I’ll admit it, when I first joined Twitter I was completely against it.  No really, I had just started TheGameAisle.com and the last thing I needed was another way to waste time on an unpaid hobby.  But I realized that my readers weren’t always going to be checking to see if I had posted something new on my site; I needed another way (other than an RSS feed) to get the word out on new articles.  Of course, I was also hoping to get a couple new readers too.
So I …

 
If the kids in your neighborhood aren’t back in school yet, they will be soon.  So in honor of the “back to school” theme we see right and left at this time of year, I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about “educational” games.  (yawn, I know…but hear me out.)
Many of you know that I wholeheartedly believe EVERY game is educational.  All games teach “soft skills” like playing well with others, taking turns, dealing with defeat, planning ahead, etc.  But then there is a whole segment of games that …

I wrote this article for Global Toy News but thought some of my readers would find it interesting too.  Enjoy!
One of my favorite naming stories starts with a physicist’s discovery of a “gravitationally completely collapsed object” and, frankly, no one cared.  It doesn’t sound interesting, it doesn’t sound fun, actually it sounds like something only the scientists in his field are going to geek out about.  However, months later he change the name to “black hole” and public interest exploded and the term has made it’s way into mainstream vocabulary.  Naming …

HAPPY APRIL FOOLS!

Rules, instructions, directions – whatever you want to call them, they’re outdated.  No one reads them unless they have to anyway so why bother including them?  That’s exactly what the manufacturers of the new card game UnRuly thought.
Why no rules?
“Right after we created the game we planned on putting rules in the box because that’s what everyone does – but then we asked ourselves, why?  No one reads them.  We thought our game was self-explanatory enough so we decided to skip the rules and avoid the extra paper. …

To read Part 1 of this series, click HERE.  To read Part 2 of this series, click HERE.
Here are some of the continuing trends I saw during Toy Fair 2011:

Tile-Placement games
In the last two years we’ve seen a bunch of Blokus-like games such as Callisto by University Games, Cir*Kis by Winning Moves/Hasbro and Blockers by Briarpatch.  New additions this year – both of which I think look pretty fun — include City Square Off by Gamewright and PathWords by ThinkFun.  In City Square Off each player has their own board …