Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2008 – February 18 (Part Three)

By W. Eric Martin
March 19, 2008

The Toy Fair 2008 coverage finally comes to an end with a few oddball designs from newcomers, a few designs that aren’t as oddball as they claim to be, Ravensburger, Winning Moves, and assorted other items.

Winning Moves / Immortal Eyes Games
Joe Sequino said that TransAmerica will make its debut as part of the Immortal Eyes Games lineup in June, most likely at Origins. Vineta will arrive in August in time for Gen Con. Since Vineta is still undergoing development, I’ll give the short version of the game: Players are gods trying to sink parts of an island while saving their supporters on the bit that remains. The more who are playing, the more out-of-control you’ll feel.

Winning Moves has The Big Taboo, a new version of the familiar party game that includes a purple posable doll called Bendy Bob that is used for some of the challenges; a retro version of Careers; and a series of small puzzle type games: Pyramid Power, in which you try to match colored triangular pieces, Square Deal, which is similar but with square pieces, and Puzz-Ominos which has various -omino pieces that must touch your existing pieces to be placed on the board while your score is based on the number of opponent-controlled squares that you touch.

The company also showed off Have You Herd?, a dice game alledgedly created by a Polish farmer back in the 1940s. Players roll dice to collect animals, starting with rabbits then trading up to collect more valuable animals. Your herd can be attacked by wolves, and the goal is to have one of each type of animal in your herd, so you can be sure the wolves will munch the most valuable trading material. Sounds like a winner for gamers as well as families.

Merillian Games
I suffered a flashback while listening to an explanation of Flibbix, a game in which “you can build your own board game, make your own rules, and then play.” How is this different from Bonkers, the Milton Bradley game in which you play tiles that affect your pawn’s movement which I played decades ago with my brother and sister?

Admittedly Flibbix does include 45-80 magnetic tiles (depending on which set you buy), and the tiles slide together with a satisfying click – but movement is governed solely by a die and the double-sided tiles have the predictable “swap two tiles,” “move back 5,” and so on that have me reminiscing about the days when I could eat 15 chocolate-chip cookies as a snack and still be hungry for dinner in an hour. Mmm, cookies....

Buffalo Games
While demonstrating Ruin to a couple of people, the Buffalo Games rep made a point about the game’s unique interchangeable gameboard. Clearly he hasn’t got a gander at Flibbix. Ruin seems like a basic roll-and-move through a tunnel that you can change to stymie opponents. Fine for families, perhaps not so interesting for gamers.

Family Games Inc.
Although Family Games no longer carries the Gigamic line – games which Fundex is now distributing in North America – the company still had a ton of abstract strategy games on display, including these new ones for 2008:

• Inversé – A fast-playing game in which each player has a set of five colored pieces, with each piece having a unique volume. You take turns placing the pieces into the playing grid, and the first one who can’t place a piece must eat those pieces. Plan for a rematch at the emergency room.

  Zoned – Players take turns placing their light or dark pieces, which look like the head and neck of a Tangoes-created bird, on a grid; each square enclosed in your color is worth two points, each half-square one point. The copy on display looked homemade, as if grandpa had made it in his garage to pass his gaming wisdom on to Junior.

• Perplexity – The plus-shaped playing pieces have both light and dark bits on them, and your goal is to prevent the opponent from being able to place a piece that will connect to his colored bits already on the gameboard.

• Gobsmacked – Really? A game named Gobsmacked? That was my first response. While the game looks like Connect Four, it’s actually an anti-connection game. Players take turns placing plugs into the vertical gameboard, but they sit across from another and can see the gameboard only half the time, which means they need to rely on their memory and spatial perception in order not to create rows of three (in color or shape). The opponent scores when they do so, and whoever scores more wins.

  

• Pull Through – This game, on the other hand, is somewhat like Connect Four in that you want to create a row of four pieces in your color, but how you place the pieces is a tad bizarre: At the start of the game, the vertical gameboard is filled with black blocks that have holes on each end. Players will insert blocking pegs into a number of these pieces, then they’ll take turns trying to pull out pieces to replace them with blocks of their own color. Pull on a blocked piece, and shame will fall on your family.

• Conniption – To complete the kinda Connect Four family, we have Conniption, in which the game play is identical to that childhood classic except that players can invert the vertical gameboard by spinning it along its horizontal axis. The goal is still to connect four, but now you have to mentally rearrange the pieces in addition to just dropping them.

• Stratum – Each player has a bunch of pieces composed of four hexes stuck end-to-end. Players take turns placing them in a recessed gameboard, then building up to higher levels while following the “layering laws.” The player who has more of his color exposed at the end of the game wins.

• Sprocket – Move rotor parts in order to create gears so that you can place your lug nuts on the board. Destined to be covered in Popular Mechanics. No hint of monkey-touching.

• One Up – Once more, you’re trying to line up four pieces in the same color, but no one owns a color. The tricky bit is that the number of required moves increases by one each turn, and the game starts with only a few open spaces for pieces to move into and out of.

Phew, that’s a lot of abstractness to unload on an audience all at once. We’ll see what appears when over the next twelve months and how many of these games survive to next year’s catalog.

Grape Games
Grape Games has only two titles, the same two shown at Toy Fair 2007 and probably even in earlier years, but I haven’t mentioned them before and electrons are cheap. Flip Floggs is a set of ten tiny wood logs that have different symbols on each end. Five different symbols appear four times each, and on a turn you flip over two logs to see whether the symbols on the opposite end match. Find a pair of each type of symbol and you win. An extremely simple design that rewards memory and works well.

‘Bouta Face uses a deck of double-sided cards that has a different pair of faces on each side. (Hmm, I sense a trend in this company’s games.) The game includes rules for three different games, such as a simple Go Fish game in which you’re trying to find certain faces. Cute pics.

Funstreet Inc.
In addition to showing off Ruckus – a fast-playing card game in which you try to grab sets of cards from other players and yell a lot – Dan Levy was demonstrating Pile It, a terrible job for someone having wrist problems, which he was.

Pile It is a card game, and each card has one of three colors, numbers and pictures on it. You shuffle the deck, split it evenly among the players, then race to divide the cards one-by-one into piles by color. You then take those same cards and repile them by number, then once more by picture. It’s all about speed, baby, and the fastest player will be able to relieve his pain with the feeling of victory. Levy was asking attendees to shuffle the deck for him to give his aching wrists a few seconds of relaxation. Next year, Don, hire a booth babe!

FoxMind Games
The Canadian company FoxMind is yet another publisher of dazzling solitaire logic puzzles, from the no frills Meta-Forms – which plays like ThinkFun’s announced Chocolate Fix but without the sweets – to the interlocking series Equilibrio, Cliko and Architecto, which use the same set of shockingly orange pieces to challenge your brain in different ways.

Oops!, FoxMind’s new entrant into the field of logic puzzles, starts with the idea that the rabbit has enacted its revenge on the magician who’s always pulling on his ears, and the magician has fallen to pieces. Your goal each round is to reassemble the magician – head on top, hat on bottom – but you must move each stack of pieces exactly as many spaces as the number of pieces in the stack. Dozens of puzzles are included; the solving magic is up to you.

FoxMind is also releasing Steffen Mülhaüser’s Six, originally self-published by Steffen-Spiele, in May or June 2008. Six is an abstract strategy game in which each player has a supply of colored hexagons. They take turns placing hexagons, creating a structure from scratch as in Hive. To win the game, you must form a straight line, a triangle, or a hexagon (whether filled or empty) with six of your pieces. If both players place all their pieces without someone winning – which is likely to happen with skilled players – then you alternate moving pieces on your turn.

The FoxMind rep also demonstrated Shokoba, based on the Italian public domain game Scopa, which is similar to Casino. In this game, players collect cards from the field of play or add cards to be collected later, and points are earned based on who collects the most cards of each type of gem. Luck plays a strong role in your ability to win, but I played a ton of Casino in my youth, so I can appreciate the game for what it is.

And with that, my 2008 trip to Toy Fair was over with nothing left except the short walk to Grand Central in the rain— followed by a two-hour train ride— and then a four-hour drive home. The trip presented the same strange mix of games as in 2007, with some fascinating titles overwhelmed by a flood of cotton candied-nothingness aimed at the mainstream market. Hope you enjoyed the report, and I’ll be back in February 2009!

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	If Dante were writing Inferno today, one of the levels would probably have people playing Zen over and over again. This game from Silly Willy Toys is all about stacking plastic funnels and its claim to fame, according to the company website, is that Zen “is the only stacking game on earth where players actually contort the tower into balance.”
	Ravensburger was showing a number of somewhat new games, such as the new version of Master Labyrinth that keeps much of the original 1991 version while adding a dragon fight onto the end of the game. Wha?
	Log Jam is an English version of Billy Biber, which was included in the Nuremberg 2008 preview. The game is a simple one aimed at kids ages 4 and up; the long and short of it is that you remove logs while leaving the beaver untouched; if he moves, you lose. I plan to incorporate the question “Hey, who’s taking my logs?” into as many conversations as possible.
	Another English version of a previously released German game, this time it’s Hop Hop Hooray! for the surprisingly similarly named Hüpf Hüpf Hurra! Bounce the marbles into the pond to create rows of three or more. Take careful note of the incredibly small “Heinz Meister” credit in the upper right corner.
	In response to a weakening U.S. economy, Ravensburger is offering miniscule versions of previously released titles, including Mini Penguin Pile-up and Mini Funny Bunny
	And two more tiny releases: Mini Cat & Mouse and Mini Chuck-it Chicken
	The first of many abstract strategy titles from Family Games in 2008: Sprocket
	One Up
	Conniption
	Gobsmacked
	Can you imagine approaching someone and asking, “Hey, want to play Pull Through?” I sure can’t.
	Ruin from Buffalo Games
	Scrabble Me from Winning Moves, which features the oddest combination of “improvements” that I can recall seeing in a revised version of a classic game. Each player has his or her own playing board, so you’re no longer worrying about setting up opponents to play on the triple word score – except that anytime a player uses a wild tile, that player must swap boards with an opponent. So the interaction on the gameboard has been replaced by wholesale plunder. Weird.
	In the mad genius category of cross-promotion, we find game designer Bobby Doran, who was set to release his Dueling Dice with a Misfits license through his employer C&D Visionary Inc. in March 2008, but alas the product is now on hold. A close look at the table will show Doran’s Deep Space DrillerAce sporting a colorful Grateful Dead palette, which is a test design and not something you should expect to see in stores soon.

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”..you can build your own board game, make your own rules, and then play. How is this different from Bonkers?” Well, you asked the question, so I hope you don’t mind if I answer it :-) First of all I’ve not had the opportunity to play Bonkers before, but from having read through the Bonkers rules and looked at all the product and packaging pictures on boardgamegeek.com, I don’t think it’s any more accurate to say Flibbix is the same as Bonkers as to say Sorry! is the same as any other draw card-then-move game. Flibbix is a “build your own board game” game, so you can really change the way it plays based on your choices in board design and rule making. “...you can build your own board game” In Bonkers you don’t actually get to build your own game board. You can place “track cards” in outlined places on a fixed cardboard game board—when you happen to land on an open space. But the shape, length, and general attributes of the board are very fixed, and you really don’t choose how your board will look or work. In Flibbix, the entire game board is easily built by you in any shape and order you want. You can see some of these designs at: http://www.merillian.com/boardblender.html. This is a really new concept that is vastly different than placing a few simplistic cards on a fixed path that will never change. The Super Set (the 80 tile version referenced above) has three-way and four-way intersections. These lead to interesting game board designs so you can make traps (where people get routed to a difficult-to-escape loop if they land on the intersection with an even roll, for example), or you have to choose which path to take to get to Finish. Is it the shorter path with all the tiles that will slow down your progress, or the longer path that looks easier? You can make hundreds of different shapes and, if you mix two Flibbix sets, you can even have two starts and/or finishes...or a longer game. You get the idea. Building your own custom game board is a much bigger part of Flibbix than the limited “place a card in the pre-defined space when you happen to land on it” system that Bonkers seems to have. The building aspect of Flibbix is incredibly fun for all players, but especially kids, and is an important part of play. Because game tiles are large, magnetic, and plastic, you can build anywhere and are not limited to a fixed cardboard game board space/shape. Your game can span from room to room on the floor, or even jump between levels (we’ve seen kids use books and chairs). “Make your own rules...” Does Bonkers even let you modify, let alone make, your own rules for the game? Not that I’ve seen. Like most games, the rules are fixed. Flibbix comes with easy-to-use Make your own Rules sheets so you can check off rules you like, and fill in a few blanks for more elaborate rules. Again, a pretty big departure from Bonkers or any other game on the market. To see 7 year olds be able to easily and quickly make their own rules (or older kids/adults make really elaborate ones) is really fun and unique. Your rules significantly change how your game plays. You can see how just changing the rules can really change game play by looking at just two sample rules here: http://www.merillian.com/ruleroundup.html. There’s even a Flibbix card that lets a player “Break the Rules” (change a rule) during the game. “...and then play” Bonkers play seem really simplistic with no way for the player to significantly change game play from game to game (except for a small amount of game board “randomness” during the game) The goal is to get points and there is no fixed “Finish” on the game board. Flibbix movement towards “Finish” is mostly governed by a die, like many games, but in Flibbix also by cards and your choice of rules. But this and “...have the predictable swap two tiles’ is an oversimplification. Here are just some of the more unique movement/play elements Flibbix has (beyond all the customizations the rule sheet and game board building give you): - Swap Start & Finish (card)...draw this and you have to swap the Start & Finish tiles during the game. The entire game play begins to go backwards. If you were losing, you’re not ahead! - Custom Tile: Land on this and you have to perform whatever action is on your Make your own Rule Sheet’s “Custom Tile” blank. - Custom Card: Like “Custom Tile,” it’s whatever you want to make it. - Jump to Color: jumps you ahead or back to a red or green color space...depending on where you decide to place these tiles. - “Break the Rules” card...lets you change one game rule in the middle of the game. - Protection Cards: allow players to protect against “Zap!” “Move,” or other actions from other players, rules, or the board. - Custom Rule (on the rule sheet) allows you to change anything about your game...even the goal. Land on 3 player’s spaces in a row to win the game...whatever you want. Set up a new rule to dictate movement (not just governed by a die). - Tile flip and tile swap. Flip over a “Move Back 5” tile to bring up a “Move Ahead 5.” Swap 2 or 4 tiles around on the board to help yourself, or slow down other players. During the game, move the green space to be near Finish instead of Start to increase your chance of jumping to the end of the game. - Fun social cards to lighten things up and get players interacting. - Human Spinner (card) replaces rolling the die with a player spinning themself like a game spinner. - Landing on another player can move you forward, bump them back, neither, or both. You choose in your rules...and choose how many spaces. - There are dozens of others, such as “Roll Reversal,” “Which Way?” “Fast Lane,” “Slow Lane,” “Get Picky,” “Rhyme Master,” “Three of a Kind,” etc. The real answer to “how is this different?” is “as different as can be.” Carcassone and Settlers of Catan both use tiles to build game boards, but it’s not accurate to say they’re the same as each other, just because of that one similarity. Hopefully Board Game News’ readers will understand the same of Flibbix. Thanks! Posted by jasonivan on Mar 20, 2008 at 02:14 PM | #

hmmmm...very...innovative?  And what’s with messing with all the classics (Amazing Labyrinth, Scrabble, etc.)? It’s about time U.S.A. game companies recognized the value of good game designers--there sure are enough of them (and please give Spielmeister Heinz the credit he deserves)! Posted by Jeff Allers on Mar 20, 2008 at 02:15 PM | #

...errr..."If you were losing, you’re NOW ahead! “ :-) Posted by jasonivan on Mar 20, 2008 at 02:18 PM | #

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