.

Although Kasparov won his first match against IBM's Chess-playing computer Deep Blue, he lost the rematch, and didn't handle the loss very well. Obviously, he's thought quite a lot about the man-versus-machine contest in the ensuing years, and he offers some interesting comments about Watson in The Atlantic:

My concern about its utility, and I read they would like it to answer medical questions, is that Watson's performance reminded me of chess computers. They play fantastically well in maybe 90% of positions, but there is a selection of positions they do not understand at all. Worse, by definition they do not understand what they do not understand and so cannot avoid them. A strong human Jeopardy! player, or a human doctor, may get the answer wrong, but he is unlikely to make a huge blunder or category error—at least not without being aware of his own doubts. We are also good at judging our own level of certainty. A computer can simulate this by an artificial confidence measurement, but I would not like to be the patient who discovers the medical equivalent of answering "Toronto" in the "US Cities" category, as Watson did.

Read the whole thing.

h/t: My wife (again).

Playing With Your Food

I'm not really that big a fan of Angry Birds, but I love how it's creeping into so many corners of society. Here's a guy who made a playable--yet wholly edible--Angry Birds birthday cake.



And here are the instructions for how to make your own.

h/t: My wife.

PUZZLE: Musical Letters

It's been a while since I posted a puzzle, so let's try some word playing.

Using just the musical notes--C D E F G A B--what is the longest word you can "play" on the piano? You can play the notes as many times as you like, but they have to a) make a single word and b) not require any letters but these seven.

There are multiple solutions.

Guitar Hero's Death Spiral

Joystiq charts the grisly toll following the death of the Guitar Hero franchise, and it's not a pretty picture. By the time the music game genre is finally laid to rest, the jobs lost actually may be in the thousands, once you add up development, marketing, and manufacturing.

In game development, it's not at all unusual to see cycles of hiring and firing. Companies swell with employees when they need to get a product out the door, and then sometimes shrink in the lull between its completion and the start of the next project.

Due to the size and rapid growth of the series, however, this is a bloodbath. The only Guitar Hero company with a real track-record is Neversoft (creators of the Spider-Man and Tony Hawk series), and they seem to have survived in some reduced form. Vicarious Visions also has some history, mostly working with Neversoft on ports and sequels, and it looks like they're going to survive as well.

On the positive side, a lot of people (including store owners, software developers, and factory workers) made a lot of money in a very short time. On the downside, it's left behind a sobering scene of wreckage that impacts real lives. These boom and bust cycles are the Gold Rush of the digital age.

Wrath of Ashardalon (Wizards of the Coast)

The new Dungeons & Dragons board game, Wrath of Ashardalon, is now available. This one slipped under my radar. Unlike its predecessor, Castle Ravenloft, it didn't seem to generate a lot of buzz, perhaps because it leans more towards fantasy than horror.

Like Castle Ravenloft, this looks like a chunky box full o' stuff for cooperative, boardgame-style adventuring. D&D purists seem to be turning up their noses at these, but my few sessions with Castle Ravenloft have provided a bit of that RPG flavor without the lengthy play, prep time, or need for a dungeon master. In other words: it's a way to play an RPG without it becoming an entire lifestyle.

This time, the Big Bad is a dragon rather than a vampire, and there seems to be a bit more complexity to the experience. The box is stuffed with plenty of dungeon tiles, hero and villain figures, cards, tokens, markers, and everything else a body needs to the D&D thing without a DM. It's listing for $65, and if I get a chance to look at it, I'll do a full review.

REVIEW: Funglish

Hasbro
$23
2+ players (the more the better)

I assume that Hasbro spends millions of dollars on R&D each year, and millions more on market research. Thus, it seems odd that they released a decent little party word game with that title that sounds like the word "fungus."

Despite the mushroomy name, it's still a lot of fun. Here's the gist: Funglish is charades with words. Not words you speak, mind you. Absolute silence on the part of the clue-giver is still required. The words are on little tiles, and you must assemble them on a frame in such a way that they describe a certain object, place, person, or phrase.

The game comes with 120 descriptive tiles, each bearing a single word. The tiles are divided into various types by color: black tiles are colors and patterns (green, striped, colorful), puke-green tiles are negative traits (evil, sour, ugly), gray are materials (wood, fabric, glass, etc), yellow are shapes (thin, wavy, round), blue are related to origin (such as African, fiction, British), red are states of being (manmade, living, dead), beige are general adjectives (scented, moving, liquid), orange are sets of antonyms (hot/cold, old/new, smooth/rough), and green are positive attributes (lovable, happy, glamorous).

The other components are fairly simple. There's a frame that allows you to set the tiles in place in one of three rows: "Definitely," "Kind of ," and "Not," as well as a set of cards with words, people, places, phrases, and various object to describe. These can range from "toast" and "silk" to "Led Zeppelin" and "Al Capone."

One person chooses a clue from the card, and then selects words that best describe it. The tiles are all laid out on a table, grouped by color to make it easier to assemble a description. Thus, if you pulled "honey," you might put "sticky" and "yummy" and "sweet" under "Definitely," "yellow" under "Sort of" (since honey is more gold than yellow, but there's no gold among the color choices), and "furry" under "Not." (If your honey is furry, it's probably time you cleaned out your pantry.) People then have to guess what the words describe, without any acting or verbal input from the clue-giver.

There's a timing element and a way to score points and determine a winner, but frankly the gameplay, win/lose aspect is a lot of hooey. This is less of a game and more of a social lubricant to get people thinking, talking, and laughing. As such, it's actually a lot of fun. The cards have some insane clues (How the heck do I describe Led Zeppelin with a random clutch of adjectives?), and always seems to lack just the word you need. I have a feeling that's on purpose, since a wider range of words might make it too easy to create very precise descriptions.

$23 seems a tad on the high side given what's in the box, and the components won't win any prizes. The tiles are thick and sturdy, but the frame likes to fall apart at random intervals. That said, it's a nice little word game that is quite a bit of fun with the right crowd. It gets people thinking in words, and helps them make interesting connections between words and the meaning they convey. I could also see it being an excellent addition to some classrooms.

Recession Buster Version!
In these troubling economic times, shelling out $23 for a party game just may not be in your budget. It is, however, relatively easy to make your own version of Funglish by printing words on card stock, or writing them on index cards. That way, you can also choose your own words and use different colors of paper for different classes of word. You won't get the frame, but since we've already determined that the frame is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine, I don't think you'll miss it much.

PS: The writer of this review wishes to confess that he tried to work the phrase "Fun Guy" into this piece. He is currently hanging his head in shame.

The Great Gatsby: The Long-Lost NES Game

Kotaku pointed me at a "lost" gem of the classic Nintendo Entertainment System days: the 8-bit adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Writer Michael McWhertor fills in the details of just how lead developer Charlie Hoey created a spoof of the iconic Great Gatsby cover art done in an 8-bit visual style. It was such a good idea they decided to turn the whole thing into a flash videogame done in the classic NES style, complete with a period advertisement and scans of the "real" insert for the original cartridge.

There's a certain mad genius in the game, a classic platformer in which Nick Carraway hops around Gatsby's mansion and other locations, collecting money and martinis while dodging flappers, Wilfred the butler, and other foes.

You can play the game online at GreatGatsbyGame.com. Can a version of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, complete with avenging ghost of Ben Gant, be far behind?

A Closer Look: French Tarot: Trumps 5 & 6

Many people are familiar with the standard Tarot suits (the "Major Arcana") used for "divination" purposes, but they're less aware that Tarot cards were created for playing trick-taking games and have a rich and diverse design history. These images are part of an ongoing series highlighting the art of a single deck used in France.

Click to enlarge

Trump No. 5: Detail

Click to enlarge

Trump No. 6: Detail

Minecraft Documentary in the Works

2 Player Productions has created a 20 minute proof-of-concept video for a feature-length documentary on Minecraft and its creator, Markus Persson. It's a remarkable story--one man creates a genuine PC gaming phenomena--so it should make for a good show.

The filmmakers are trying to raise funds to finish Minecraft: The Story of Mojang, and they've created a Kickstarter page to get the ball rolling.

Here's how they describe it:

For the first time, viewers will be given an in-depth look at both the triumphs and the challenges faced by a studio during their first year in existence. We will analyze the unprecedented success of Minecraft, gain insight into its impact from journalists and industry professionals, and meet the fans whose lives have been changed by the game.

The video embed was cluttering up my site with a lot of autorunning ads, so just click on the widget or link to see the full excerpt.

Watson's Amazing Victory

Ken Jennings has written a wonderful piece for Slate about his experience playing against (and losing to) IBM's Jeopardy-playing supercomputer Watson.

But there's no shame in losing to silicon, I thought to myself as I greeted the (suddenly friendlier) team of IBM engineers after the match. After all, I don't have 2,880 processor cores and 15 terabytes of reference works at my disposal—nor can I buzz in with perfect timing whenever I know an answer. My puny human brain, just a few bucks worth of water, salts, and proteins, hung in there just fine against a jillion-dollar supercomputer.

I remember writing about Deep Blue and what its victory against Chess Grand Master Garry Kasparov meant for AI, and Watson is exponentially more impressive than Deep Blue. Kasparov wouldn't last five minutes against Ken Jennings. The skill set and programming necessary to master Jeopardy is far more subtle and complex and that required to master Chess, at least from a pure computer AI perspective.

The Singularity is Not Near
Impressive as it is, I still balk at the notion that this is the first step towards The Singularity, for the simple reason that I believe The Singularity is the greatest farrago of nonsense since the Population Bomb. Time Magazine recently ran a long, hilarious piece on The Singularity. I laughed all the way until the end, and then I realized that it wasn't satire, thus reminding me yet again that Time isn't so much a news magazine as it is a source of absurd trend-chasing and juvenile credulity wrapped in a squishy coating of bias.

Let me state this as clearly as possible: The Singularity--the moment at which computers essentially become sentient--is the greatest load of BS to come down the pike in many generations. That intelligent people believe it's All Really True! doesn't make it so. Aristotle, the most intelligent man of his age or almost any other, was certain that the blood cooled the brain and the liver was the true seat of human life. At one point, all the brightest minds in the world were utterly convinced in the truth of geocentricism. In our own day, powerful interests continue to flog the big lie of anthropogenic global warming. 

So, I don't care one bit that some of "the best and brightest" have signed on to Ray Kurzweil's loony idea that one day (in the next 40 years!) we will reverse engineer the human brain, dump our entire consciousness into a computer, and live forever. It is more likely that I could swallow my own torso than it is for a machine to replicate the human brain. I am not saying "maybe," or "perhaps eventually," or "given the right scientific developments": I am saying never, ever, ever: not in 40 years, not in a 1000.

This is all just part of the progressive's favorite delusion: that of the continued upward development of humanity, hand in hand with glorious technical achievement. This is utilitarian nonsense. First off, it's a failure to understand the practical reality of Moore's Law. The number of transistors on an integrated circuit may in fact keep doubling every two years until infinity (although I highly doubt it, and there is already some evidence that this will eventually peak and then decline), but that does not correlate to a matched increase in processing speeds. 

Second, it ignores the immense complexity of the human brain, and just how much of its function remains poorly understood if not downright inexplicable. Even the common process of medicating for mental illness remains a matter of trial and error because we simply don't know how the brain does much of what it does. The notion that the myriad complexities of the human psyche can be wholly reproduced if we just have enough processing power is madness.

Finally, there is the part many scientists leave out due to their own personal bias. I hate to break it to the atheists out there, but the human soul exists. We are not merely clever meat. We are simultaneously physical and metaphysical beings. The notion that we are the product of random chance, originating from nothing and returning to nothing, isn't even good nonsense. Ex nihilo nihil fit. The rational soul is transcendent, and will forever remain a mystery beyond the ability of science to grasp.

The Simulated Brain

Without question, we will see continued progress in artificial intelligence. Watson impresses not because of its 15 terabyte store of knowledge, but because of its ability to parse the English language, including puns, word play, allusions, and other very human subtleties of speech. Its knowledge set did not impress me: that's simply raw processing muscle. It's language ability, however, is frankly amazing. 

Yet with all that, IBM couldn't create a truly human voice. Watson won Jeopardy, but he still would have failed the Turing test. No one listening to its answers would be in doubt that they were hearing a computer. Watson is the Deep Blue of this generation, and as such is a fascinating and important milestone in the development of artificial intelligence. Where it will lead, I have no idea. Deep Blue was dismembered and mothballed, with a chunk of it ultimately winding up in the Smithsonian. 

And it's important--vitally important--to remember one thing. Watson did not create itself. It was created by a team of brilliant and dedicated people, pouring human knowledge into its brain and teaching it to think and learn in human ways. A machine can only be a simulation of the human brain, and no machine will ever be anything more than that. It will forever remain a mere shadow of the real thing.

GAMES Magazine: April 2011

The latest issue of GAMES should be in the mail and on the shelves by now. For this one, I did a feature on the card game Ecarte, and its unusual ubiquity among 19th century writers from Poe to Doyle. There's a good sized review section this issue (both conventional and electronic), as well as the usual collection of games and pencil puzzles.

The cover is a twist--literally--on our regular Eyeball Benders puzzles. Can you tell what these items are?

Buy it wherever better magazines are sold.

The Toy Fair Recap Part III: Killer Bunnies, Flying Dummies, and The Thrilling Conclusion!

Toy Fair is an annual trade show in which the toy and game industry shows their latest wares, usually in mid-February. I liveblogged my day on Monday, and now I'm writing about everything I saw in a little more detail. The first part of the report can be found here and the second part can be found here.


Blue Orange

Blue Orange was a new company to me, but I liked what they had to say and show. Their goal is to bring quality European-style games to America without the usual high Eurogame prices.

A number of these games use round cards inside little tins. They’re compact, inexpensive, play fast, and make for good ice-breakers and party games.

Tell Tale is a storytelling game that uses illustrated cards to help people improvise stories. In Spot It!, each card has a constellation of images of varying sizes. Every card has one image that matches an image on another card. You have to be the first to find the match. Trigger! offers factoids with “true” or “false” answers. You slam down your left hand to vote false, and your right to vote true. The goal is to answer first and answer correctly. The mechanics are nothing special, but the facts, such as “Groundhogs have teeth” or “Cows drink milk” make it a fun.

Dragon Face has been in development and testing for a while and the results look good. It’s an abstract strategy game played on cloth mat with double-sided checkers. The goal is to capture the enemy’s emperor checker by blocking it in. It plays a bit like checkers and a little like chess, except that when you jump an enemy, you flip it over and the enemy piece is now yours. There are a few other nuances, but it appears to have all the makings of a really nice entry in the abstract strategy genre.

Wonder Forge

I’d never heard of Wonder Forge before, perhaps because a) they used to be I Can Do That! Games and b) they traditionally produce a lot of kid games that I just don’t cover.

However, they caught my interest with a traffic-stopping Busterpult for their Mythbusters game (it's always fun to fling a rubber crash test dummy at a target), and then really impressed me with an item called Konexi. 

Konexi

The Mythbusters game looks fine: a bit of fact-or-fiction guessing, a bit of Buster-flinging, and about what you’d want in a licensed game. May it make them giant piles of Mythbuster money.

Konexi, however, was closer to a piece of playable art. The game is comprised of 26 thick, handsomely-sculpted plastic letters. These letters have grooves and tongues so that, when stacked, they hold together, although you needed to be careful during placement. The goal is to stack letters, make new words, score points for the words, and keep the tower from falling.

It’s a great game to just leave out on the coffee table, since it’s aesthetically pleasing, clever, and nicely designed. The gameplay element is simple, but it just looks and feels good.  

ThinkFun

ThinkFun always has something interesting to show, and thus year was no exception. The two that caught my eye were Tilt and Pathwords

Tilt is a logic maze with an interesting implementation. You follow directions on a puzzle card and set the board with obstacles and sliders. The sliders are little circular tiles that travel along grooves in a tilting board. The goal is to get the green sliders through a hole in the center of the board by tilting the board in any of the four cardinal directions. The maze element is familiar from dozens on logic mazes, but the implantation is clever and has a nice design to it.

Pathwords is a logic-word game hybrid with a neat mechanic. Each puzzle has a matrix of letters that lays under a clear plastic grid, and requires a selection of translucent, colored tiles akin to Tetris blocks. These tiles come in various configurations (L-shaped, U-shaped, etc...). Each tile has to be placed over the letters in such a way that it forms a valid word, and all of the tiles must fit together without any blanks or invalid words. It's part word search, part puzzle.

GameWright

The GameWright booth had the most important thing I needed at 3:30 in the afternoon: water. (Thanks Emily. What, you thought I was going to say good games?) When the vendors are charging $4 a bottle for water, anyplace you can score some of that wet gold is welcome.

Oh, yeah, their games were good too. Then again, we always like GameWright stuff.

First up was Gubs, with designers Cole and Alex Medeiros on hand to show it off. This is a fresh, mass market version of a game you can check out at gubcards.com. The idea is to collect little critters called gubs, using special cards to get more gubs or take away those of your opponents. I didn’t get a really good sense of how this one played out, but the art is very nice and it looks appealing. 

Mermaid Beach is going to be popular with tween and pretweens, thanks partly to its theme and partly to its colorful art. It mixes a bit of Sleeping Queens and a bit of Go Fish together to form a quick pairing and collecting game. You gather pairs of cards (taking necessary ones from another player if needed) and then "spend" these pairs to buy shell cards of varying values. Quick, cute, and family-friendly. 

Finally, City Square Off has a bit of that ole Tetris/Blokus feel. Each players has a tray with a building in the center, a pile of different Tetris-like shapes, and a deck of cards. The cards tell you which shape to place, and the goal is to fill as much of your tray as possible.

Playroom

Playroom does a lot of nice games aimed at the younger kids. The packaging and style on a number of their games is a lot like GameWright (or vice versa), so you have small, quick, fun card games like Sherlock, Saddle Up, and Monkey Memory. I had a great chat with a man whose name I don’t recall (it was a really long day, and I lost his card), and he showed me one of their games called Trading Faces. I’m going to cover this on its own, but it's about "collecting" and reproducing facial expressions, and looks like a great way to help kids with high-functioning autism and aspergers recognize facial expressions.

Playroom’s biggest line is Killer Bunnies, which I had never played because it seemed a bit too Munchkiny. It’s a huge success, however, and they’re expanding the series in interesting ways. Killer Bunnies and the Ultimate Odyssey seems to be a deeper game with more deck-building and strategy: kind of like Dominion with green rabbits. I’ll try to get hold of some cards and write it up at some point.

They’re also releasing some children’s games that use thick boards and magnets to create a new twist on memory games. The Magic Labyrinth, for instance, lets you set up a custom maze use little tiles placed upright inside a plastic frame. The gameboard fits over this, hiding the maze. Player pawns have magnetic bases, which allow them to hold a marble placed underneath the game surface. As the pieces move across the board, they must follow the correct path or the little upright tiles dislodge the steel balls, which rolls back to the start of the maze like a pool ball. It’s a little hard to visualize in words, but it works quite nicely.

The Magic Labyrinth uses a hidden maze under the board.

The End

I hadn't been to Toy Fair in a few years, so it was good to get back, walk the floor, talk to people, and soak in the weirdness. It's always strange to see a few acres of floor space occupied by every manner and permutation of toy, doll, game, and geegaw, with nary a child in sight. (You have to be 18 or older to attend. "Child correspondents" are explicitly banned.) This is a trade show, which means professionals who take their work seriously are either trying to put their best foot forward, or looking for interesting things to stock in their stores or write about for their publications. 

And it's not just the big guys who come to Toy Fair. I saw both of my local comic book/toy store proprietors walking the floor looking for new stock. I also saw a surprising amount of Amish people--at least half a dozen--there to look for items to stock in their own stores back in Lancaster County. 

Sure, a lot of the space is devoted to people hawking stuff you don't need and planning to find new ways to separate parents from their money. In a tough economy, toys and games need to do even more to stand out among the hoard. There's certainly a lot of junk no one needs, but there are also a lot of clever, interesting items. I focussed on the games, and found quite a lot of interesting items. There wasn't much that broke the mold or screamed "next big thing." There was no Dominion or SmallWorld on display. But there were a lot of good items that will be worth seeking out in the year to come.

Also: there was a giant mouse.

The Toy Fair Recap Part II: Lego! Mayfair! More!

Toy Fair is an annual trade show in which the toy and game industry shows their latest wares, usually in mid-February. I liveblogged my day on Monday, and now I'm writing about everything I saw in a little more detail. The first part of the report can be found here.  

After Hasbro, I cabbed it over to Javits, had a painless check-in, dropped off my coat, and started heading for the show floor. That’s when I noticed that Activision was doing a bit of a demo in a little conference room off in a corner. Thus, I began my day by looking at …

Wappy Dog
Okay, so it wasn’t the most thrilling way to begin Toy Fair, but it’s a cute product that is expected to have a reasonable price point. Wappy Dog is a little robot dog (like the old Tekno toy) that works in tandem with a Nintendo DS game. The package comes with a DS cart and the dog itself. The game is a standard Nintendogs clone, but the twist comes from its ability to interact, wirelessly, with the robot dog. The dog barks, sings, changes color, makes noises, dances, and so on. You can pet it, train it, play with it, and get reactions from it.

Look, I have a daughter, so I’m around a lot of little girls. This kind of stuff is like catnip for them. If it works (the version I saw was prototype) and the price stays reasonable, it could definitely find its market. 

Lego
Although I didn’t make an appointment, I did manage to slip behind the velvet ropes of the Lego showroom and get a tour of their game line. It turns out that last year, Lego nabbed almost 13% of the children’s game market with their new Lego board game line. The first series of games not only had several Reiner Knizia designs, but Knizia had input into the direction of the line.

Lego games will continue in a couple of interesting ways. The new flagship title, following on from Lego Creationary, is Lego Champion, which offers a combination of building challenges and racing.

The new Lego Ninjago line (a popular item with my son) is getting a board game this August, and there’s also a pirate-themed game called Pirate Plank due in March.

More interesting is the Heroica line, which is an entirely new Lego line created exclusively for boardgames. The initial releases will be four build-and-play adventures—Draida Bay, Waldurk Forest, Caverns of Nathuz, and Castle Fortaan—which can be linked together to form an even larger game. All four are due in August, but the art I have is tagged “preliminary” and is thus embargoed. I could probably describe it to you, but I’m afraid Ninjago agents would appear from the shadows and cut me to ribbons with their little Lego weapons.

Oh, and Lego now has the Pirates of the Caribbean license, which explains this stupid photo of Yr Humble Correspondent. 

Man-sized minifig heads:
Gruesome trophies from a tribe of Lego headhunters 

Queen Games

I’ve been trying to score a review copy of Fresco for ages with no luck. Now I understand why: Queen Games is based on in Germany and has no real US PR presence. Plus, their products are big, heavy, and beautifully produced. They had a wide range of items on display—Samarkand, Kairo, Lancaster, Show Manger—but Fresco and its expansions was clearly the highlight.

In Fresco, you manage your Renaissance art studio, buy and mix paints, and slowly restore a fresco for the bishop. The pieces, board, art, and mechanics all look wonderful. I’m going to have to buy this one, so please start shopping through my Amazon store so I can afford it.

Days of Wonder
My first scheduled meeting of the day was with Days of Wonder’s Mark Kaufmann. DOW didn’t have a booth and they were only showing Cargo Noir, which I’d already covered. So we just talked a bit about the games business and some of the interesting reactions Days of Wonder games generate among hardcore gamers. It was nice to sit down and talk with someone who wasn’t trying to flog his new game--Scowling Men With Beards Trading Little Wooden Blocks--as the greatest thing since penicillin. Thanks for the break, Mark.


Mayfair
And then it was on to Mayfair, who are also very matter-of-fact about their product and their audience. When you have the first Eurogame to be sold in a big-box store like Target, you really don’t need to worry about what the hardcore crowd on BoardGameGeek think.

Mayfair's Bob Carty ran me through the brand-spanking-new, straight-from-the-printers copy of Martin Wallace’s new game, Automobile. This one looks good, but it’s a heavy numbers game, with the entire board dominated by research, auction, sales, and production tracks. It lacks the map element that gives Wallace’s train games their life. I think this one will find its audience, but it probably won’t break as a big as Steam (my favorite among Wallace’s train games).

On the other hand, Bob got me all worked up when he mentioned the third part of the Mayfair/Wallace transportation trilogy. The next game will be about air travel, and will return to a map-based design as people fight for dominance of various air hubs.

In some other Mayfair news of interest:

• They’re publishing a new edition of 1830 with a nice-looking board, original rules, and new variants. It’s a slick-looking bit of work for the hardcore 18xxers. 
• Steam is getting a map expansion with three new tracks: Mid-Atlantic US on one side, and Belgium & Luxembourg and Brussels Metro on the other. 
• Rivals for Catan is also getting an expansion, with new lands, resources, and adversaries. 
• I’m not at all sure what to make of First Bull Run: A Test of Fire, a fast-playing Civil War game from … Martin Walace. It’s listed as ages 10 & up with a 30 to 60 minute play time, which sounds a lot like Battle Cry. I’m really curious to see what they do with this one. 
• The final one that caught my eye was Five Points: Bloody Politics in Old New York. Since everyone else is going to be calling this “Gangs of New York: The Boardgame,” I might as well get the ball rolling. Players control factions vying for influence in upcoming elections, using agitators to tip the scales in their favor. It plays in under an hour, so it’s obviously a lighter game. 

I also got my best swag of the trip from Mayfair. I whispered in the ear of a friendly Mayfair lass that my daughter was the biggest Catan fan in the world, and she returned with a bag filled with these:

My daughter always tells me I’m the “best daddy in the world,” but last night she really meant it.

Final part of the Toy Fair recap coming later today.

Best Toy Fair Swag Evah!

Yes, they're stuffed anthropomorphic Settlers of Catan goods, courtesy of Mayfair Games.

I found them a happy home with the biggest Catan fan on the block. (Well, at least until she trades them for some road.)

The Toy Fair Recap Part I: Introduction and A Visit to Hasbro

Yesterday was one long day.

You have to understand something: I don't really leave the house that much. I drive the kids around, teach about once a week, volunteer, and go to church, but that's about it. I've been working on my agoraphobia skill set for several years now, and it's coming along swimmingly.

Also, you should realize that I live in South Jersey. Down here, we consider ourselves a different state than New Jersey, and I'm hoping to spend my declining years fighting for full secession. I'm far enough south that it takes 2 to 3 hours, door to door, to haul my sorry, arthritic, anti-social corpse into mid-town Manhattan. This was easier when I was young and went to school in New York. I'm not young any more.

So, I only planned for one day on site at Toy Fair, which means I had to cram the maximum amount of appointage into about 8 hours of time at the amazingly awful Javits Center. (I've been told that the place is a firetrap with poor safety protocols: the Titanic of conventions centers.)

I'm going to run through my day (leaving out things like tooth-brushing, bathroom breaks, and $4 hot dogs) and pick out some of the highlights. At some later point, I'll post a bit more on individual games that struck me as notable.

First off, I decided the liveblog the entire day. We have a nice new Verizon iPhone, so I used it to take pictures, and then wrote and posted using BlogPress. The whole things was an experiment, but I'm kind of pleased with the way it turned out. I'm not thrilled with the picture quality, but the snapshots add a bit to that "you are there" feel. At least, that's what I tell myself.

So, onto my day:

Hasbro
Hasbro's offsite, permanent showroom is always the first stop, since it's on the way from Penn Station to the convention center. The charming Laura Trani showed me the line, skipping the toys and going right to the games. She mercifully whisked me by the branded products (SpongeBob Ants in the Pants? I only wish I was making that up.) and straight to the new card games: Ratuki and The Game of Life: Adventures.  Ratuki seems like a fast-playing variant of Spit, while Life: Adventures continues the trend of making board games into card games.

Scrabble Flash is a huge hit for Hasbro (it's even up for a game of the year award at Toy Fair), so they're expanding the line with Yahtzee Flash and Simon Flash. As far as I'm concerned, you can keep anything with the name "Simon" on it, but the Yahtzee Flash looked better than you might expect. Both versions were in prototype, so it's still too early to say much more.

Hasbro is experimenting with a new line they're calling "Live," which blends electronics and board games. I may like chocolate in my peanut butter, but I hate electronics in my board games. However, both the Battleship and Monopoly "Live" games seem to do something worthwhile with the technology. The center of the board is a tower (I'm assuming it's fitted with infrared sensors) that "reads" board states and inputs. This allows not only for more interaction on the board, but also for more dynamic game environments, such as storms that change the positions of ships in Battleship or random money events (auctions, races, etc) in Monopoly. Gimmicky,  but interesting.

I already described Scrabble Alphabet Scoop, but there's also Connect 4 Launchers, a new Clue Harry Potter, and Cranium Brain Breaks. Connect 4 Launchers is kind of like Connect 4 meets Ants in the Paints: flick the little discs into a double-level game grid and try to make four in a row. I actually kind of enjoyed it. The first Clue Harry Potter game was one of the better Clue variants, and the new version looks pretty nice as well. Cranium Brain Breaks is a set of cards describing a couple hundred mini-games that can be played in about 60 seconds. It has familiar Cranium challenges like acting, drawing, scultping, guessing, and so on. A nice little party/filler-game.
 But Laura saved the best item for last: Ji Ga Zo. This jigsaw puzzle from Japan allows you to create a mosaic puzzle out of any picture. The box comes with three hundred shaded, gray scale puzzle pieces. You import a photo (high-contrast facial portraits work best) into the Ji Ga Zo software, and the software outputs a coded puzzle matrix. Each puzzle piece has a symbol on the back, and by assembling the symbols to match the printed guidelines, you create a mosaic-style custom puzzle. The pieces can be used repeatedly. I haven't tried it yet, and I assume that not all pictures will work well with it, but the results on display were amazing.

And that wraps up Hasbro's offerings for 2011. Tune in later for more from this year's Toy Fair expo.

GameWright Keeps the Fun Coming

Live From Toy Fair. GameWright is a favorite around Casa McD, and they have a few new items this year that look good.

Mermaid Beach seems like a fresh riff on Sleeping Queens (one of GameWright's best titles): you "spend" pairs of cards to buy shell cards of varying values. There's also a Go Fish element as you try to take cards from other players.

City Square Off has a bit of that ole Tetris/Blokus feel. Each players has a tray with a building in the center, a pile of different Tetris-like shapes, and a deck of cards. The cards tell you which shape to place, and the goal is to fill as much of your tray as possible.

I also looked at a game called Gubs, which has beautiful art and some interesting mechanics. I just didn't get a good feel for how it all played out.

(This post didn't actually transmit from Toy Fair. It got stuck in the mobile blogging software, and I just found it.)

Konexi: A Tower of Letters

Live From Toy Fair. Wonder Forge has a very cool word game that combines words with Jenga. In Konexi, you build towers of letters, scoring points for complete words. Very nicely done.





They're also producing a Mythbusters game that includes a Buster catapult.





They had a cute scale-model of a Busterpult:

Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Automobile Debuts

Live From Toy Fair. Martin Wallace's new game, Automobile, makes its debut from Mayfair.

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Living Game Board for iPad

Live From Toy Fair. The Living Game Board combines an iPad dock with a touch sensitive gameboard to create a unique experience. Sure it's a gimmick, but it looks like a neat one.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone