Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2008 – February 17 (Part Three)

By W. Eric Martin
February 18, 2008

It’s midnight in Manhattan, and a cool breeze is blowing through the open window in my friend’s apartment. The temperature might be near freezing outside, but funky radiators and the collected heat that comes from living on the top floor keeps her apartment warm no matter what the weather. The sound of traffic on Broadway, half a block away, rises and falls like a pulse. While New York is pictured as an always bustling and noisy metropolis, I haven’t heard a car horn in hours. Life carries on quietly in thousands of nearby apartments.

And I’m awake, writing (as always) about games – the good and the bad, the promising and the compromised. Most important of all, at least for this report, I’m showing off the new Risk from Hasbro, but not yet.

North Star Games
Dominic Crapuchettes and Satish Pillilamarri had two items to show off at their booth, which was at least double the size of last year.

Say Anything will be North Star’s third party game, following Cluzzle and Wits & Wagers. Due out at Origins in June 2008, Say Anything combines elements of Apples to Apples and Wits & Wagers. Each round, the judge chooses a question – e.g., “If you could have a big anything, what would it be?” – then each other player writes an answer on a personal dry erase board.

The answers are laid out, and people lay down two chips on the answer (or answers) they think the judge will choose, which may or may not be their own. Anyone who guesses correctly scores points, as does the author of the chosen answer. The judge scores a point for each chip on the card he named, but he can’t score more than three. Crapuchettes says that this keeps judges from gaming the system, such as by choosing the most obvious answer instead of what he really thinks. Ideally, he says, by knowing the playes, you’ll be able to guess what they’ll choose – and if you don’t know them, their guesses will tell you a lot.

The second feature was the new Xbox LIVE Arcade version of Wits & Wagers. This version will be available as a download from XBLA in March, and it supports up to six players. AIs fill in for missing players, but their talents don’t seem as good as those of humans, so try to find breathing opponents if possible. The XBLA version of Wits & Wagers has been tweaked, refilling your supply of betting chips to five each round, whether you win or lose, which encourages you to bet big in the early rounds since you’ll at least break even.

When you choose a character to start the game, you can choose from one of fifty heads, but you can’t customize the clothing as is done in games like Rock Band. Instead, the characters’ clothing alters each round to relate to the topic of the question. You do, however, get to make your character dance.

R&R Games
R&R Games, like Innovention, was refeaturing one title that was shown in prototype last year. Pressure Point is a word category guessing game. The game comes with an electronic device a la Catchphrase that presents a random category, such as fast-food restaurants, local car dealerships or card games. Starting with the player to the left of the active player, each person looks at the category, then secretly bets how many answers the active player will give for that category. The non-active players win points if they guess correctly and lose points if they’re off, paying points to the active player if he performed better than they expected.

Pressure Point is for 3-8 players, retails for $24.95, and is due out in May 2008. The game device includes 900+ categories, so the replay value should be huge.

Horse Fair is a newish card game released in late 2007 that is aimed more at the mainstream market than the hobby market. Players take turns putting down cards valued from 3-7, and when there are as many cards of a number as that number (e.g., four 4s), then the cards are cleared. Anyone with a 4 keeps the card, which is worth 1 point at the end of the game; the player who played the final card in a set receives a plastic horse, worth 2 points.

R&R is also developing a new expansion for Time’s Up that will include non-celebrity categories such as food, movies, television shows, and so on.

Hasbro
I avoided checking out the Hasbro line of games in 2007, but with the hue and cry over the new design of Risk, due out in Q3 2008, I thought it prudent to see what the toy giant had to offer.

One title that should appeal to the Geek crowd is Sorry! Sliders because the game play is like a poor man’s Crokinole. Players take turns sliding their Sorry tokens – which have a ball bearing embedded on the bottom – toward a target card that has a hole in the center. If you fail to leave your launchpad or go off the target, that piece is out; otherwise, you sit on the target and become a target yourself for other players. If you land in the center hole, you remove the piece so that others can target it.

At the end of the round, you score points based on your tokens’ locations (scoring the higher value if you’re crossing a line), then move one or more of your scoring tokens toward Home. These pieces must enter Home by exact count (as in the basic Sorry! game), so you won’t always want to aim for the bullseye. The game includes four target boards, providing different challenges in the points that you can score.

I asked whether a White Castle-themed version was in the works, and the PR person said that would be an interesting idea. You’ve got my number, Hasbro – call for more of my awesome ideas.

Battleship Express and Clue Express will be added to Hasbro’s Express line of games, which currently includes versions of Monopoly, Scrabble and Sorry! I asked about Risk Express, a Knizia title currently available only in the UK, and the rep said it would perhaps be released in the future, but there are no guarantees.

Trivial Pursuit Digital Choice, due in October 2008, is a clever extension of the TP line. Players are purchasing an iPod-like device that can hook up to your computer through a USB port and download questions from the Internet, either in a single broad category like Sports, or subsets of that category (say, Racing and Baseball), or in some mix of categories. The device then functions as your deck of cards, allowing you to ignore all the categories you don’t like or customize the deck for each group you might encounter.

Okay, enough beating around the bush – here’s a look at the new version of Risk:

As you can see, the graphic designer is going for a dynamic look, something that has motion built into it. The oceans don’t resemble pools of blood, but rather some dramatic setting, as in a movie poster. In the end, the gameboard doesn’t resemble a map of the world, but rather an abstract design with floating, rounded-off continents and islands in place of the actual land masses.

The plastic arrows represent troops, and they have different sizes and markings to show troop strength. The choice of arrows is apparently just to allow the gameboard to resemble the scenes in war rooms in movies of the 1940s and ‘50s, when generals stood around a world map that showed the movement of troops into enemy lands.

The PR rep said that she was aware of the outcry over the limited release of the Black Ops edition of Risk, a version with a sleek black and gray design that is being shown only to reviewers. (A friend speculated that this was akin to the practice of giving specialized gift packs to those in the Academy who vote on the Oscars, a way of buttering up a plain product to encourage people to write about it. Another way to view this edition is as a CD of alternate tracks from a musician; you can still talk about the lyrics and songwriting, but the particular vocal tics and outstanding notes won’t be the same as those in the regular release.)

She also said that the version on display is what’s being released come the summer of 2008. Maybe someday in some way, she said, Hasbro might entertain the possibility of conceptually releasing something similar to Risk: Black Ops. No, she wasn’t even that certain about it, but she didn’t say never either. It was more like a magic cloud had descended on the room and made everything uncertain. Publishers are like that, of course, being mysterious when it suits their purpose. Never say never when you can instead say, who knows?

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Thanks for the pics of the new Risk. I think the arrow shaped pieces are actually kinda retro cool. It’s odd that they are saying Horse Fair hasn’t been released: We gave a copy to my niece for Christmas. The little plastic horsies were quite a hit, and it was a game that we didn’t mind playing with her. Maybe the March release is a reprint? Posted by David Lund on Feb 18, 2008 at 09:38 AM | #

David, I was also baffled by the claim of a May 2008 release date, but I went with it, figuring that I can always clarify it later. Publishers say all kinds of stuff after being hammered by retailers and press for days… Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Feb 19, 2008 at 02:15 AM | #

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