W. Eric Martin: Thoughts on Toy Fair, and More Games for Grunts

Attending New York Toy Fair gave me a better idea of how games are presented to the American marketplace at large, and the outlook is its usual mix of promising and grim. Mayfair, Z-Man, Face 2 Face, Temple, and assorted other companies showed games that appear to be the creative work of designers who care about creating a fun experience for players. Many other companies showed product that seemed designed to fit marketing niches, fill shelves, and repackage the familiar.

One example of the latter was a firm that makes game sets (chess, checkers, etc.) with hollowed-out pieces. The designer said that he got the idea because he was trying to encourage his son to learn how to play chess. His father had forced him to take hours-long lessons, and he had hated the experience, so he decided to entice his son with chess pieces filled with candy. Whenever you capture a piece, you get to open it and eat the sweets inside. After releasing a chess set with hollowed pieces, he went on to release checkers and go sets using the same principle. Throughout the description of his product line, I kept wondering why he thought bribing children with candy to play these games was better than playing more interesting games. Doesn’t he know about the obesity crises in our schools? Think of the children!

A more egregious example of pure product came from Mindgammon. The first warning sign? The illuminated advertising banner in the Javits Center common area with a picture of Einstein and a tagline that read something like “The game of the 21st century.”

The Mindgammon booth was a doublewide (the same size as Mayfair’s) and boasted a giant videoscreen showing how to play its eponymous game. I watched the video and thought, “This looks just like backgammon but on a straight board.” I asked the rep how the game differed from backgammon, and he replied, “It’s played on a straight board, you start with no pieces on the board, you take an extra turn on an acey-deucy (roll of 1-2), and you have to bear the pieces off exactly.”

I could have avoided wasting any time at all on the game if only I’d seen this red alarm on the company’s website: “Mindgammon Inc is a new board game company that creates games that take one minute to learn and a lifetime to master.”

Mindgammon also describes its game as “easy to learn,” a claim I heard numerous times throughout the fair from representatives who apparently thought I’d be scared away by a game that requires deep thought. Buffalo Games, for example, was featuring Nacho Loco, an incredibly simple tile-laying game with triangular cards that are impossible to shuffle. Players start with a handful of cards, which have different colors—and possibly a special effect (e.g., draw three card)—along the three edges. On a turn, you play a card by matching one edge of the card with a similarly colored or worded edge of a card already on the table; if you match a special effect, you decide which player it affects. Run out of cards and you win.

I played Nacho Loco at the demo table and simply laid down card after card after card until I won. The game is fine for younger players—on the Geek, Skip Maloney mentions playing it with a four-year-old—but all the reps kept saying was “It’s so easy, there’s nothing to it.” Then why bother?

Perhaps the only thing worse that a claim about a game being easy is a claim that your wife is easy your game is unique and mind-blowing when it’s in fact common and uninteresting. Thurn & Taxis has received plenty of comparisons to Ticket to Ride and comments that its mechanisms are familiar, but the design works so well that you don’t care.

Eezee Kricket—a trivia game about cricket—doesn’t stand up to such scrutiny. First ponder this promise on the company’s website: “The Eezee cricket game is played on a board consisting of 64 squares. The board layout is the only one of its kind in the world, i.e, such a board has never been created before.” Not sixty-three, not sixty-five, but 64 squares!! Who’d have thought that possible? The designer seemed so uninterested in his own game that he kept looking up and down the fair walkways while describing how to play. If the game designer himself doesn’t care about the game, it’s time to walk away.

Okay, enough bad-mouthing for one week. I did run across a number of fun-sounding designs at Toy Fair and wrote about them in my coverage of the event. Thankfully not all designers approach their creations as these do. I played a prototype by Kory Heath, for example, back in 2004, and the game felt nearly finished at the time—yet Kory spent roughly two years adjusting and readjusting the scoring system before he felt that the game was in its ideal form. You can judge the results for yourself this summer when Funagain publishes Uptown. Fans of Ingenious should be especially pleased by the game.

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On Monday, February 26th, I shipped out the latest “games for grunts” packages. A number of BGN readers had contributed funds, and folks in New England gave both geld and games at Unity Games XII in January 2007. Here’s the rather eclectic list of games that was sent to three troops in Iraq and one in Afghanistan:

San Juan x2
For Sale
Coloretto x2
Cosmic Wimpout x3
Bang x2
Wizard x2
Take Stock
Payday
Bohnanza x2
Fairy Tale
Senator
Winner’s Circle
Harry Potter Scene It
Scene It
Stratego Legends
Risk Godstorm
Harry Potter Trivia Game
Cribbage board, plus cards
Phase 10
Canasta Caliente
Ra

I hope our armed forces contain a sufficient number of Harry Potter fans to make use of all these games. As I noted in my Jan. 16th column, Innovention Toys had shipped a crate of Khet to American soldiers in the Middle East. I asked Luke Hooper, President of Innovention, for details on the donation and he sent the following explanation:

As for the Iraq donations, we didn’t realize our troops overseas even enjoyed boardgames until we got an email with the picture of the guys around the old Deflexion board telling us how much the guys around the base loved the game. We were happy to help and have since sent a case of games with shirts and splitters overseas to make sure anybody can get in a Khet game without much of a wait during their downtime. It’s gotten great feedback, and we even got a thank you from one soldier’s mom.

While researching various game companies, I ran across Games To Troops, a program organized by GAMA (Game Manufacturer’s Association) in which game publishers donate hundreds of games to troops overseas. An impressive effort by GAMA and all of the publishers involved. I’m glad that Boardgame News can contribute its few boxes to this effort.

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Recent unplayed-to-played games include Evergreen and Goldener Drache. Goldener Drache is a race game by Wolfgang Riedesser with a programmed movement system in which players are trying to land their dragon in a golden volcano. Each dragon sits on a directional token (N, S, SW, SE, W, E), and each player has a rack that holds five other tokens. On a turn, a player must play three tokens, but he can play each one on his own dragon or an opponent’s. With each token he plays, he picks up the token left behind by the moving dragon and places that in his movement rack. Special cards let you play all five tokens in your rack or prevent someone from moving your dragon.

We goofed by handing out the tokens randomly at the start of the game instead of giving players one of each token, but I think the game played out fine anyway. Memory plays a role in that recalling what’s under a dragon may affect whether or not you want to move it to take the token for a future move. With five players, you could be moved a lot between your own turns, and I’m sure the game plays better with fewer.

The Kramer/Kiesling game Evergreen is labeled for 2-6 players, but I can’t imagine playing with more than four. Three of us took turns playing artist cards to take control of the records representing those artists and bumping up their popularity. With this being a first play for everyone, we didn’t know which scores were good or bad, so we had a hard time judging which of our four performances to double. In the end, Evergreen is an area majority game of light control. I was dealt a bunch of high- and low-valued cards, which was likely responsible for my victory, given our collective inexperience.

Next week, I’m having a party…

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