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Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2007 - February 13, 2007 (Day Three)
By W. Eric Martin
February 16, 2006
With snow, snow and yet more snow in the forecast, I decided to cut out of Toy Fair in the afternoon of the third day. Luckily for me, I had explored most of the Javits Center on the first two days, so covering the final ground wouldn’t take too long.
One aspect of the Fair that I missed, probably due to inexperience, were the various off-site locations, that is, toy and game companies in Manhattan that had opened up their businesses to nosy reporters. As such, I saw nary a hex of Heroscape or any other Hasbro items. Thankfully, Erik Arneson from About.com was on the case, and he has published gallery images of the Heroscape: Swarm of Marro Master Set, Marvel Heroscape (which is now due May 2007), and assorted other Hasbro titles.
My first stop of the morning was an appointment with Kati Elliot of Educational Insights for a look at the company’s new entries in its StrataGems series. Blokus might be the shining star of the series, but there’s always a chance for another nova to light up sales, right?
Pixel, as with all of these titles, is an abstract strategy game. The gameboard features an 8x8 grid with the corners removed and two arrows that slide in perpendicular directions along the grid’s axes. Each player, of which there can be 2-4, starts the game by placing one of his cough drop-sized pastel pieces in a central square of the grid. Once each player has done this, players take turns in clockwise order, trying to place three or four of their pieces in a row to win. On a turn, a player must move exactly one of the sliders so that the pair of sliders point to an empty spot in the grid, then he places one of his pieces in that location. Play continues until someone wins.
While this game might work fine with only two players, I can imagine situations with three and four players where Player D is about to win, and Players A and B skip the blocking moves to advance their own positions, thereby forcing Player C to block Player D and shake his fist at Players A and B. The game demonstrater said as much while showing a group of buyers how to play. Pixel is for players aged 6 and up.
Color Scheme looks and plays like Connect Four—that is, it has a vertical playing grid into which players drop plastic pieces in order to create a line—but the game does have important differences. To start with, the grid is actually two layers thick, so one tile can overlap another. Second, the rectangular tiles are formed from two primary-colored squares; when these tiles overlap in the grid, they form secondary colors (orange, green, violet). To win the game, you must create a row that’s three spaces long of the secondary color of your choice. The colors were somewhat difficult to see during the demonstration, but if you’re looking at the grid straight on, as opposed to looking down at it, the colors are much clearer. Color Scheme is also for players aged 6 and up.
Tunnelz was the final StrataGem title, and it plays like a 3D version of Hex. Instead of a gameboard, the two players are using a hollowed, three-dimensional plastic cube that’s five units across on each side. Opposite faces on the cube are painted white, red, and black. Your goal is to create a line of bricks in your color from one matching-colored face to the other.
Each player has a supply of bricks that are two units long and one unit wide and tall. On a turn, the player pushes a brick into one spot on the grid, pushing the brick until (a) it hits something that can’t be moved out of way, or (b) the brick is even with the cube’s face. Players can enter a brick into the grid on any face, and they keep alternating turns until one player creates a path of bricks that touches both cube faces of the appropriate color. This description would make more sense with an accompanying photo, and I’ll try to keep that in mind in future convention reports. Tunnelz is for players aged 8 and up.
Aftershock!, for players aged 5 and up, is a speed dexterity game in which players take turns stacking colored three-dimensional polyominos onto a platform. A device on the platform tells you which color of polyomino you must play (and each color has a different formation of bricks); after placing the block, you must hit the timer on the device or else the platform starts vibrating. If a piece falls of the assemblage, whether from fumbly fingers or a vibrating platform, you’re out of the game.
Obscurity is essentially a travel version of Big Boggle. Players place a 5x5 grid of letters (one of 80 in the game) into a plastic holder, write down as many words as they can find in the grid, cross out words that other players found, then score points for the rest. Words in the grid, and the points they’re worth, are listed on the back of the card—except when they aren’t. In just a few seconds with the card, I found MOLT and MOLTS, neither of which was included on the word list.
Educational Insights is releasing its own series of solitaire logic puzzles, dubbed Smart Games, and a half-dozen titles were on display:
- Fire Escape: One of 48 puzzle cards is slid into a two-sided playing board. Your job is to move the fireman from the lower level to the window(s) holding the occupant threatened by flame without burning up yourself. As puzzles increase in difficulty, you receive fire extinguishers and sprinklers to douse flames and clear your path.
- Mazeways: Cat & Mouse: A solitaire version of Friese’s Turbo Taxi. On a 3x3 grid decorated with cats, dogs, mice, cheese and other items around the outer edge, players create paths between particular items by placing nine decorated squares in the grid. The more difficult puzzles require you to connect multiple items while not connecting other ones.
- North Pole Camouflage: The puzzle includes 48 different playing cards that depict ice floes, open water, and (possibly) obstacles. Your job is to place 4 L-shaped and 2 I-shaped pieces onto the playing area. The trick is that the pieces have polar bears and dolphins printed on them, and the bears must be placed on the white areas and the dolphins on the blue area.
- Safari Undercover: The puzzle has four 3x3 indented areas, and each square in an area depicts some kind of animal or is empty. Each challenge requires you to place four plastic pieces onto these areas so that particular animals are exposed while all the other animals are concealed.
- Castle Logix: This item is aimed at kids aged 5 and up, as is clear from the chunky wood bits: four blocks that depict castle sections and three rods topped with pointed roofs. The blocks have holes in certain directions allowing the rods to fit through them. You must recreate pictures that show the blocks and rods in certain combinations.
- Zookeeper’s Nightmare: This puzzle looks and plays like ThinkFun’s Rush Hour series. For each challenge, you set up animals in a certain formation in a grid that holds three animals lengthwise and four across. One space is kept clear, and that’s the target space for the animal indicated in the challenge. The heads and tails of some animals interfere with the movement of other animals, so you have to discover how to manuever them in the right manner to solve the challenge.
Zygote Games was sharing space with Temple Games, which serves as the company’s distributor, and Diane Kelly was showing off a prototype of Parasites Unleashed! The game turned out to be simpler than I imagined: Players start by taking one HATCH and MATE card at random. These cards, and all cards in the game, have colored bands on the left- and right-hand edges—green signifies an outdoor environment, red inside a host, and so on. You start with these two cards and a hand of other cards, and on a turn you play two cards onto your own side of the table, your opponent’s side, or some combination, making a chain of cards with colors matching from edge to edge. A player wins by having his HATCH and MATE cards in his chain and the same color on both ends of the chain, thereby recreating the circle of life. The game includes a few “take that” cards, but most of the text on the cards are fascinating facts about parasites. The images are cartoonish, but still juicy enough to get boys excited about playing.
The company’s previous card game, Bone Wars, was also on display. Your goal is to net a certain number of prestige points, and you do this by finding bones, creating skeletons, and revising skeletons already played to bring them closer to completion and scientific reality; different colors of bones represent different dinosaur families, and within colors you have different types of skulls and so forth. The game recreates the scientific process, and the art by Bryant Johnson is utterly charming.
Temple Games is both a distributor and publisher, and the first tag will be of far more interest to BGN than the second one. In roughly four months, Temple Games will start distributing various Ferti titles—PitchCar, Diam, and Siam—inside North America. This should make PitchCar both more available and less expensive. Sales Manager Jeff Lum says that the company is trying to hit a certain price point to make the games more attractive, while still retaining the same look.
Pirate King is an original release from Temple Games. Jeff Lum started his description of the game by noting that it’s a combination of Monopoly and Risk, and my brain shut down at that point.
Temple Games will be revising and rereleasing ChiZo Rising with new artwork and new game play, but no release date or details are available.
Erik Smith is building on the success of Pizza Box Football by launching—wait for it—Pizza Box Baseball! PBB is a two-player, simultaneous action selection game. For each at bat, the hitter chooses one of two cards: swing or take. The pitcher draws five cards from a deck of 25 (15 balls, 10 strikes), then plays one of those five cards. Based on the combination of cards played, you reveal a card from one of three decks (strike/swing, ball/take, and the other two combinations). The different decks have different results (single, pop fly, etc.) that are meant to represent the statistical likelihood of certain actions. Play nine innings, and the high score wins. Pizza Box Baseball has a July 2007 release date and will retail for $30.
Nick Kellet was showing off three mini-editions of GiftTRAP: one for kids, one for families, and one for adults. The GiftTRAP minis can be played on their own or added to the main GiftTRAP game. Nick says that he’s removing the adult-oriented cards from future editions of the main game to ensure that retailers won’t consider it an adult-only game.
After walking the rest of the lower level, I took a break, then prepared for my talk at the Knucklebones booth about the game review process and what publishers need to know. (First step: Include a stack of twenties.) After the talk, I skedaddled out of the Javits Center and grabbed a train out of town, with thoughts of Mindgammon, candy-filled chess pieces, and a cricket trivia game filling my head. While the mix of good and bad games at Toy Fair was interesting, I’m looking forward to conventions devoted to games and nothing but in the year ahead.
| Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version | |
 | A rough copy of Parasites Unleashed! |
 | Pizza Box Baseball—a first look |
Posted by W. Eric Martin on Feb 16, 2007 at 10:00 AM in Special Features, Convention Reports, Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2007 / 2534
