Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2007 - February 12, 2007 (Day Two)

By W. Eric Martin
February 14, 2006

For day two at the New York Toy Fair, I decided to canvas the upper level from one end to the other, examining interesting games whenever one happened to stand out from all the dolls, plush and kites—and keeping my eye out for goofiness when my GameDar was silent. Let’s start with the silly stuff first…

Provoking a chorus of “I saw something like this on YouTube” from onlookers was the Geyser Tube, which is a plastic tube packaged with a roll of Mentos. You screw the tube onto a two-liter bottle of soda (Diet Coke, for best results), load in the Mentos, then stand back, pull the release string, and watch soda shoot up 15 feet. I’m not sure about the replay value on this one.

The Marshmallow Fun Company sells air-powered guns and bows that fire marshmallows so that you can kill your enemies with complications brought on by diabetes.

The number of educational products on display is ridiculous, outshone in uselessness only by the marketing spiel that company reps spew when talking about their junk: “makes kids smarter,” “toys that develop character,” “a little genius in the making,” and so on. After all, under the right lens, every item becomes an educational product. I’d much rather see some counter-marketing take place, perhaps with a game that proudly carries the tag line: “Makes kids dumber!”

We’ll ease our way into games now, starting with companies that don’t normally receive coverage on BGN (for good reason, mind you):

• Mattel offered nothing in the strategy games department to join Voltage and Deset Bazaar.
• Fundex can safely be categorized as a wasteland.
• University Games threw me out. Do I need an appointment to come inside your giant walled-in display area, I asked? No, the rep replied, but you have to go downstairs first and talk with Mr. So-and-So. Whatever, I said.
• Hugg-a-Planet featured the “chess game of the 21st century,” which is apparently shorthand for a round chess board, six-player capacity, and rainbow-colored pieces.
• Kheper Games sells a line of drinking games and adult party games, including Who Is The Biggest Pervert? (Answer: Dale Yu. Next game!)
• Unknown Games gifted the world with P.U! The Guessing Game of Smells, a roll-and-move, scratch-and-sniff game with odors ranging from laundry and roses to skunk, garlic, and dog poop.
• Jewish Educational Toys featured Hebrew Sudoku so that those of the faith can also enjoy the world’s most overpromoted logic game.
• My Throne is a potty-training game for infants. Your reward if you win? You get to play it again tomorrow!

Now let’s leave behind those companies and delve into the realm of strategy games, ‘kay?

Family Games, Inc.
Quebec-based Family Games distributes the Gigamic line of games in North America, and the company will be bringing out Gigamic’s five Nuremberg 2007 releases—Inside, Katamino, Marrakech, Tortuga, and Winomino—this summer.


Be Good Company
The Be Good Company produces, among other items, a line of kid products that resemble miniature sand boxes, but president Vince Kurr is also a fan of the old 3M series and has brought a few of those titles back into print in a series titled Bookshelf Games. (Sound familiar?) The first three titles in the Bookshelf Games series are chess, dominoes and poker, but numbers four and five are Facts in Five and Executive Decision.

The Bookshelf Games series is nicely produced, with a magnetized side flap holding the cover in place, and University Games distributes the series. The next title in the series will be Challenge Bridge, and Kurr says that he has a couple of other 3M titles in the works for 2008. (To answer everyone’s first question, Jati is not one of those titles.)

ThinkFun
ThinkFun, once known as Binary Arts, continues to produce fabulous solitaire puzzles year in and year out. Solitaire puzzles aren’t games, but you folks are smart cookies who are likely looking for something more advanced than My Throne, so here’s an overview of Thinkfun’s new releases.

Treasure Chest works similarly to Rush Hour in that you have an explorer who moves through a rectangular grid, going around immovable obstacles, to stand adjacent to a treasure, then push it out of a slot on the side of the grid. (Apparently the explorer lacks sufficient upper body strength to pick up the treasure.) As the puzzles get more complicated, you add in more obstacles and even a second treasure.

Pete’s Pike is a rethemed Lunar Lockout. You have a central character, Pete, who needs to reach the center of a 5x5 board, but the ground is slippery, so once he starts to move, he’ll keep moving until he hits an obstacle or slides off the board. Your job is to move Pete and the obstacles in such a way that his movement will be halted on the center square. I’ve hosted teenage foreign exchange students in previous years, and several of them could not stop playing with this engaging little puzzle.

Hot Spot is a jumping peg game in which you have to move a character to a certain position. The character can jump over one or two obstacles at a time, but you often have to jump the obstacles into the right positions first before you can reach the goal.

Cover Your Tracks gives the player four asymmetric plastic pieces and a square playing surface. You place a puzzle card on the surface which shows a line of tracks through sand, mud, or snow, then you must cover those tracks by placing all four pieces onto the playing surface. Covering the tracks—not so hard; placing everything else, though, is more challenging.

Winning Moves Games
Winning Moves mostly featured mainstream items along the lines of SuperScrabble and Power Yahtzee, but it also has a new solitaire logic puzzle using the Clue brand. The item, Clue Suspects, comes with a plastic house with six rooms, three rooms per floor. Each room has two pegs that each can hold a plastic piece representing one of the Clue characters. To start one of the 60 logic puzzles included in the game, you place the dead body figure in the room specified by the puzzle card. You then use the puzzle clues to determine where the other figures must be placed, nailing down which person is in the same room as Mr. Boddy and therefore guilty of his murder.

Out of the Box
Out of the Box had four new items on display, two of which have graced Gone Cardboard for months and two new items.

Cineplexity is a movie trivia game that steps outside of the typical trivia format. The game comes with a deck of oversized cards that list one of seven categories (Actors, Critiques, Characters, Production, Setting, Theme, and Props) as well as a specific example of that category. Cards might say “Supernatural,” for example, or “Fully Animated” or “Released During the 1940s.” You turn over two of the cards and the first player to name a movie that matches both of the cards—such as Spirited Away for Supernatural and Fully Animated—wins the first card on the table. The other card remains, a new card is revealed, and players now name a movie that matches these two cards. If everyone is stumped, then you reveal a third card and players name a movie that matches any two of the cards.

The other known game from OotB is 10 Days in Asia, which is likely to be a Summer 2007 release. Out of the Box is using a tri-fold board (think TransAmerica) for 10 Days in Asia and while likely switch over to this board size for 10 Days in the USA whenever it reprints that title. In addition to country cards, planes and ships, 10 Days in Asia introduces train cards to your list of travel possibilities. The map of Asia includes train lines that run from, say, Russia to Laos, passing through Mongolia, China and Vietnam on the way with a separate leg for North Korea. A train card connects any two countries on this train line, even adjacent ones. Trains in a Moon game—whodathunk?

Qwix is a simple word game in the Boggle family. The game includes six dice: three white which have common letters, 2 light blue with less common letters, and 1 dark blue with Xs, Zs, Œs, ∑s, and so on. On a turn, a player chooses to roll any three dice, then players create word lists that use the three letters that were rolled. They mark out words in common and score for the other ones.

Party Pooper is, as you might expect, a party game, but it’s miles apart from My Throne. The game includes a deck of category cards—say, cavorting with wild goats at midnight under a full moon— and the active player decides whether to choose a Party Animal (the person most likely to fit this category) or Party Pooper (the person who’s least likely). Identity cards are included in the game, so the active player will have a card for each person and secretly choose one of these people (even him- or herself). On the count of three, everyone points to the person they think the active player chose; if a guesser is correct, he wins a point and the active player wins a point. Wash and repeat. Qwix and Party Pooper will both be released in the summer of 2007.

Playroom Entertainment
The more I saw from Playroom Entertainment, the more I realized that Steve Kurzban (aka K-ban) offered an excellent idea for Boardgame News. K-ban’s suggestion? “Hey, I Already Own That Game!"—a comprehensive list of German games that have been republished with English titles. The rethemings and straight-up rereleases, all carrying a Q2 2007 release date, are:

• Bull in a China Shop—Michael Schacht’s Essen 2006 release Der Elefant im Porzellanladen
• Cowabunga—Reinhard Staupe’s Fettnapf...in Sicht, with a much more enveloping theme of surfers on waves that rise and fall
• In Limbo—Schacht’s Diabolo
• Limits—the similarly titled 2001 Amigo release by Uwe Rosenberg
• Hop to It!—the Nuremberg 2007 Amigo title Hoppla Hopp from Reinhard Staupe
• M is for Mouse—A bis Z, another Reinhard Staupe/Amigo release

As for the new titles coming from Playroom, we’ll start with Mother Sheep, which has been on Gone Cardboard since the previous Toy Fair, I believe, and now due for a Q2 release. In Mother Sheep, by Jeb Havens, 2-6 players have to fence in five of ten roaming sheep to win the game, and each player’s list of sheep to be shoehorned into a pen is secret. To start the game, the ten sheep—which aren’t quite as adorable as the Shear Panic sheeples—are placed randomly around the Mother Sheep. Players are then dealt their target sheep card and alternate taking turns, which consists of laying one tri-colored wooden fence on the field. (Players each have three secret fences and can also choose from three face-up fences.) One end of the fence must lie on the Mother Sheep card or a fence of identical color, while the other end can be free or on a matching colored fence; intersections can consist of only two fences, so you can’t pile logs to the ceiling. Once a sheep is enclosed, it’s removed from the field and placed on a corral tile. Whoever nabs his or her five sheep first wins.

Unspeakable Words, another Gone Cardboard oldie and Q2 release, is a word game by James Ernest and Mike Selinker with a Cthulhu theme. Each player has a hand of 7 cards, and each card has a letter, a point value, and a nursery book phrase. ("V is for Vulthoom.") On a turn, a player spells words with cards from his hand, then rolls a sanity check on a D20. If he rolls higher than the point value of his word, he scores that many points; if he fails, he doesn’t score and he loses a bit of his sanity, which is tracked by the gosh-darned cutest Cthulhu tokens I’ve ever seen. (Seriously, the big lug looks like a cuddly green gooey marshmallow. When I tried to take a picture, though, my mind broke.) When a player runs out of sanity, he’s out of the game. The first player to pass a predetermined point threshhold wins.

One optional rule that the Playroom employees like to use is that a player hanging on to only a single point of sanity can create gibberish words and still score. The guy’s already going cuckoo, after all, so there’s no reason to penalize his lingual deficiencies…

Little Italy is a new Reiner Knizia title for 2-6 players, ages 10 and up, that’s playable in 30 minutes. Playroom had nothing more than a mock-up box on hand, so let’s go to the catalog for a bit of info on the game: “Travel back to New York’s golden age of gangsters, where you get to take on the role of a crime boss in 1950s Little Italy. Make your rounds about town as you pick up money from different buildings, but watch out for the ‘heat’! Each crime boss shares control of two cars, each with a different opponent. Drive through the streets, timing it right to collect money and avoid the police. Play strategically, and you’ll be able to drive your opponents straight into a stakeout, costing them big money while you collect the big score. If you don’t, you’ll find yourself sleeping with the fishes!” Little Italy has a Q3 2007 release date.

(Herr Knizia was actually in the Playroom booth while I was asking about the game, but he was clearly involved with other matters. The Playroom rep said that despite the text, players will not sleep with fishes. Going insane in Playroom titles is okay, but killing is right out.)

Temple of the Monkey, by Aaron Watson, is the first in a series of Pathfinder games from Playroom. In this game, 2-4 players shuffle a deck of path cards, then deal out an individual path of cards that they need to traverse to reach the temple in the center of the playing area and win the game. Players also receive a random assortment of equipment and tactics cards. To enter certain path cards, you need specific equipment (as in Goldland), but you discard the equipment after using it, so you need to manage your hand for future obstacles. Tactics cards let you mess with opponents, draw more cards, alter your path, and so on. Future Pathfinder releases will follow a similar play format of a central target area and individual player paths. Temple of the Monkey plays in 45 minutes and will be released in Q3.

Reality Check is Playroom’s take on the reality television craze, courtesy of Maureen Hiron, Ron Badkin and Caron Badkin. Players try to lay down sets of Who, What and Where cards to create high-scoring shows, such as Rock Stars (Who) Diving for Buried Treasure (What) at the Circus (Where). Lots of “take that” action is involved for 2-6 players. Reality Check is another Q3 release.

The Killer Bunnies reach their final frontier with the Ominous Onyx Booster Deck, which contains 110 large cards, 12 small Mysterious Place cards, 9 chips, and a ball.

Or do they? Playroom says that a new Killer Bunnies system is in the works, incorporating gameboards into the playing area and taking the rabbits into space. This system won’t launch until 2008, so expect more news on this release at next Toy Fair.

Front Porch Classics
Front Porch had only one new title, the World War II air game Sortie. Sortie is for 2-6 players, and the playing area on the hexagonal gameboard is different depending on the number of players. On a turn, players simultaneously lay a face-down cards which represents either a turning maneuver, an advance, or a special event. The cards are revealed simultaneously, resolved in a certain order, then the hands refilled for another round. Players are eliminated one by one until there’s a single flyer left in the sky.


Rex Games
For 25 years, Rex Games has been selling Tangoes and Tangoes meat by-products. While that level of success with its branded tangrams puzzle package is worth celebrating with a specially iced cupcake or two, BGN readers want to hear about games, so here’s a short description of Idol Quest, the company’s first board game.

Two to four players have three explorers each, and they’re trying to be the first to grab the idol from a tower in the center of the board and take the idol to their home. To do this, they play cards from their hand to add blocks to the board, move blocks already on the board, push opponents into the lake to send them back to start, and other such activities. After playing three cards, a player rolls the die and moves one of his explorers a number of spaces equal to the die roll. Idol Quest looks like a family-friendly version of Strata 5 in the way that blocks are stacked to create steps up to the idol’s perch, but the game has family-unfriendly elements in its “take that” cards, idol theft, and explorer trapping. Idol Quest was released at the end of 2006.

Gamewright
Gamewright has a few new titles to add to the “Hey, I Already Own That Game!” list, as I reported on February 2 in an item called New Titles from Gamewright for the Discerning Gamer. Ka-Ching! is an English version of Combit, a perfect information two-player game in which players try to buy stock cards and get the best return for their purchases. The game plays quickly, and the money-making theme is a huge improvement on Winning Moves’ color-and-number theme.

Aunt Millie’s Millions, another of Gamewright’s new releases, is a party game in which players try to snag the most loot from Aunt Millie’s estate. Three to six players take on the role of a character and must introduce themselves at the start of the game, summing up their relationship to Aunt Millie in a sentence or two. Players shuffle and evenly divide the possession deck. On a turn, each player turns over a possession card, then players use their character to claim a possession, with no more than two characters on a possession. If a card isn’t claimed, it’s removed from the game; if one player claims it, he now owns it; if two players claim an item, then a judge is chosen and each player has 30 seconds to explain why they should have the item. The judge can ask one follow-up question of each player, then he awards the item to one of the players. This process is repeated until one player has possessions in all five colors. Whoever has the most valuable loot wins the game.

Atakama-Games
Look around the Javits Center, and you’ll see lots of hopeful designers, such as the Chilean designers from Atakama-Games, who have traveled to New York to try to license their games. CrossAx is a perfect information game for (generally) two players. On a 14x14 grid, players first agree on where to place obstacles that block off parts of the playing area. After choosing a start player, they take turns placing six different symbol tokens in a row on the board; after placing a row of tokens—which must intersect of llie adjacent to tokens already on the board—the active player claims any spaces which can no longer hold symbol tokens, whether due to fewer than six spaces being available or to the restriction that identical tokens can’t be placed in the same set. The game continues until no more symbol sets can be placed, and the player who has claimed the most territory wins.

If you’re a Fresh Fish fan who gets hot and bothered by thoughts of expropriation, then this game is for you. Track them down in Chile, and place an order!

That’s mostly it for day two, although I’ll present a few odds and ends in the coverage of day three, which was my final day at the Fair.

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	“What a ripoff! I paid for four dimensions and all I can play with are these lousy three-dimensional bugs...”
	Soda cannon
	Now I know what to contribute to the Gathering prize table...
	The Gigamic guys show off Marrakech to Family Games
	A product shot of Sortie from Front Porch Classics; the airplanes are metal and have a nice heft to them
	Rex Games’ Idol Quest, which sounds like a contradiction of terms
	Fans of Fresh Fish can practice their expropriation skills in CrossAx

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Ah!  I’m looking forward to finally getting a copy of Cineplexity!  Also, the new edition of Facts in Five sounds intriguing - do you know if the categories have been updated at all? Posted by Brett Myers on Feb 14, 2007 at 08:35 AM | #

Brett, the categories have been updated for Facts in Five. Each card contains only one category (although the box now contains more cards than previous editions), and obscure categories have been reduced, eliminated, and replaced. Vince Kurr mentioned, for example, that the old edition contained multiple categories for radio personalities, something that would stump most players today. Note for next time: Take more pictures! Posted by W. Eric Martin on Feb 14, 2007 at 09:42 AM | #

"Ka-Ching! is an English version of Combit...” Glad to see this clever game will finally be available for this market. Posted by Ward Batty on Feb 14, 2007 at 10:35 AM | #

Eric, please avoid the Dale Yu pervert jokes while I’m eating my lunch.  I almost passed an entire meatball parmesan sub through my nose! Actually, I understand that Kheper Games’ latest project will be a Dale Yu themed version of What’s That on my Head?  It’ll be called What’s That on my Chest?  I predict many sales in and around Columbus, OH! Posted by Larry Levy on Feb 14, 2007 at 11:49 AM | #

It’s good to know I’m not the only one who has bad experiences with University Games. I visited their downstairs booth, got some information, then asked to take some pictures. They said OK, then after I took one picture changed their minds and said maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. Then as I was asking why, they tried to say something like, “We’re not telling you not to take pictures, but maybe you shouldn’t.” It was surreal. Posted by Erik Arneson on Feb 15, 2007 at 06:58 AM | #

Great coverage, Eric!  Any chance of pictures of the Front Porch Classics game?  I like the “look” of past games by them (even when the gameplay is lacking) and am curious if this title keeps that up. Posted by j. andrews on Feb 15, 2007 at 01:48 PM | #

Unknown Games sound like they should remain just that. Posted by Patrick O'Brien on Feb 15, 2007 at 01:57 PM | #

Joe, I’ve added a components shot of Sortie from Front Porch Classics to this posting. The game seems pretty basic in terms of strategy, but it does have a nice shelf presence. Posted by W. Eric Martin on Feb 15, 2007 at 10:49 PM | #

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