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

By W. Eric Martin
March 14, 2008

Okay, with multiple writing projects out of the way, I’m clearing the dust off my 2008 Toy Fair notes and wrapping up the games seen there in this article and one more to appear early next week.

Out of the Box

Matt Mariani was showing off seven new titles from Out of the Box, one of which falls into the strategy games category with the rest being party games or fillers. Ninja Versus Ninja features the John Kovalic artwork that has become a hallmark for Out of the Box, along with sculpted plastic ninja figures based on Kovalic’s design. What are those ninjas doing? Harassing the students of the other dojo naturally.

Ninja Versus Ninja is a new edition of Foray, from designer Tushar Gheewala. Each player starts with a half-dozen ninjas on his half of a long narrow gameboard. On a turn, you roll two dice and move one of your ninjas, either in a straight line or with one 90º turn. Your goal is to step as far into the other player’s dojo as possible, then make it back to safety on your own half of the board. You score 1-6 points based on the depth of your incursion – but if an opponent lands on you while you’re outside of your home base or you don’t return home after three moves, that figure is auf’ed. The game ends when a player accumulates seven points or one player loses all of his ninjas. Ninja Versus Ninja is for two players, ages 8 and up, with a retail price of $20. Mariani says the game will perhaps by released by Gen Con.

The party games consist of the following quartet:

• Backseat Drawing – Players are split into two teams, and each round one player one each team will draw an object, but without knowing what that object is. One other person on each team will peek at a word card, then give the artist instructions on what to draw, but clues are limited to geometric shapes: “Draw a line. Now stick a tiny circle on the end of the line. Add a rectangle to the line near the end with the circle.” And you have drawn a...?

• The Chain Game – Each round, a player reads a phrase or compound word from one of the cards included in the game, such as “catfish.” The next player in clockwise order must give a new phrase or compound word that uses part of the previous one, maybe “hep cat” or “monkfish.” This process continues until a player takes too long, is booed mercilessly, and is forced to give up a link that serves as a scoring device.

• Letter Roll – This title and the next were both shown as Toy Fair 2007, but were delayed until this year, which is a short way of saying that I’m repeating my previous write-up. Letter Roll, previous shown under the name Qwix, is a simple word game in the Boggle family. On a turn, a player chooses to roll any four letter dice, then remove one of them from play. Players then create word lists that use the three letters shown, mark out words that other players found, and score for the other ones.

• Party Pooper – The game includes more than 400 category cards – for example, 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. Rinse and repeat until someone wins.

Finally, Out of the Box has a pair of quick-playing games for two players. Rock! is a modified version of War; a deck of cards showing various forms of rock, scissors and paper is shuffled, then half the deck is given to each player. Players each turn over a card simultaneously, and whoever names the winning card of the pair shown (paper airplane beats Stonehenge) collects the cards; answer incorrectly, and you’ll be punished.

I didn’t see Nutty Cups at Toy Fair, but the catalog and website gives this brief description: “Stack the seven cups with Nutty Guys on the bottoms. Keep track of the nutty characters as the cups are stacked and restacked. But can you un-stack the cups to reveal a set with matching characteristics?” So, speedy pattern recognition while looking at jockstraps? Got it.

ThinkFun
ThinkFun, once known as Binary Arts, does fantastic solitaire logic puzzles: the Rush Hour line, Lunar Lockout, Spinout, and much more. That line is expanded in 2008 with:

• Chocolate Fix – Place the nine pieces of chocolate (in three colors and three shapes) in the right 3x3 arrangement based on the clues given.

• Pirate’s Gold – Maneuver your pirate through immovable obstacles and barriers that can move only in the directions indicated in order to slide your chests of treasure into your own hold.

• Top This – Given sets of tiles in two colors, can you create the same silhouette in each color? The pieces are shaped differently in each color, so you must create the same shape twice; Ubongo fans would probably be all over this puzzle.

• Serpentiles – Take a number of plastic tiles that roads on them in one or two colors, then place the tiles so that all of the roads are complete. Now do it 39 more times...

ThinkFun is also coming out with a new simple strategy game called Ducks in a Row. Each player starts with six ducks arranged on the perimeter of a 5x5 gameboard. They take turns moving the ducks, with movement like a queen in chess, and the first player to get four ducks in a row wins.

Fundex Games
Hard to believe that I’m covering games from Fundex, publisher of kids’ grossout titles like Don’t Cut the Cheese, What’s in Ned’s Head? and Gassy Gus, but covering them I am. Not because of its new kids titles – like When Pigs Fly, that lets you shoot plastic pigs through the air, or Don’t Tip the Waiter, in which you’re encouraged to harass a paraplegic waiter by stacking his tray in an unbalancing manner – but rather due to Fundex picking up the Gigamic line of strategy games from Family Games Inc.

Yes, Quoridor, Quads, Quarto, Sputnik (a revised version of Quivive), and all the other classy looking abstracts from Gigamic will be available, including the non-Q title Marrakech, which recently won the French game of the year award for 2007. Fundex also plans to release Inside sometime in 2008, once the production details are nailed down. Inside has you competing to stack wood pieces in a holder so that you have the fewest blocks of your color showing on the outside once the complete cube has been built, but the Fundex rep said that the tolerances in the wood pieces had to be so tiny that the game wasn’t working under its current design. Oh, the details of publishing a game that are invisible to the enduser…

Set Enterprises
Did you know that Set is available on the New York Times puzzle page? Yes, indeedy – since December 2007, four different Set puzzles are posted each day. Hard to believe that I was selling copies of this game to humiliated customers back in the early 1990s, and it’s still around today. Tiny little Set keeps chugging along…

And the game has now been morphed into Set Cubed, which looks like Set crossed with Scrabble. Each player starts the game with five dice decorated with the standard Set symbols (although shading has been eliminated as one of the characteristics. Players take turns placing up to three dice on the gameboard, scoring points for each set that they create. The gameboard includes bonus squares that boost the number of points you can score, and some dice include a WILD side that fills in for a symbol combo of your choice. Set Cubed is due out in April 2008. My new nails, on the other hand, can be enjoyed now…

Giddy Goose ‘n Gander Games
This company had a very hep looking abstract strategy game called biStratex, and I’d show you a pic, but the representative refused to let me take one. So imagine, if you will, the hex layout for Hacienda – it doesn’t matter which one you choose since biStratex includes a double-sided gameboard – but in purple and brown with some empty spaces.

Players start with two types of pieces on their side of the board, and they’re trying to either reach the opposite side of the board or pass stratexspheres from piece to piece until they get one to a target space. The pieces have different styles of movement, and it’s possible to jump them through portals in order to lay a ninja attack on an opponent’s piece.

So one more abstract strategy game in a stack of hundreds. The description is pretty meaningless really without more detail or pics. Sorry to have bothered…

Zabazoo
Canadian publisher Zabazoo, which previously released the the party game Ruk-Shuk, had a new two-player abstract on hand. In Jakbo!, players each have a set of geometric pieces, and they take turns placing them on the board, trying to blaze a path from their starting line to the opponent’s side of the board. So maybe “new” is a relative term here since this seems awfully familiar – think Hex/Twixt crossed with miQube/Rumis.

Enlightened Play
Here’s the only word that I wrote in my notebook after getting an overview of Enlightened Play’s EcoRanch: Dire. The designer seemed earnest as all get-out, but that only added to the miasma that descended upon me as I heard about the game: You’ve freed farm animals from destitute lives and must give them new foster homes; Awareness cards say things like “Time to make choices”; you barter with other players at the Cooperative Center. Best of luck to you, Eileen, but I’m moving to the next booth.

Spiraling Hearts
And what’s in the next booth but a series of yoga games, specifically bingo and matching games designed to teach yoga poses. Keep walking, Eric…

Smart Zone
Smart Zone Games is based in Israel with an office in the U.S., and company reps were showing off three items:

• Battle of the Pyramids – An abstract game by Michael Kazula in which you’re trying to move your pyramids across the board to occupy the opponent’s home squares. Movement is determined by the colored markings on the pyramids and the colored squares around the edge of the gameboard.

• World Passport – A solitaire logic puzzle in the ThinkFun/Smart family in which you try to place six hex-based pieces onto maps of various countries while creating a connected path with the transparent parts of the pieces and without obscuring the country-related items pictured.

• Hive: Mosquito – Okay, this rare and precious object wasn’t really being shown, but there was a copy tucked behind some other games. The reps said that they’re still trying to determine how to distribute this item. If it’s hard to believe that a mosquito could cause so much trouble, you’ve oviously never heard of malaria.

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Still a few more companies to cover, then Toy Fair 2008 will finally be in the books. Phew, I really need to pick up my writing speed!

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	Nothing to see here, move along, move along...
	Ducks in a Row from ThinkFun
	Two more logic puzzles from ThinkFun: Chocolate Fix and...
	Serpentiles
	Zabazoo’s Jakbo!

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