I played all these games in 39 hours, probably the same amount of time it took me to type all this out. I've rated each game with three values: replay value (how often could I play it?), fun factor (how often do I want to play it?), and worth buying (how badly do I want to own my own copy?).
There were no "beautiful abstract stinkers" this year (unlike Quadtria from last year and Dao from three years ago). Googolplex was maybe the closest, but even it wasn't completely broken.
Rumis is a natural to win considering how similar it is to last year's winner Blokus. (Pueblo would have a good chance, it it had ever been submitted.)
There was only one party game this year that I considered to have strong showing: Smarty Party.
Another thing to keep in mind regarding the Mensa Select award is that the electorate changes every year, and is not the entirety of Mensa.
This year there were around 150 attendees and the event was held in a hotel near the airport in downtown Chicago. Compare to three years ago, when there were around 100 attendees and the event was held in northern Ohio.
I felt that that made a BIG difference. Many of the attendees in Ohio were older people who lived nearby, had heard about the event in the local newsletter, and decided to come mostly to socialize and see other friends. They weren't "gamers".
This year things felt different. Since we weren't near any residential neighborhoods, most people who showed up are those who made a concentrated effort to come to the event. That means ... gamers! Not really the crazy ones like me, but definitely more like me than in past years.
The result is a domination of, well, strategy games in the selection that surprised even me. (I really had expected Smarty Party to win, even though I didn't vote for it.)
I really like this trend, though, and I hope it continues into the future.
Replayability: 6
Fun Factor: 4
Worth Buying: 3
Let's say the buzzword is "Red". You draw a card, and there are ten words or phrases on it that contain the word "Red". You have 30 seconds to try to get your teammates to answer as many as possible. Any that you don't answer can be stolen by the other team. Easy as pie! What makes this game different from other similar games on the market? In this one, you don't have to think up your own clues; instead, the clues are written on the card, and you have to read them!
The reader no longer has to worry about being creative! All right! It's always good when the games are made simpler! Hold on. Let me take my tongue out my cheek now ... one interesting feature this game has that I wish other similar games had is a stack of cards labeled (loudly) with the numbers 1 through 10, so you can easily keep track of which clues you've gotten and which ones the other team can steal. Other than that minor feature, however, I'm not sure this game has much going for it.
Replayability: 7
Fun Factor: 8
Worth Buying: 6
This is one of the simpler games that uses the concept of ambiguous clue-giving; one player is given a word and must give a definition for it. Everyone who guesses the word from the definition gets a point, which the giver gets one point for each person who guessed it right -- except that they get *no* points if everyone gets it! The words are given by an electronic gizmo that gives a random word when you press a button.
There seems to be a recent surge of party games where ambiguity is encouraged. (I love this trend because it means that more and more people are learning to like thinking in their games.) The mechanic works great in a large group of around ten people, but don't try playing this with less than five. I'll confess that the gizmo seems to be useful for a lot more than just this game -- I'm tempted to buy one and use it in last year's similar fare Proclaim!, which I believe to be a better game (although this one's good too).
Replayability: 6
Fun Factor: 6
Worth Buying: 4
Start with the basic concept of: here's a category. Here are five words/phrases in the category. How fast can you give clues to your teammates to name them? Okay, so this has been done in countless other games, what's special here? What's special is that the other team has to come up with the words! The amount of time they spend to come up with the words is exactly the amount of time you get to answer it. This is all enforced by a fancy electronic gadget that also gives out the categories.
It's too bad the electronic gadget doesn't handle the scores too. Oh well. The idea is fine, but unfortunately the problem is that it becomes a race to think of five items so quickly that the other team doesn't even have time to give clues. What I would have liked to see are some ways to give more time to clue-giving than to clue-writing. Another problem with this game is that's it's very hard for a team to come up with clues without the other team overhearing and still stay within reach of the gadget. If you get this game, maybe you can try playing with the idea that teams must give clues in separate rooms and then run back to the gadget to press the button. That might give enough extra time for clue-giving.
Replayability: 6
Fun Factor: 7
Worth Buying: 5
The game starts with the concept of a "Trhyme", which is a triplet of cute definitions that each define a word, and the three words rhyme. The progress a player has made determines how much time they get to answer the question. If they can't get it, the next person gets a chance, and so on. If everyone misses then the reader reads one of the words and there's a free-for-all.
This game has good points and bad points. The board is mostly a glorified scoreboard. I like the idea that a person closer to victory has less time to think of the answer; I think more verbal games should use this mechanic. The rule of calling out the name of the game when you have the answer is silly and unnecessary. They provide a nice holder for the current card, which is good, but the holder is made out of cheap cardboard and isn't easy to use, which is bad. Oh, and the questions. I liked some of them, but occasionally one of them would be just wrong (bad part of speech, for example).
Replayability: 3
Fun Factor: 6
Worth Buying: 2
Roll the die and move your pawn on the track. You'll land on a letter. Find the letter on the outside of the board, and trace it onto a piece of paper. If you can write a word that starts with the letter, move forward one. If you can draw a picture from the letter, move forward one. If you can draw a picture from the letter that represents something that starts with the letter, move forward two. First to the end wins! Oh, it's probably also worth mentioning that the age range is 4 to 7.
This certainly isn't a bad game considering the age range, but my worries would be if the parents can play competitively in a convincing way. Also there's the problem that with a fixed sequence, kids will probably be drawing the same pictures over and over. A better game could be made by replacing the path with one of those Scattergories dice that has the letters on it. Still, unlike other kids' games, this one will engage their brains and give them a bit more to do than just follow rules, and that's certainly a plus.
Replayability: 9
Fun Factor: 8
Worth Buying: 6
Players familiar with Klaus Teuber's "Barbarossa" will be familiar with this mechanic: you have to make a sculpture out of clay that's ambiguous. You get the most points if people guess your sculpture on the third try, but none if they can't guess it by then. One nice party-game-like addition is that you get two yes-or-no questions each round that you can ask of any sculpture.
I think I've mentioned that I'm a sucker for games that reward ambiguity. Unlike Barbarossa, this game doesn't dally around with pawns and different tracks and therefore will be more accessible to a general (American) audience. The game idea is solid and works reasonably well. Some reviewers complained that the clay tended to discolor or droop (always a problem with clay in games, I suppose).
Replayability: 7
Fun Factor: 6
Worth Buying: 6
In this game, you're trying to draw a famous person doing something in a certain location so that other players can look at your picture and figure it out. For instance, in my playtest game I had to draw E. T. playing the bagpipes in the forest. (Okay, so E.T. isn't exactly a "person", but you get the idea.) The game comes with three decks of cards, scoresheets, and pads of paper.
Pretty much the description of the game is enough to give you an idea of what the game is like. The game is entertaining if you enjoy guessing at bad artwork, but the scoring mechanic is nothing special, and there's really not much in the box that you can't replicate on your own at the next party.
Replayability: 6
Fun Factor: 4
Worth Buying: 5
On each turn of this game, a reader draws a card and is told to tell a story of something that happened to them. They secretly roll a die, which tells them to either tell a truthful story or a fib. The other players then try to predict what the die roll was. (Well, you know what I mean.)
The game also comes with a timer, which seems to me to just make the game more tense. I like the fact that the scoring tokens are also the items used for the predictions; other games could learn a lesson from this one. The game is pretty much what you'd expect; I personally had a hard time with it because I can't tell when people are lying and I can't lie convincingly either.
Replayability: 7
Fun Factor: 6
Worth Buying: 5
It's like a trivia game ... but all the questions are multiple-choice legal questions. This also means that they're rather long to read.
And, well, that's it. The questions are interesting if you enjoy watching the occasional legal drama on television, I guess. Most of them are actually reasonably easy to piece out if you were paying attention in Civics class, but others seem rather off the wall. Fun but not exciting.
Replayability: 7
Fun Factor: 5
Worth Buying: 4
Each question card contains four items, three of which have something in common, one that doesn't. The current player can attempt to identify which one is the odd-one-out, and gets bonus points for saying why. If they miss, the next player gets a chance. To get everyone involved in the game, you're issued cards that let you steal the current question or force someone else to answer them.
There's nothing wrong with this game, but it lacks pizzazz. The questions are only moderately interesting, and the giant game board and pawns seem rather unnecessary (as their only purpose is to keep score up to 30). Same goes for the bulky "steal" and "challenge" cards. Still, none of these problems are showstoppers, and the game works pretty well for what it is.
Replayability: 5
Fun Factor: 7
Worth Buying: 5
Cherry, Pineapple, Orange, Strawberry. Which one doesn't belong? Unlike most quiz games, you can get credit even if your answer isn't the one on the back of the card, as long as you can convince a majority of the players that your answer is sensible.
(That also means that you don't want to play this game with players who think winning is more important than being open-minded and going with the spirit of the game.) I found the questions in this game to be much more interesting, perhaps because the authors were trying to write questions that were more ambiguous -- that certainly would explain the small number of questions that hurts this game's replayability score.
Replayability: 6
Fun Factor: 6
Worth Buying: 3
Well, if you've played the previous games from this publisher (titled "The 80's Game", "The 70's Game", and "The 60's Game"), this one adds nothing new but the questions. Answer trivia questions, each of which refers to some event that happened in the decade; to make progress on the game board, you must answer the additional question of whether that event happened in a particular year.
Nothing special here, except that I have to gripe (again) that the proper place to put the apostrophe is BEFORE the number ('90s), not AFTER. The apostrophe stands for "nineteen". I'm not sure what you're trying to say if you put it after. "The Ninety Is Game"? I was a bit surprised at how little pop trivia I remembered about the '90s; then again, I do have the excuse that I wasn't in the USA for the first two years of it.
Replayability: 6
Fun Factor: 6
Worth Buying: 6
This is a quiz game where all the questions contain a number in them. The categorization is rather cute although a bit confusing at first. The scoring system is rather innovative; each player has 5 digits they need to assemble to win the game, and for each correct answer, they roll a special pair of dice to get chits to compose their digits with.
I like the questions, because the "number" element gives you something to hone in on when answering. Their flaw is that the difficulty tends to run all over the place. The scoring system is cute but some players may find it tedious.
Replayability: 7
Fun Factor: 6
Worth Buying: 7
This is a quiz game that would be insulted at people calling it a trivia game, as all the questions are focused around probabilities and likelihood of things happening. The trappings are certainly like a trivia game, though, with players moving around on a board answering questions from a box. The game gets all players involved in each question by allowing everyone to bet on whether the active player will get the question correct, and at the end of the game the player with the most money wins -- which isn't necessarily the player who's best at guessing the right answer!
I'm pretty hard-pressed not to consider the probability that I'll be eaten by a crocodile to be "trivia", but whatever. This game will have the problem at not being able to find the right audience: casual game players will be annoyed at needing to be involved all the time (there's no way to walk off and get a snack without pausing the game), while more serious game players will find the luck element to be way too high. During our playtest we hit a few spaces that basically amounted to "go back to start"! It feels like the designer had lots of interesting ideas and attempted to squeeze all of them into one game.
Replayability: 5
Fun Factor: 5
Worth Buying: 5
Pretty much a quiz game where all the questions are based on knowledge of foreign cultures and customs. One nice change from other quiz games is that no matter whose turn it is, everyone (including the reader) answers and can make progress if they're right. Of course, this means that all the questions are multiple-choice, although I can assure you it doesn't make the questions significantly easier. First person to collect "passport stamps" from a variety of different locations wins.
The game is enjoyable and even educational. Even practical if you're the type who travels abroad often. Although I do have one reservation; something makes me feel uneasy about this game's approach of simplifying foreign cultural beliefs down to clearcut factoids. As long as you keep in mind that culture is something where there rarely are absolutes, the game works great.
Replayability: 5
Fun Factor: 1
Worth Buying: 1
This game is a trivia game that asks questions about US history and other Americana. The questions come under three difficulty levels (although I didn't really notice a significant difference) in three stacks of cards. There's also a set of pewter pawns and a game board, but I couldn't figure out if there was anything to do with them because the game proclaims that everyone who plays is a winner!
For all its glitz and high production values, I don't really understand this game. It basically feels like a bunch of questions distilled from a standard U.S. History class. Some questions seem very open-ended (the answer booklet actually ends with "etc."), some are too easy, and some don't really seem American at all (I got a question about William Shakespeare)! The gameplay is astoundingly dry; there aren't really any mechanics besides answering questions.
Replayability: 8
Fun Factor: 9
Worth Buying: 10
A quiz games based on lists of related items. Everyone in turn has to name an item on the list, and the round ends when either all items are named or 7 wrong answers are made. The next question is read by the player who's doing the worst, ensuring that they won't be losing any points the next round. There is a gimmick toy: a tiny pair of rubber "smarty" pants that goes to the last player to answer correctly; it's worth a point at the end of the round.
I'm a pushover for these list-based quiz games. This is one of the best implementations yet; the scoring and play system makes sure everyone gets involved, even the questioner as they have to make a side bet on how well the group will do. My only gripe is that I like reading questions and am often tempted to get things wrong just so I can be losing. I find the gimmick unnecessary but others think it lends a unique signature to the game.
Replayability: 7
Fun Factor: 6 (dependent on group)
Worth Buying: 6
This game is based on Michael Feldman's radio show of the same name. A cute little multiple-choice quiz game where everyone but two "contestants" answer, and then the two contestants are persuaded by the other players to agree with them. You get points for the right answer, and bonus points for effective use of persuasion. The clue giver, well, gets a bobble-head to play with.
The scoring is a bit tricky to read through, but it makes perfect sense and works well when you do it. Kudos to the designers for spending time on that aspect. The trivia is above average and player-interaction is good. The game probably won't work well when there are too few players, and certainly works badly when everyone knows the right answer, but otherwise I'd expect this game to be a crowd-pleaser.
Replayability: 6
Fun Factor: 7
Worth Buying: 5
Roll the dice and move your space alien around the board. Your goal is to get him back with enough power boosters, but before he can do that he'll need to get tools to survive hostile planets and you'll need to answer science questions.
This is the sort of game I was always trying to design in the second grade. I actually think it's been a while before I've seen one of these roll-dice-and-move games that doesn't run on some symmetric grid, and has paths running all over the place. A bit reminiscient of Talisman, although this game is much shorter and much more educational (although someone with a science background like me will find the questions too easy). There are lots of components to play with; although clearly aimed at younger children, I actually managed to enjoy the game.
Replayability: 6
Fun Factor: 4
Worth Buying: 4
In this game, players start with a modest sum of cash and go around the board buying and selling stock. Most spaces determine the stock; to buy, land on the space, roll a die for the price, decide how many shares you're going to buy. To sell, land on the space, decide how many shares you're going to sell, then roll two (or three) dice and choose the biggest number as the sell price. This simple mechanic means that profiting is likely but not guaranteed. The game also adds a simulation of options (both call and put) and dividends as well.
Superficially this game is a Monopoly clone; roll the dice, move your pawn, make a (usually) trivial decision based on what square you land on. Even the artwork looks similar. To me, however, the mechanics of what you do are sufficiently different that I'd prefer to think of this game as a reinvention, rather than a copy or extension, of Monopoly. This doesn't mean it's better (I think it's about as fun as Monopoly) but it's a nice change of pace.
Replayability: 3
Fun Factor: 5
Worth Buying: 3
The main game mechanic in this game is short term memory. A booklet contains assorted lists of five items each, and most of the spaces involve having a list read to you twice, and then having you remember enough of them. Winning the game involves a mostly luck-based hunt through the board followed by a move to the center, where you have to get all 5 out of 5. There are some random-event cards that add spice to the game.
I'm don't find the game that exciting, perhaps because I don't find my past lapses of memory particularly interesting or humorous. It's interesting to see short-term memory being explicitly tested in a game (I'm especially fond of the party game Rapid Recall), but this one doesn't hit the spot. The hunt is random and tedious -- not a fun combination.
Replayability: 6
Fun Factor: 7
Worth Buying: 5
A nice little "guess the identity of your neighbor" game. Each player is secretly assigned a character, and has a pawn that goes around the board, mostly by die rolls. Many spaces result in taking some of the seven pieces of "evidence" and pinning them on a particular character. Every circuit around the board there is a difficult-to-avoid space called the "Grand Jury"; if you land on that space when your character has two pieces of evidence against them, you lose.
A lot of the strategy in this game is based on making moves that will fool other players as to what your identity is, since once they know they will of course try to pin evidence on you. The game provides lots of room for tactics by providing players with "Get-Away" cards that effectively allows them to predict their die rolls. The game definitely works better than I would have expected from reading the rules and I'd play it again.
Replayability: 6
Fun Factor: 5
Worth Buying: 4
Well, there's no board to move a pawn around, but somehow this game still has that feel. Players spin a spinner each turn on a board filled with properties: if you land on an unowned property, it's yours; if you land on your own property, you collect money; and if you land on an opponent's property, you can sue them. Suing is a moderately elaborate deal where you decide how much to sue for, pay the non-refundable legal fees, attempt a settlement, and then get a verdict if there isn't one. They tend to cause massive monetary swings.
The game is a rather humorous simulation of the legal business but it's not clear to me if there are actually any strategies. Since the outcome of each lawsuit is a swing that can make a big difference and it is dependent on a die roll, there's not much predictability. The game text is entertaining on first play but I suspect will get old quick.
Replayability: 2
Fun Factor: 3 (okay, 6 if you're me)
Worth Buying: 1
Remember those matchstick puzzles, where the sticks form an equation that's incorrect, and you have to move one stick so that it is correct? Well, this "game" has a few hundred of those puzzles on flimsy cards, and comes with a bunch of shortened popsicle/craft sticks. It even has a few of those wooden screw recess caps so that you can make the dots in the division symbols.
Although the sticks are shortened to about 3 inches long, they're still a bit big to do the puzzles comfortably. (It's also not clear to me if having the sticks actually makes the puzzle easier to solve.) So, even assuming that you (or the child that you're buying this game with) has the patience to go through all four hundred nearly-similar problems, they won't get much more value after that. It's no surprise that this was one of the leftover picks at the lottery.
Replayability: 3
Fun Factor: 5
Worth Buying: 2
The game components consist of a jigsaw puzzle based number line, pieces with items on them (portrayed from 0 to 20), a deck of cards with the Arabic numerals, and a deck with the English and Spanish names for the numbers. Oh, and two wiggly arrows. There are many games in this box, but all center around identifying numbers of one sort or another.
For adults, this game is of course completely uninteresting, but we're not the target audience. From what I remember of my childhood I think I would enjoy playing with the components and learning about numbers that way, although I suspect even then I wouldn't find the game (which involves clapping hands as the primary form of cluegiving) that interesting.
Replayability: 3
Fun Factor: 3
Worth Buying: 2
A deck of cards, each of which either shows a picture of a noun or a picture of a verb (which has a green alligator doing that verb). Players draw combinations of cards and then have to act them out, trying to get the other players to guess them. The particular deck we evaluated had both Spanish and English on the card.
I felt like this was a deck of vocabulary flash cards. The game itself was simply charades used on top of that. Probably reasonably interesting for young kids, but once you actually know what all the cards means, there's not much entertainment value left.
Replayability: 7
Fun Factor: 6
Worth Buying: 8
Yet another tile-laying word game variant. This one involves creating a chain of words on a fixed layout under a certain time limit. One nice innovation is that vowels don't have point values; instead, they are multipliers that increase the value of adjacent consonants if played correctly.
The game itself feels like a more advanced version of the old Milton Bradley (unsung) classic game "Jitters." The scoring idea for the vowels is great and I wish more word games would use it. I highly recommend playing in teams of two; otherwise the game completely lacks player interaction. (On the other hand, I know of very few word games that do.)
Replayability: 7
Fun Factor: 5
Worth Buying: 4
(No official site; order at 740-385-9468) A word-based contract rummy game. ("Contract Rummy" means that the first meld has to be a particular type of meld, which tends to get harder in later rounds. This one adds the mechanism of a "bonus word" each round; players cannot use letters in the bonus word unless another player has already contributed those letters to it. Finishing the bonus word is worth bonus points, and there are wild cards which can stand for any letter and be substituted in.
I have to admit that I don't have much of a knowledge of word rummy games (I only know of about five) but having a contract rummy mechanic for words is new to me. I like it. The instructions are a bit hard to plow through, but this game does have one significant problem: the rounds are too easy! There's a rule that says a player can't go out in the first round, but all that means is that the first player goes out in the second round. It's not clear to me how the game can be made more difficult without making it impossible to play -- perhaps a mechanism akin to Phase 10, where players have their individual string of contracts to make?
Replayability: 7
Fun Factor: 4
Worth Buying: 5
The game comes with a 5x5 board and a bag of plastic disks in four colors/suits with Scrabble-like letter/score pairs on one face. The board is laid out; 9 spaces are "bonus" spots where the suit is known but the letter is not. Players take turns; on your turn, you draw tiles from the board, and all the tiles you draw must be used to make one word. Taking the bonus tiles adds points to your score but are risky because you don't know what letter they are.
This game is a nice concept and plays okay but is dissatisfying on many fronts. The arrangement of pieces on the board is nice but completely unnecessary; you could make do with a 9-space board (for the bonuses) and a pool of 16 tiles, since adjacency is completely irrelevant. There's very little interaction between players and nothing to do when it's not your turn. We discovered that the score you get from grabbing the four corners dwarfs any other possible score, so there's no reason to play other strategies. Good components but the game needs a bit more work, I think.
Replayability: 9
Fun Factor: 6
Worth Buying: 7
This game looks almost exactly like Scrabble. It has one big difference from Scrabble, though; the preponderance of wild tiles. Unlike Scrabble, where a wild tile can only stand for one letter and must stand for that letter in both directions, in this game they can stand for as many letters as the player wishes, and stand for differences in both directions. There are slight differences in the grid; some spaces have a "turn to wild" space where any tile you place on it must go face down and is wild; however, it is not easy to use these spaces without hitting the adjacent "minus 10" space.
I feel that this game is definitely an improvement over Scrabble. The preponderance and usage of wild tiles means that longer words can be formed and there is less of an advantage in memorizing two- and three-letter words (not to mention seven- and eight-letter words). Challenges are more interesting because there are more potential words to worry about (you don't declare the words when you lay down tiles). And the fact that certain tiles get played face-down adds a dimension to tile-counting. However, a bit like Hexes Chess, I'm afraid that Scrabble enthusiasts are probably too entrenched to be willing to switch.
Replayability: 2
Fun Factor: 3
Worth Buying: 1
This game comes with several cards on which grids of consonants have been printed. The game is basically a puzzle (on the other hand, so is Boggle) where, for each row, column, and (partial) diagonal of letters, players try to find as many words as they can with only those consonants. For example, if one row of letters were STD, you could have STUD, SUITED, or SAUTEED. The cards have a supposedly complete list of words on the back.
It takes a really good game to compete favorably when it only contains sheets of printed paper and a timer. This isn't good enough. The idea is fine as word games go; it's that there isn't anything really engaging about the format. Word game enthusiasts might enjoy this more but even then they'll probably be wanting something extra.
Replayability: 5
Fun Factor: 5
Worth Buying: 3
A reasonably simple draw-one-and-play-one card game. The main theme is to find cards in your goal color, and play them on yourself, which net you points. What makes the game exciting is that about half of the cards are special black cards than can be played out of turn, with interesting effects such as stealing cards, taking extra turns, or nullifying players' stacks.
The game was fine, but I really didn't find anything innovative enough to endear me to it. Like so many "play out of turn" mechanics, the best strategy seems to be hoarding onto the powerful cards until near the end, and then play a whole lot of them before quickly finishing the game. The game makes this a bit more difficult by restricting players to one black card during the last round, but it's pretty easy to see that coming.
Replayability: 3
Fun Factor: 9
Worth Buying: 6
(The game is not on their website yet.) Lay out 25 circus animal cards -- there are five colors and five species. Now, draw a goal card, which has four different animals on it in four different colors. Find the animal/color pair that's missing and slap it!
A simple game trying to cash in on the "Set" idea (much like last year's "Hocus Pocus"). This one's a bit better, because at least the set is complete. Unfortunately, there's not that much depth to the game, and I doubt it will get that much play except among the 5-year-old kids it's targeted at. The cards are made from stiff durable cardboard, a very excellent decision and I commend the company for going that extra mile. One variation: instead of leaving the correct animal out, remove it from the tableau entirely. This makes the game speed up to an exciting climax!
Replayability: 3
Fun Factor: 7
Worth Buying: 4
(This game is not on the website yet.) The cards in this deck contain many geometric shapes (of different color and sizes) on them in a random arrangement. Each player gets a fair fraction of the deck and simultaneously turns up the top card into a public center area. The winner of the round is the first person to successfully count how many spheres are on all the public cards combined -- but one more twist is that you have to represent your answer in binary using a personal set of cards labeled 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16.
The game measures two skills: Counting fast, and converting to binary fast. That's about it. I found that I was reasonably faster than the other players, but it wasn't particularly interesting. Still, a nice light filler game, and if you like testing those skills (certainly useful ones for modern-age kids to learn) it's worth trying.
Replayability: 5
Fun Factor: 7
Worth Buying: 6
(This game is not on the website yet.) A fast game with a pinball theme. Each card has four colored pop bumpers, each with a number on it, as well as a pinball that has a color and size (which real pinballs don't have, but whatever). The pinballs dictate a sequence to follow the cards -- for example, a large blue pinball means "Go to the card with the largest blue pop bumper that hasn't been used in the sequence yet." First person to slap the last card in the sequence wins a point, takes that card, and game continues by drawing the first card in a new sequence.
My initial instincts told me that this game might be too easy because since the next sequence contains the same cards, parts of the sequence might be the same. This turns out to be not the case because of the "hasn't been used" rule. There's also a minor flaw in that sometimes there's a tie. This doesn't happen very often and I think it can be dealt with easily. Overall, a fast-thinking game that is simple but satisfying.
Replayability: 8
Fun Factor: 5
Worth Buying: 6
Players get dealt 6 cards each, and take turns bidding how many particular symbols there are in everyone's hands combined. Bids must go higher and higher or else be challenged. As players lose challenges, they get fewer cards; last person left wins.
As can be divined from the description, this game is basically Liar's Dice (aka Perudo) with cards. I found this game surprisingly harder to explain than I thought it would be; part of the reason is that so many things run counter to what people expect from a card game. For example, the cards each have a number, shape, and color -- and the three attributes are not independent! The cards are of rather poor quality, and in many purposes the cards are used for purposes that other gaming equipment would work better at. The game has some great ideas ("Last Chence", "Perfecto", and "Take Sides") that would be a great addition to spice up Liar's Dice -- but the idea of turning everything into cards wasn't it.
Replayability: 5
Fun Factor: 7
Worth Buying: 5
In this game, each player is a presidential candidate starting with 5% of the vote. Throughout the game, you'll be playing cards, some of which are ways to get more of the vote, but many of which are "secrets" that you try to pin on other candidates. If these secrets are revealed during the campaign, the candidate will lose votes; but if they can keep them hidden until election day, they may actually help!
The game plays rather randomly but in an entertaining sort of way; it's not unlike many other card games where the point of the game is not to provide interesting game elements but rather to satirize a particular aspect of real life. The game has a mechanism that ensures that it doesn't end too soon, but it doesn't work that well -- I'd recommend making sure that "Primaries" and "Election Day" are in the bottom half of the deck when they are shuffled in.
Replayability: 4
Fun Factor: 6
Worth Buying: 6
This rummy-like game has a special deck where each card has a letter, a number, and a color. The only letters are "k", "u", and "d", and the goal of the game is to place out the word "kuuduk" where adjacent letters either share a color or number in common, but not both. Some spice is added to the game with cards that reverse order of play or steal cards from other players.
The rules to this game should seem simple, but in our playtesting we kept on having disagreements on how to interpret the rules. Since the game itself is rather unique, we couldn't really draw upon any classic games to base our rulings on. But regardless of the details, the basic game is playable but not very exciting.
Replayability: 8
Fun Factor: 8
Worth Buying: 8
This looks like a cute little kid's game, but don't be fooled; it's actually a reasonably sophisticated strategy card game (actually it plays more like a tile-laying game, but I digress). What starts out as a small arrangement of cards quickly grows as players crowd penguins next to entertainers so that they will perform and score points for the penguins around them. What keeps the game from being shallow is the fact that the lowest-scoring player each time gets a benefit that can help them substantially near the end of the game, leading to some interesting psychological jostling.
I chose to take this game home in the lottery (it was sixth on my list). After I did so there was a murmur throughout the crowd; later I learned that this was the murmur of "Oh darn, I was hoping that no else had noticed that this game was a gem." It quickly disappeared in the lottery after that.
Replayability: 4
Fun Factor: 3
Worth Buying: 5
Simple Rummy game based on Native Fishing off the Hawaiian Islands. The rules are a bit confusing (for instance, there is a card labeled the "Ulua / Giant Trevally" that the rules call the "Giant Ulua,") but I believe the goal is to meld out a canoe, hook, and bait, and then collect a hand of five harvestable fish. There are a few weather effects that can hurt other players, and a few fish that do nothing but take up space.
The game has nice art but the gameplay is shallow. On the other hand, how many games do you know that let you have a card that says Humuhumunukunuku-apua'a?
Replayability: 9
Fun Factor: 8
Worth Buying: 8
In this game, players start with gemstones and attempt to get the most points by the end of the game. Each turn everyone rolls their own die and moves clockwise around the board. Your space specifies a gemstone award and a (small) point award. Everyone then secretly chooses if they're going to go for the gemstones, the points, or an extra die roll (people who finish the round by completing a circuit get bonus points). If three or more people go for the same award, nobody gets it; and if one person goes for the award, they get it for free. But the interesting part of the game comes in when two people both go for the same award; they then have to enter a "bartering" round where they each must offer successively better sets of gemstones to each other for the right to take the contested award.
I'm not actually sure if I know of any game that has the "barter" mechanic this game has, which is something of a cross between an auction and a negotiated trade (Alea's "Edel, Stein, and Reich", basically an enhanced version of the same design, doesn't count). It's a unique mechanic that creates interaction without the game turning into a free-for-all dominated by fast-talking. Another nice factor is that you rarely need to wait for other players. One house rule that you might want to try out (taken from ES&R): when one person gets the sole bonus for having the most gemstones, have them return half of their stones (rounded down) instead of 3 as the rules say. This makes the later rounds more exciting.
Replayability: 8
Fun Factor: 7
Worth Buying: 7
The box tries to use the adage "Two minutes to learn and a lifetime to master", but I'm afraid that (unlike Othello) both of those estimates are probably a bit off. Like many other Leo Colovinni games, this game is based on trying concentrate your forces on a gradually-shrinking landscape, but I doubt I could summarize the details in a paragraph of this size.
Unlike many of his other games, however, this one has a much lighter surface story, rendering it more accessible to casual players while not really losing its underlying game. I'm a tad skeptical about the enjoyability of the standard game with player-selected setup (I'd probably prefer a random setup that gets the game quickly). A solid game and I was glad to see it win.
Replayability: 5
Fun Factor: 6
Worth Buying: 7
Each player is given 5 "geists" they need to capture. To capture a "geist", you need to land you pawn on that square and have a specific number of, well, monetary units -- in exact change! On each turn, the number of your square determines how many spaces you can move, and the square you move to determines how much money you gain or lose -- again in exact change! The combination of needing to position your moves in sync with your money makes the wide-open board seem like a multi-dimensional maze.
This is either a game which you'll figure out the concept immediately or one that you have no chance at understanding. Playing with players who know the system can be quite interesting, as then the advanced powers and abilities come into play. But playing with someone who just can't wrap their mind around it will be so excruciatingly slow you'll want to avoid doing things to them just so that the game can progress. The artwork is beautiful and the graphic design is excellent. I'd like to play it more, but I don't know if I could ever find the right group to play it with.
Replayability: 9
Fun Factor: 6 (4 to 9)
Worth Buying: 8
Probably the first posthumously-published Sid Sackson game, this game gives an excellent framework for the dominant game mechanic of negotiation. Players own "Investors" that are instrumental in making "Deals." Each "Deal" has a known quantity of money going to the players, as long as they have the necessary Investors and can agree on how to split it. You can also get cards that gain you the ability to put opponent Investors out of commission for a turn, bring out your own temporary Investors, steal other Investors, or even take over the entire deal and get the final say on whether it goes through!
This game isn't for everybody, although it will be hard to predict whether you'll like it without actually playing it, as there's no other game (that I know of) that uses a similar negotiation format. There are a few problems with the game if you're playing for the first time; the instructions are confusing (I highly recommend getting someone experienced to teach you the game), and the cards can sometimes be confusing to read in the thick of the game (the recruiting cards look too much like a particular Investor card, for example). I also recommend playing with the rule that players with more Investors draw fewer cards, as well as the rule that becoming the "Boss" doesn't affect whose turn it is.
Replayability: 8
Fun Factor: 8
Worth Buying: 8
This Moon & Weissblum design has been described as "Rack-O on a map". Basically, the game has tiles for each country in Africa, and to win you need to have ten tiles representing a legitimate road trip through adjacent countries in order. But you can't move your tiles around; instead, you only get to replace one tile each turn.
The rules are simple to teach and the setting has the added bonus of being educational; this was the one I was most sure of winning Mensa Select. I highly recommend the house rule that the first player to arrange their initial hand wins the privilege of going first. People who like a bit more difficulty in this game should consider the similarly-designed Europa Tour -- the ships in that game are trickier to deal with than the cars in this one.
Replayability: 3
Fun Factor: 1
Worth Buying: 2
Based on the TV series, players build gates, troops, and ships, and use those to gain territory or take over enemy gates. First player to control enough area wins.
Every year there's a game that has such complicated rules that only kids will bother to understand it. This is it. After you decipher the rules, you realize that the game is quite similar to Risk (which, come to think of it, also had rather opaque rules) but on a significantly more regular grid and with more army types. Both changes probably sounded like a good idea but only serve to make the game more boring and complicated. And yet the game isn't nearly as sophisticated as, say, a modern-day computer wargame. A friend called it "a game that needs to be a piece of software, except that then it'd be 20 years out of date." I'm inclined to agree.
Replayability: 8
Fun Factor: 9
Worth Buying: 8
This is a little game of ship-building and sailing amongst islands in the South Pacific. Players place cute little wooden ships on the board; when a dock is full, the ships set sail. They might sink; they might survive and land on another island; or they could even come back to the same island! Players score points based on how many islands they occupy at the end of the game.
This game was my favorite of all the entrants. In the midgame there are often moves that are controllable and yet chaotic, with large chain reactions involving ships leaving islands, rearranging, and returning, often resulting in cute little suicide missions that were often playacted in our game with the tactile wooden pieces and solid cardboard tiles. For a change of pace, try playing 2 (and 3) player games with twice the number of colors. Warning: don't play this game with anyone who is prone to silent overanalysis.
Replayability: 9
Fun Factor: 7
Worth Buying: 7
Describing this game without pictures is probably impossible. It's a 2-player game with perfect information where you're putting holed pieces on columns. You have blockers and scorers; your blockers keep your opponent's scorers from taking the space directly above them, and whomever has the most scorers atop columns wins.
I'm a bit surprised this game didn't win but am happy it didn't; although it's not clearly broken I suspect the winning strategy is calculable with a computer. Still, a reasonable coffee-table game and well in line with Pin Games' other offerings.
Replayability: 3
Fun Factor: 4
Worth Buying: 2
This game is three-in-a-row on a 4x4 board. What makes it different from Tic-Tac-Toe is the ability to play up to four players, and special moves such as the ability to play on top of another piece, and the ability to take a stack of pieces and flip them. The pieces are made out of comfortable foam.
I've never known any generalized form of three-in-a-row to work, and this is no exception. The two-player game leads to a quick stalemate, and the multiplayer version devolves quickly into a highly defensive game, where each player needs to make the one move that will stop the next player from winning.
Replayability: 5
Fun Factor: 4
Worth Buying: 4
The game is similar in concept to last year's winner Octiles: you have a pawn at one corner of the board and are attempting to get to the opposite corner. The tiles form a maze, and each turn you may pick up a piece of the maze and rotate it before you move your pawn.
Superficially this game looks great. The wooden pieces are elegant (although some testers complained about the smell of fresh varnish) and reasonably comfortable to manipulate. But actually playing the game revealed a problem: there really isn't much difficulty in the game. It's too easy to see the results of a particular move, and certain maze configurations will lead to almost instant wins -- unless the player at the opposite end is playing a highly-defensive tactic, in which case the game will stalemate. One of the reasons is probably the limitation of pieces only be allowed to turn. In Pin's Octiles or Ravensburger's Master Labyrinth (both similar games), often the configuration of the whole maze would seem to change after a move. This is a great game to look at; but not a particularly great one to play.
Replayability: 10
Fun Factor: 7
Worth Buying: 8
Chess on a hexagonal grid. The grid is three-colored, and each player starts with a set of 15 pieces that has two fewer pawns and one more bishop.
Ho hum, another chess variant. Wait. This one actually works. The generalization of the pieces is amazingly sensible and the game plays a lot like actual chess. Unlike actual chess, there are no grandmasters and no opening plays and ending combinations based on centuries of experienced play (which is what I always disliked about chess). A few unexpected differences from chess appear occasionally with welcome surprise, such as the inability of a single king to stop two adjacent pawns from queening. I heard a few judges complain about the price; I guess they haven't tried buying a high-quality chess set recently.
Replayability: 4
Fun Factor: 4
Worth Buying: 7
An abstract game with simple rules: Start with a hex grid. On your turn, place one of your stones on a hex, or place a tower on a hex. Each hex can only have one item in it. If you have the most "stone power" next to a tower (and it's at least 5), you own the tower. A stone has power equal to the number of non-tower hexes it is adjacent to. First player to own 4 towers wins.
The game is simply-described and I'm afraid it might be too simple, period. The 2-player game is probably easily analyzed (although I could be wrong) and the multi-player game tends to devolve into each player keeping the next player from winning; I'd suspect most games would end in ties and therefore go to the tiebreaker of whomever has the most stones. The visuals were good but not overwhelming (and we couldn't figure out which end of the towers was supposed to be up).
Replayability: 8
Fun Factor: 7
Worth Buying: 6
This is from the same people as last year's winner Blokus, and although visually it is quite different, the fundamental idea is the same. Each player gets a complete set of dicubes, tricubes, and tetracubes. Players take turns placing them in a three-dimensional structure, with the restriction that your first piece must touch the face of someone's piece, and all subsequent pieces must touch the face of at leas one of your previous pieces. The grid squares have restriction on how high pieces can be piled up, so at the end of the game you'll have a very nice-looking starcase, pyramid, or cube. The winner is the player with the most faces visible from directly above.
The strategy seems to be similar to Blokus; in the opening, make early moves that get you mobility (although it doesn't pay to be too greedy); in the midgame, carve out small areas for yourself; in the endgame, just find places to put your pieces. The pieces are wooden and coarse and the game seems to have an Incan motif; while this might appeal to some, I greatly preferred Blokus' clean new-age design. Something like the pieces in Kramer and Kiesling's game Pueblo (from Ravensburger/Rio Grande) would have made me enjoy this game much more. (And for that matter, a scoring mechanism like Pueblo's would also have been a plus over the solitary goal of Rumis.)
Replayability: 10
Fun Factor: 7
Worth Buying: 10
An abstract game where each player controls five rings (I like to think of them as "cursors") that move around and drop colored Reversi-like tokens. The general rule is: choose a cursor, drop a token there, move the cursor along the lines to an empty space (subject to certain restrictions) and all tokens that it passes over change colors. The goal is to get five-in-a-row of your color token. Those tokens and one cursor of your is then removed (making it harder for you to repeat the feat). A player wins when they remove three cursors.
The prolific publisher Rio Grande Games, which used to submit more games to the event, has scaled down to just sending the Project GIPF games. Who can blame them, since two of them (Dvonn and Zertz) represents their only wins? Although one probably has to play much more than I did to get a true feeling of the depth of the games, I found Yinsh to be a better game than any of its precursors (pun intended). It would have been a severe injustice for this to have not won the Mensa Select award. (Incidentally, what's the best move for Black in the fourth photograph?)
Replayability: 8
Fun Factor: 6
Worth Buying: 7
A beautifully-designed game with a theme of colorful frogs jumping towards the center, but the game is basically a variant of backgammon where both colors are proceeding in the same direction (in that sense, perhaps this game is closer to Senet than backgammon). There are enough twists to differentiate this game from backgammon, however; blots can be hit as normal, but a stack of two can be covered (and rendered immobile), while a taller stack is immune. There is also a special piece which locks all pieces underneath it and blocks any pieces from landing on it; since this piece can be moved after most turns, it is not useful for permanent strategies but adds a lot of tactical possibilities.
I can tell that a lot of care and playtesting went into this game to avoid ugly stalemates or endless play (for instance, the "safety zone" near the end of the game), but after two games it just doesn't grab me as much as backgammon does; too often the right move seemed obvious and uninteresting. Possibly with more plays deeper intricacies will surface themselves, though, so I won't give up on it yet.
Replayability: 6
Fun Factor: 7
Worth Buying: 8
A simple deduction game that feels strangely tense and yet satisfying. Players draw tiles with numbers on them and then order them according to fixed rules (small number on left, black less than white if they have the same number). Then they must guess the identity of other players' tiles based on their position and their color.
The tiles are big and solid and work perfectly for what they're designed to do. My only gripe is that they should have made all the black tiles even and the white tiles odd instead of needing extra rules to deal with ordering identical numbers.
Replayability: 6
Fun Factor: 5
Worth Buying: 4
Fish move around the sea eating other fish in an attempt to rule everything. Or, if you're the type who likes peeling off the story -- move your tokens on a 5x5 grid, stacking on other tokens in an attempt to be the only person with tokens left. The game reuses a mechanic the designer Reiner Knizia used in Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation: play a card simultaneously, and your card gets added to the your own strength to determine the winner.
A much more lighter and more chaotic game than LotR: The Confrontation, and that's probably why I don't like it nearly as much. It just feels to me that a player has very little control over their fate; there are too many unpredictable factors, including who other people attack and what cards they play. The artwork and pieces are functional but for some reason don't grab me.
Replayability: 8
Fun Factor: 7
Worth Buying: 8
The game looks daunting at first, but it's actually pretty simple to explain if you're familiar with the classic Stratego: you're playing Stratego where pieces that are killed drop their equipment, which can be picked up by other pieces. This means that there's a *lot* more tactical possibilities compared to Stratego.
The look of the game is exotic but quite managable. Be warned that if you buy this game that you're going to have to spend quite a bit of time applying decals before you can play, but the game is quite worth it in its innovation.
Replayability: 3
Fun Factor: 7
Worth Buying: 8
Thinkfun (nee Binary Arts) has released this nice collection of eight classical mechanical puzzles, all done with nice solid components. The goal is easy to see but the puzzles themselves are rather tricky.
They have an excellent hint system and the look and feel are great. Unfortunately, while these are nice bits to have on your coffee table to guests to play with, you're not going to get much replay value out of them once you know the solutions (and if you're an avid puzzle collector you probably will have seen these).
Replayability: 3
Fun Factor: 8
Worth Buying: 8
This is the portable version of the 4-player boardgame "Perfect Timing!" game. It tests a skill that you won't see in any other game -- the ability to get a stopwatch to show as close as possible to a specified time without going over. (Well, except for the 1992 Sega arcade game "Tantoaru", but that was only part of that game.) The board game had a bunch of bells and whistles to augment the basic mechanic; this one does away with all that and just has two stopwatches and a pile of cards.
I almost like this better than the boardgame, which had a lot of management didn't seem like part of the game. If you don't enjoy the skill tested by the game, you're not going to like the game no matter what additional glitz they put on it. And if you do, this simple version is really all that's needed. The $15 price tag was scoffed at by a few reviewers, but try buying 2 stopwatches and see how much it'll cost you.