Melissa Rogerson: Australian Toy, Game and Hobby Fair

Ahh, early April. The time when the thoughts of the gaming world turn to one place.

I’m not entirely sure that that one place is actually the Melbourne Toy, Game and Hobby Fair, but that’s where I found myself on Saturday, checking out the new releases and up-coming goodness.

Here’s a run-down of the good, the exciting and the rest. No photos this year as Fraser pointed out the “NO PHOTOGRAPHY OR WE WILL HUNT YOU DOWN AND HURT YOU” signs that I somehow managed to completely miss again. 

First game sighted was “THE ULTIMATE BOARD GAME!” - Passport to Australia: The Australian Travel Game. The main appeal of this appeared to be the possibility to hand someone a playing piece and tell them to “stick this in your map of Tasmania” – which is not enough to sit through yet another roll-and-move/trivia hybrid. The game has representation but it also has a hefty $59.95 price tag. I did not play it, and will endeavour to keep an open mind about it until/unless I do.

Our first extended stop was the Modern Brands stand. Modern Brands are the local representatives for Ravensburger and also for Orchard Toys. They controlled access to their stand quite tightly, which worked well for us.

The Ravensburger rep was showing off Master Labyrinth, which will be launched in Australia during July/August, at around $50 Retail. I expect this will do reasonably well on the strength of the Ravensburger name, although the $50 price point will scare a few off.

Ravensburger are also releasing Make’n’Break Compact, which will retail at around $20-$25. This is a smaller version of Make’n’Break (which we love), an Australian title. I’m not sure whether the rep we were speaking with actually knew that it was locally designed. As well as having smaller blocks and smaller, double-sided cards, this version of Make ‘n’ Break does away with the timer. Instead, while one player builds, another player rolls a supplied die over and over until the numbers rolled add to exactly 6 (The die faces show, I think, 1,2,3,4, blank, blank). If you go over, you have to start again. This should make turns much shorter. Sadly, there’s no plans to import Make’n’Break Extreme at this stage. With Make’n’Break retailing somewhere over $40, this lower price point should give the game wider exposure to the game-buying public.

Orchard Toys are old favourites of mine as they produce my beloved Tummy ache, which I remember playing with my brother in the ‘70s. New to Australia are Spaghetti Junction (a domino-like game where players build roads but can build bridges to cross over existing tiles); Clear Round (gameplay unclear, theme is show-jumping) and some booster packs for Shopping List.

Ventura Games are one of the big hobby game importers, so there were no real surprises there. Lots of new and current Rio Grande Games titles including a few that have not been widely available in Australia in the past – Piratissimo, Mr Jack and Thebes, for example. They also had a whole range of ‘Sequence’ games including a travel version and Sequence for Kids (played with animal pictures).

I quite liked the look of Letter Roll, a new game from Out of the Box. Players roll three dice (each shows a letter) then list words that contain those three letters. Like in so many word games, players only score unique words, not words that other players have found as well.

Also new from Out of the Box is Party Pooper – a ‘psychology’ party game. I cannot say enough how much this type of game makes me shudder. My notes just say “looks horrid” – but take that with the caveat that I loathe games where I have to ‘rate’ other people or judge what they are going to say.

I also got my first good look at Qwirkle and am now quite keen to try it again. In general, abstracts are not my thing, but this seems more a game of pattern-matching than what I’d consider a pure abstract.

Ventura also had a range of new Gamewright games including King Toad and the larger boxed Tiki Topple. Hisss has also had a box size increase, and Hula Hippos (which I believe is a retheming of the well-recommended Maus nach Haus) is featured prominently in the new Gamewright catalogue.

Weirdest repurposing has to go to ROCK! As far as I can tell, it is Rock-Paper-Scissors the Cardgame.

Even Toys and Games have a wonderful range, mostly of children’s games – they are the local agents for Playroom as well as a couple of other companies.

Monster Stomp looked like a fun game for small children, despite sharing a movement mechanic with Candyland – the winner is the first person to use the plastic boot provided to stomp on 6 play-doh monsters.

Another was You’ve been Sentenced (with many expansion sets) – players take 10 cards each and must make a sentence, scoring the points shown beside each word.

The new Knizia title Ilium will appear from Playroom during the second half of the year.

Even Toys and games were also showing off three new Playroom games – Time after Time (a game of – surprise – time sequencing) and Pick a Paint (featuring “Rainbow recall”) as well as Baker’s Dozen, another Knizia.

JEDKO games, another importer/wholesaler/retailer, weren’t showing off many of their gamers’ games (although the new Diplomacy box got a good showing). They had a good range of DK games, the Gamewright range as seen at Ventura, a variety of Top Trumps sets and some licensed merchandise including – to our delight (and soon to Otto’s delight too, once they appear in the shops), some Charlie and Lola dominoes and other products including the new “Monopoly Mega” with 13 properties along each side. Fraser was very taken (in a horrified, omg-where-did-the-toys-go kind of way) with Snout! The pass the pigs card game, while I was interested to see that the Imagineering prototypes they showed last year still appear to be prototypes. There wasn’t anyone around to ask about this.

Our favourite for the JEDKO stand was the prototype Spicks and Specks boardgame. It’s a simple trivia game, just like Spicks and Specks is a simple quiz show ... except that the questions are so much fun. I think we will get this one for sure. For example:

The theme from The Muppet Show, “Ma nah ma nah” first appeared where?

A. It was the theme to a popular British children’s TV show
B. A French song, “Mais non mais non”
C. In an Italian soft-porn movie.

Blue Opal games, a local distributor and publisher, had a range of newish games but – at least when we were there - no-one who really knew the range well (Me: What do you have that is new? Staff: Look blank, um, we just started, we don’t know.)

Of possible interest were Rank ‘em, (looks a bit like Sorts), Clothes Pins and Animal Soup. Another that caught our attention was Last Man Standing – a game where the goal is not necessarily to be first, but definitely not to be last. This adage is very important when running away from killer bees, so the game could train someone well.

I also quite liked the look of “Origins: the origins of modern expressions” which I suspect is like Balderdash but with phrases not words.

Crown and Andrews had their range of games on show – we were struck by Sorts for Kids. Sorts is a pretty good Australian party game which is on the nominees list for the Best Australian Game, and it has now been released in a children’s version. Kids are given 4 things to sort, and the sample cards we looked at seemed to be good topics that would appeal to boys and girls in the 7-12 age group.

Next stop was the Dr Wood Challenge Centre. They were showing off their newest game Kogworks, which retails around $40. Marketed in Europe as Mecanix, this is a clever little 2-player abstract game where players take turns to place cogs on the board. The goal is to block your opponent while still reaching the golden cog at the top of the triangular board. We hear that Kogworks (another Best Australian Game nominee) is going very well in Europe.

The other new games here were Enkounter (now sold separately from the kaleidoscope classic) and Tribe. Also hitting the $40 price point, Tribe players race to reach their “tribal mount” approximately 2/3 of the way across the large square board. Each piece has special powers – one can steal others’ spaces (sending the other player’s piece back to the starting row), another can jump over pieces, another can climb on top of a piece and control it, and the last type can turn individual or stacked pieces.

Tribe looks like a great game for children and was explicitly designed to appeal to girls as well as to boys. My only concern is with the cartoony style of art – I think my Miss Nine would look at it and say “this game is for little kids” where in fact the recommended age is 8 and up.

A few stands on, we were surprised to hear a voice call, “Fraser!” – and see an old friend who we had lost touch with about 9 years ago. Not only was it lovely to catch up with her, it meant that we stopped to look at her stand – which, as it turned out, also featured a great range of wooden Charlie and Lola merchandise including a really lovely little dexterity game. Players roll a die to see what colour piece they have to place on top of the Wobbly Balancy Thing. All the pieces feature food from Charlie and Lola books, including biscuits, donuts, moonsquirters and – my personal favourite – green drops from Greenland. It’s not just a nice franchise, it’s a nice little game as well. (sorry cardboard dominoes, you no longer have a chance).

We hurried on to Funatical, where (it will come as no surprise to hear) we talked Agricola for a while. Funatical are Z-Man’s representatives in Australia and I think this is an example of the positive things that can happen when publishers and importers work together. Funatical are definitely committed to growing the hobby game market as well as to their partnership with Zev.

We also looked at their range of Gigamic games including Pylos and Inside, which are coming this year, as well as the Mini Gigamic games and the Blue-Orange range (Bingory and Froggy Boogie are both nominees for the Boardgames Australia Best Children’s Game award).

In a similar vein to compact Make’n’Break, “Gobblet on the Go” will retail for around $20 and offers the full game experience in a smaller package and at a lower price.

Funatical were also showing Hive with the Mosquito tile as well as Army of Frogs and the Tower of Kadesh for Khet. As always, a section of their stand was reserved for Squatter (we saw but did not get a chance to speak with the ever-lovely Bob Lloyd). We also saw three different variants of “Double Shutter”, Pengoloo (which looked like another very fun kids’ game) and the Tantrix Match puzzles.

On the way out, we passed Intercept, a 3D board game from the future. It looked a lot like 3-dimensional tic tac toe, but there may be more to it than that.

The Hasbro stand featured a range of updated games including a new version of Cluedo (Clue) with all-new rooms. Partini appeared to be a drinking game or simulation of one. My First Monopoly featured a Talking Mr Monopoly driving around the outside of the board in a car. And Twister Hopscotch was just a bit scary for me to contemplate.

The Australian Toy Association Toy of the Year (Games Winner) was Pictureka which looked quite fun. It’s an observation game where players compete to find things in a picture.

There are three decks of cards, and players roll a coloured die to see which deck to draw from. One requires the player to find ‘x’ (roll another die) of a type of picture on the 9 boards that make up the playing area. Another requires all players to match a picture – the first one to find it scores points. The third colour requires players to bid how many of Thing X they think they can find. Samples might be Sports things, Light or Animal tracks.

Hasbro were also promoting RISK (including 2-player RISK: Balance of Power) and Diplomacy, although there was no sign of Risk: Black Ops or RISK Express. Stratego and Axis and Allies were sort of tagged onto the RISK display.

Four hours and a few mm of shoe leather later, it was time to PLAY some games instead of just looking at them.

Have a great week!

Melissa

PS: The answer was C. Of course.

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