Convention Report: New York Toy Fair 2009 – Gamewright, MindWare, FRED and Hasbro

By W. Eric Martin
March 11, 2009

Sure, the 2009 New York Toy Fair ended almost a month ago, but seeing as I still have unprocessed notes in my notebook, there’s more to talk about from the show, starting with…

Gamewright


Gamewright had its standard mix of colorful kids’ games, along with a single title directed at older players, that title being Funny Business, a concept-driven party game for 4-8 players. On a turn, players need to think of a name for the business combination presented on two cards drawn from a deck of 200. What would you name an aquarium/home supply store? How about a taco shop/massage parlor? Everyone votes on which name they prefer, with the winning entry scoring two points and everyone who voted on it – possibly including the writer of said name – scoring one point. Whoever has the most points after a certain number of rounds wins.

In addition to a billards game in which the cues shoot out of the mouths of sharks, not surprisingly named Pool Sharks, Gamewright has a dexterity game called Ring-O Flamingo in which players try to land rings around flamingos. You don’t toss the rings, but instead flip them onto the board by placing them into a slot on your ringholder, pulling back with your finger, then letting go. Landing on the alligator costs you points, but if you can aim well enough to avoid them, you should skip this game and head to the carnival to wipe out its supply of giant teddy bears.

Say Cheese! falls into the Go Nuts! category of games that require you to roll dice really, really quickly. It’s part of Gamewright’s 12-minute game line, though, so this shouldn’t be a surprise. The game includes a deck of cards and a bunch of dice, with each player getting a pair of different dice. On a turn, you reveal two cards, each of which depicts two people, then everyone rolls their dice over and over and over again until someone matches the two people on a card with the faces on her dice. That player claims the card, then you do it again and again until all the cards are gone. The dice include a wild symbol; roll two wilds and you claim both face-up cards.

Polar Derby is a no-frills push-your-luck game. Players lay out polar bears in five colors, then take turns rolling dice to claim one or two of the bears. You can reroll the dice on your turn, but if you don’t claim a bear, then you’re mauled and left on an ice floe.

Too Many Monkeys brought to mind the Ruby Gloom game that was on display at Spiel 08 in the Korean manufacturers booth, but the resemblence held only for the display of your cards at the start of the game: two rows of three face-down cards, with one row directly above the other. On a turn, you draw a card; if it has a number, and the card in that slot in your array (counting across 1, 2, 3, then 4, 5, 6 in the next row) is face-down, you place the number card in that slot and reveal the face-down card. If you can place that card in your array, you repeat the process. Some cards have action icons instead of numbers, and those end your turn, let you steal, and do other things. If you’re the first player to have cards numbered 1-6 in your array, you win the round and start the next round with only five cards. As you win rounds, you start with fewer and fewer cards, and the first person to have only one card wins. Where do the monkeys enter the game? They’re pictured on the cards, duh.

This Big! is a streamlined bluffing game, with players having hands of fish and rubbish cards, with the fish being different colors and point values. Players take turns playing lure cards. If you play a yellow lure, all other players lay either a yellow fish or rubbish card face-down, then you choose one of them and score points, if possible.

MindWare


MindWare was showing Qwirkle Cubes, but only in a preproduction copy that might change before the game appears in print. I previewed the game in February 2009, so head to the link if you want to know more about the game and how it stacks up against the original game.

Not quite the final look

The 2008 release CrossWise was on display as it was new for this Toy Fair. The game is played by two individuals or teams, with one player scoring for the X coordinates and the other scoring for the Ys. You take turns drawing tiles and placing them on empty locations, trying to satisfy certain scoring conditions while not setting up the opponent. Action tiles let you swap tiles or play additional ones.

Talk’n Text has players compete to claim puzzle cards, with the cards coming in four flavors. All of the puzzles relate to the layout of letters on a phone keypad – sample puzzles: “What color can be created by 2 and 5” and “What part of the body is created by 6673?” – and the first player to claim 15 cards wins. Tiny cardboard phones are included in the box should players not have ones of their own on which to play.

BrainBox is the brand name for a series of memory games, with the topics of the games being things like U.S. presidents, U.S. states, and countries of the world. On a turn, a player looks at a card, which depicts all sorts of facts related to some subject, then turns the card over after ten seconds and has to answer some question related to what was shown on the card. In response to a question from me, Gary Wyatt from the Green Board Game Co., the original publisher of the BrainBox series, which is located in the UK, said that the company had printed up the Barack Obama card for the U.S. presidents game long before the November 2008 election. “Did you also have a John McCain card in reserve?” I asked. Wyatt admitted that they did not.

FRED Distribution


FRED Distribution was showing off the first nine titles in its bookshelf series, the five that have already been released (Money, For Sale, etc.) as well as those due out in March/April 2009: Birds on a Wire, Looting London, Incan Gold and Masters Gallery. Rik Soued mentioned that Roll Through the Ages had sold out its first print run and due to escalating costs in China, the next printing might cost more than the first, although that wouldn’t be known for sure until the game went to print. He also noted that the Rails of… titles that had previously been announced would actually appear as Railways of…, with the base game – Railways of the World – due out in Q2 2009.

Finally, Peter Burley’s Take it Easy! is being redubbed as Stringo! for the North American market. The game, which is due by the end of Q2 2009, remains the same as always, and the graphic design is that of the recent Burley Games edition; only the name differs.

Hasbro


As usual, the Hasbro display was off-site, with it being located in Times Center this year as the company was showing preview clips of upcoming films to accompany the toys and games in its product lines. While being led through the exhibit of titles, I heard the two-minute-long Wolverine preview an incredible number of times, with the music swelling and exploding repeatedly until I became numb. (High muckety-mucks were taken to special preview rooms with giant screens for extended previews of G.I. Joe and other films.)

As for the games on display, the titles were the customary blending of the familiar and the slightly less familiar. Trivial Pursuit is being refashioned into a team game to prevent the lone knucklehead from going pieless all game. But wait – the pie slices themselves have been replaced with a point system as the questions are no longer all-or-nothing gambits. Instead you have challenges such as “name 6” with one point per correct answer, “more or less” in which you choose an easy or hard question and “go for broke” in which you can choose to bank your points or keep facing more questions at the risk of losing everything. The Trivial Pursuit Team Game will be released in Q4 2009 and sell for $30.

The new version of Battleship (Q2 2009, $20) has a hexagonal playing field and a double-sided display. In addition to sinking the enemy’s fleet, you must rescue a sailor stranded on a desert island. Connect 4x4 (Q4 2009, $20) is a double-wide version of Connect Four with up to four players dropping pieces down one side of the grid or the other in order to place four pieces in a row; players have special double-wide blocking pieces to help them hog territory. Pictureka! Flipper (Q4 2009, $25) has the same Where’s Waldo? feel of the original Pictureka game in that you’re trying to find obscure items in busy pictures, but the pictures are on tiles that are flipped into play one-by-one by a mechanized penguin. Best appreciated by children and the inebriated. Candy Land: Sweet Celebration (Q4 2009, $20) has a variable length colored path so that you can play as much (or as little) as you want. The publisher’s description of The Game of Life: Extreme Reality Edition (Q4 2009, $20) deserves to stand on its own:

The Game of Life: Extreme Reality Edition is an outrageous and adventurous way to play The Game of Life. As players travel through “life” they encounter radical “real-life” scenarios – from getting married while skydiving to having sextuplets. Players can also own extreme homes, such as a castle, and assume extreme careers, such as a stunt car driver. Add even more reality to the game by going to The Game of Life: Extreme Reality website to create and print cards that feature your own life experiences.

Like eating an extreme ice cream cone topped with extreme sprinkles. While on fire.

Jenga Max (Q4 2009, $20) reverses the standard of Jenga play by having players hang plastic blocks on a balancing platform. Boggle (June 2009, $14) has been repackaged into a shapeshifting plastic block that allows you to shake the dice, then lock them in place with no risk of the dice falling out or putting out someone’s eye. Rook is part of Hasbro’s new line-up of card games, which bear low price points that should please families hurting from the sour economy. The new titles among Hasbro’s card game offerings includes Monopoly Deal Card Game, Crazy Old Fish War (which combines Crazy Eights, War, Old Maid and Go Fish) and Scrabble Slam Card Game in which players race to create four-letter words. (Yes, really.) For those whos jobs are still secure, Hasbro has upgraded a few of the titles to include fancy carrying cases, as with the Scrabble Slam game pictured above.

Monopoly City (Q4 2009, $35) dumps the houses and hotels of Monopolies past in favor of skyscrapers, stadiums and parks, which are built in labeled spaces next to each property, with valuable buildings boosting the value of adjacent land. By building power plants, however, you can tank the rents next door. Monopoly Go! is a travel version of the game with clip-on pieces, houses and hotels so that nothing will get lost during play in a hurricane.

Clue: Secrets & Spies (Q4 2009, $25) brings a Colovini feel to the detective game. Players are no longer trying to solve a murder, but are rather searching for Agent X. Six agent markers take part in each game, no matter how many players are the table, with their score markers on one of the scoring track and Agent X’s on the other end. Each player is secretly assigned one agent, but as the game progresses, you’ll score points for various agents, keeping cards to acknowledge that you were the one who made the score. The game ends once Agent X’s marker, which is moving toward the other end of the track, meets the score marker of any agent. Players add the points that they scored to the current position of their agent’s marker in order to see who wins.

How do you score points? Have agents collect the items shown on your secret mission cards, and have one agent meet another secretly. This last action is one of two gimmicks in the game. The meeting cards say “Meet ________ in Tokyo” (or some other city), and once you reach that city with an agent, you can use a blacklight device (or some such thing) and discover the name of the agent who you’re supposed to meet in that city.

The game’s second gimmick is a texting feature in which players receive secret messages via their phone, but this element is an add-on to the game itself. In essence, you text a word to a particular number on your own cellphone at the start of the game, then pass the phone from player to player as you finish your turns. At random points during the game, the phone will receive a text message that affects the game in some way. This game mechanism makes Clue: Secrets & Spies the first title that I know of with a sunset clause as Hasbro guarantees that the texting will work only for a certain number of years.

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And that’s a wrap for the 2009 New York Toy Fair, an event that occupies two enormous floors of the Jacob Javits Center, with only a sliver of that space featuring interesting board games relative to the number of scooters and dolls and blocks on display – not to mention $8 crèpes that look nowhere near as good as the nutella/banana crèpes available at Spiel. Manhattan has many wonderful things to offer, but bargain-priced food ain’t on that list. Until next time…

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"Peter Burley’s Take it Easy! is being redubbed as Stringo! for the North American market.” FAIL!  The Eagles never recorded a song called “Stringo” (or even “Take it, Stringo")! Posted by Larry Levy on Mar 11, 2009 at 12:40 PM | #

Stringo? FAIL x2 Posted by Aaron Lawn on Mar 11, 2009 at 01:51 PM | #

Were the eagles finally suing? Did you see the new Epic Duels? Posted by Lee Fisher on Mar 11, 2009 at 06:21 PM | #

I did see the box for the new Star Wars: Epic Duels, Lee, but the rep knew nothing about the game, saying that it had arrived at the display site that morning. Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Mar 11, 2009 at 06:26 PM | #

Any additional news you may have on the Monopoly and Clue games Eric?  I also clicked on the picture to get a better look at the boards and the link broke. Posted by Ryan B. on Mar 11, 2009 at 08:24 PM | #

Ryan, the links for the photos are fixed. I can possibly post more on the new Monopoly and Clue games later. Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on Mar 11, 2009 at 08:45 PM | #

Thanks Eric.  Very interesting board layout for Monopoly. Posted by Ryan B. on Mar 12, 2009 at 12:07 AM | #