Back in the summer of 2009 I wrote an article on one of my FAVORITE dice games: Can’t Stop by Sid Sackson.  In this article I mentioned that I got my copy back in 2007 and it wasn’t going to be the easiest game to find — but good news for all, NOW IT IS!

You can scroll down to read my original review, but before that I’d like to rave about it’s new design.  The new Gryphon Games version is on the right and the older Face2Face games version is on the left in the pictures below. (*there are many older versions of Can’t Stop, this just happens to be my older copy.)

The games looks pretty similar but there are several improvements that I really appreciate.   First and by far the most important, the movers are so much easier to hold.  Maybe it’s the Industrial Designer in me, but the old game’s movers irked me — but since I loved the game so much I overlooked that they were small and really hard to hold.  When I heard that Gryphon Games was redoing Can’t Stop I was praying they redid the movers — and they did!  The new movers are taller and don’t nest as well but that actually makes it easier to see whose piece is stacked underneath. (see picture at the top of the page for the new version, and scroll down to see the old pieces in action.)  I also appreciate the built in cups in the plastic box insert — they’re not necessary, but boy are they handy!  And when you lift the board up the insert has a spot for the dice and the “runners” which is nice too.  Overall, the only negative I could find is that the new version is a tad bit larger box (13×13) — now, in all fairness, it was already a large game box (12×12) so does the extra inch of height and width make a difference?  Not really.  So go, buy, enjoy and win!  (Updated game stats are listed after the 2009 review below.)

My July 2009 Review:

Today’s pick is Can’t Stop by Sid Sackson.  Currently this dice games tops tall the others because I’m just so addicted to it and it’s an oldie but a goodie.  It was originally published in 1980 by Parker Brothers but was reprinted by Face 2 Face games back in 2007 and that’s when I got my copy.

The game is so easy to learn and play.  You’re trying to move your pieces from the bottom of the board to the top in columns numbered 2-12.  There are only 3 spaces in the 2 and 12 columns and 13 in the 7 column and since 7s are the easiest to roll using a pair of standard dice, it makes sense. The board is shaped like a giant stop sign which is a little ugly, but the shape easily lends itself to the bell curve that defines the odds in rolling dice.  So on a turn, you get 4 dice to roll and once rolled, you choose how to pair up the dice so it’s most advantageous to you.  Then you use 3 “runners” to move your pieces up the columns towards the top of the board.  And since there are only 3 runners you can only attempt 3 columns per turn.  The “Can’t Stop” part of the game comes in when you are holding the dice saying “I can roll just one more time, just once more, I can get a 2,7 or 9…then I’ll stop.”  You end up saying the same thing turn after turn until you gain some willpower to actually stop and move your pieces to where your runners are or you bust and don’t roll a 2,7,9 and the runners are removed from the board and without any advancement of your pieces, you pass the four dice to the next player and say “why did I keep going?!”

As the game progresses people who are really lucky or have the “slow and steady” mentality start to close out columns by reaching the top first.  Once a player closes out a pre-determined number of columns they win.  (The number of columns depends on the number of players.)

The thing about this game that I love isn’t that I have to fight my dice addiction to have a chance of winning – no, it’s that there is some luck mixed with a little mental game too.  The question becomes, how far in the lead do I have to be in a column before I should start working in other columns?  It kind of depends on how if your opponents are lucky, but also how gutsy they are.  It really makes me kind of antsy for my turn – and if I lose I want to play again…right away…because I just can’t stop playing.

So I guess Sid Sackson knew what he was doing when he created this game.  Addictive + fun is always a good combination in my mind.  Somewhere I read a quote from Sid that said something like “games should be easy to learn, give lots of strategic possibilities, include interaction amongst players and be played within 90 minutes.”  He had me until the last part.  I hate long games (which is why you won’t find a review for Monopoly on this site).  I think games should be played in 30 minutes or less and then if I have time to play it again, great.  Besides, it keeps people who want…er need… to win interested in the game even if they are getting killed because they know they have a chance of starting over in a couple minutes.  Ha!

So if you can find it get, yourself a copy of Can’t Stop.  It may be a bit of a hunt to find – try little mom & pop online retailers and eBay, though why someone would want to give up their copy of this classic is beyond me.  Maybe they don’t know what kind of fun they’re missing.

UPDATED Can’t Stop stats:
~$30 Amazon, FunAgain Games, some mom & pop stores
2-4 players
~15-30 minutes
Ages 7 and up (but I think the box says 9)

Every holiday season at some point I end up raiding the game shelves at my father’s house looking for something to play.  I’ll admit that over the years, I’ve “liberated” many of my favorites and they now reside in one of my game cabinets, but there are some that I’ve left for sentimental reasons (and there are others that haven’t made the cross-town journey simply because I’m afraid of the wrath if he noticed they were gone). The games at my father’s house are classics from my childhood and earlier.  If something happened to them, some may be impossible to replace but others you can still find on store shelves, because good games are like that, they don’t die – they get reincarnated.

Most of the time games are resurrected using the same name to give consumers that warm-fuzzy nostalgia feeling; great examples out now are Bed Bugs, Hedbanz, Shark Attack, Mall Madness and Rock’Em Sock‘Em Robots.  All except Rock’Em Sock’Em (it’s a bit before my time) were out when I was a kid, disappeared for a while and came back.  Bed Bugs even reused the artwork from the 1985 box when Patch Products rereleased it this year, so it looks just like it did when I was putting it on my wish list for Santa.  On the other hand, Spin Master had some really dated box art for Hedbanz and opted to give the game a facelift, which resulted in a far more appealing package.  But either way if the reincarnated game was notable enough, the product should evoke memories of playing with friends, wishing for it to appear under the Christmas tree or even fuzzy recollections of the game’s commercial.

This “reincarnation” phenomenon isn’t exclusive to the game industry.  Toy brands, shoe brands, car brands, beverage brands, video game brands all go through cycles like this too, but what makes it interesting in the board game arena is that products don’t always stay with their initial manufacturer.  In fact, neither Hedbanz nor Bed Bugs is with the company that originally released it.  Hedbanz has been published here in the US by IRWIN Games, Pressman Toy, Western Publishing and many international manufacturers.  Bed Bugs doesn’t have quite as lengthy of a history, having only been published by Milton Bradley before being picked up by Patch Products.  So why all the jumping around?  Sometimes this is due to a “trickledown” effect.  Hasbro now owns Milton Bradley and they may not have thought that Bed Bugs could sell the volume of games needed for them to spend money to promote the product or maybe they’re focused on building their core brands and didn’t have room for it, either way it ends up with a smaller company who has the time to nurture and rebuild the brand.  Other times it’s in the hands of the inventor to find their game a new manufacturer “home.”  Regardless, it’s obvious that well-loved games have multiple lives and don’t disappear forever – which is good, because there are a couple I’m hoping to see again!

Part 2 – The Reviews

Instead of explaining Bed Bugs I think you can just take a peek at the “vintage” commercial:

Remember that?  And obviously, with New York’s little bed bug problem this year, the rerelease of this game is extremely timely.

Now, I couldn’t find a commercial for Hedbanz, but I’ll explain it for those of you who don’t recall how to play.  Everyone wears a band on their head with a card clipped in it.  Cards have a picture and say “I am a [image word].”   Players don’t know what picture is on their card, but obviously they can see the cards of the other players.  Everyone takes turns asking questions in a “20-questions like fashion” until they can guess what’s on their card.  The quicker you can guess what you are, the more likely it is that you’ll win.  Overall, everyone looks a little silly — but it just adds to the laughs!

Bed Bugs Stats:

~$15 at Amazon, Meijer, Are You Game, Wal-Mart
2 to 4 players
~5-10 minutes
Ages 6 and Up

Hedbanz Stats:

~$15 at Amazon, Target, Toys’RUs (which also has the exclusive Hedbanz for Adults for $17)
2 to 6 players
~20-30 minutes (depending on the number of players)
Ages 7 and Up

Not far from my house there is a dive bar, with scary red lighting that hosts bingo on Monday nights.  It’s really not all that exciting; you win a brown paper lunch bag filled with random odd items.  I was lucky enough to win the first round Monday night and my winnings included some Cheez-It snacks, baby food, a bunny sucker and Chicklets.  By the end of the night our table had a skull candle, a bible card game and three colors of “fun dough.”  But before the bingo festivities began, we played quite a few rounds of the classic, but somehow not super well known, game Shut The Box.

Surprising to me, no one at my table had ever played Shut The Box before but by the end of the night everyone was addicted.  There are lots of variations of this game but traditionally it’s a box with tiles numbered 1-9 that you can flip forward and backward, which allows players to “check them off” as they use them.  The game is simple; you roll two standard dice and total them up.  Then you flip forward any available tile combination that equals the number you rolled.  So if you roll an 11 and it’s your first turn, you can flip forward a 9 and a 2 or a 1, 4 and 6.  It’s totally up to you, but once you flip forward a number you can’t use it again.  Your turn ends when you roll and you don’t have the right combination of tiles to equal your dice total.   You get your score for the round by totaling up the unused tiles.

There are a couple ways to score.  We played that whoever had the lowest number each round got one point.  You can then play until someone reaches a certain number of wins or until you run out of time.  Keeping a running tally of each player’s actual score is another way to play, just make sure you have a pencil and paper handy.  Play a certain number of rounds or until one player reaches a set number, and then the player with the lowest score is the winner.

Other versions of the game include boxes with tiles numbered 1-10 or 1-12.  There are also 2-player versions and 4-player versions.  Blue Orange games also has a game called Double Shutter that has two levels of tiles numbered 1-9 so you can flip two 5s if you roll a 10.  I also own a dice game named The Game of Chips by Jax that is essentially Shut The Box, with no box.  It uses poker chips numbered 1-10 and you flip them over as you use them.  This is a great low-priced travel alternative; it comes in a nice fabric pouch and can be purchased for ~$5.

Fun bit of trivia for you too, there was a TV show back in the mid-1970s called High Roller that was based on the game Shut The Box.  It was hosted by Alex Trebek and players answered “toss up” questions to gain control of the dice and the option of rolling or passing to their opponent.  It was on for a couple years and then again in the late 80s with Wink Martindale, but the new show wasn’t as successful.

Shut The Box stats:
$15 – $65+ at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Toys R Us,  some mass market retailers, specialty retailers
Shown at top: Melissa & Doug Shut The Box retails for ~$19-$25
Article preview: Front Porch Classics Shut the Box Signature Edition retails for ~$45-$53
1 or more players
Any amount of time
Ages 6 and up

Double Shutter stats:
~$19 at Amazon.com, Toys ‘R Us, Target, specialty retailers
1 or more players
Any amount of time
Ages 8 and up (it’s a bit more complex)

The Game of Chips stats:
~$5 Amazon.com, online game retailers, some specialty stores
1 or more players
Any amount of time, ~15 if you play by their rules
Ages 6 and up

Like I said, backgammon is old.  Some estimate that it’s has been around close to 5000 years – at least in some form.  It has evolved over time, but by the early in the fourteenth century it looked much as it does today.  Check out this illustration from the Codex Manesse (at left, c. 1304).  The codex is a small illuminated manuscript of love poetry that was made in Zurich for the wealthy Manesse family and that looks identical to the backgammon sets of today!

Between the twelfth century and the sixteenth century views on backgammon changed a bit – in fact, the church even tried to ban the game a couple times.   (How many games can say that?!)  The last attempt was in the early sixteenth century right about the time Hieronymus Bosch completed his work, “The Garden of Earthy Delights. ” (at right, c. 1503)  If youlook at the right panel of the triptych, it depicts hell (whereas the left panel is heaven and the center is Earth – click to enlarge).   This right panel is brimming with people who have succumbed to temptations – like backgammon — and are facing eternal damnation for it.  You can see the backgammon board in the lower left corner of the panel being held up by some crazy looking creature. (below at right, click to enlarge)  It is similarly used in “The Triumph of Death” By Pieter Bruegel the Elder (below left, click to enlarge).   The board is in the lower right corner of the painting and it looks like a jester is stepping over it to hide under a table from the legions of dead that have invaded.

So it hasn’t always been an easy road for backgammon, but yet the game survived.  Guess that says something aboutits playability!

In much more modern times it came back into favor when Hugh Hefner started holding backgammon parties at the Playboy Mansion in the late 1960s and 70s.  (It’s rumored that Lucille Ball was a huge fan!) And actually there is a book called Playboy’s Book of Backgammon with the forward written by Hugh Hefner and backgammon was featured in the magazine from time to time.

But really, you don’t need a book to learn to play backgammon.  The game is simple, each player has fifteen “checkers” (also called “tokens,” “chips,” “pawns” and a ton of other things…) and the goal is to get all of their pieces back into their side of the board and then to remove them from the board.  To start, pieces are setup laid out in a specific form on the board and each player will be moving their checkers in a u-shape in the opposite direction of each other.  Using 2 dice, players roll and may move 1 or 2 checkers the numbers shown on the dice.  Rolling doubles gets you twice the amount shown on the dice!  You can’t land on a space occupied by 2 or more of your opponents checkers – but if there’s only one, you can land on them and move them to the “bar” which essentially means they are starting over from the section of the board furthest from their finish.   Once you successfully move all of your pieces into the area of the board closest to your finish, you can start to remove your pieces from the board.  This is called “bearing off” and it’s like the final race to the finish!

Games can be quick and fast – so unlike chess, there’s not a lot of mulling over your move.  There are also ways to bet and use a “doubling cube” to increase the dimensions of the game, but it’s not necessary to enjoy the game.  You also don’t need a fancy set to play.  If you have a set of checkers – or two colors of poker chips, you can draw your own board on a sheet of paper.  Sounds really low budget, but it’s how it was played during medieval times.  Players would have dice (made of bone) and stones and they’d draw a board in the dirt.  Guess you could call that the first “travel” version of the game!

Backgammon Stats:
From dirt cheap to very expensive
2 players
~5-15 minutes
Ages 8 and up

You don’t really need to have a huge vocabulary to win – you just need to be quick.  You get 1 point for 3-4 letter words and more for longer words.  So if you come up with zillion 3-letter words, you can beat the person who found only a couple of crazy long ones.  And I must admit, my favorite part (besides winning) is when you get to the end of the round it’s really satisfying to see how many great words you have that no one else found.

I like Boggle so much that in the past I’ve been known to have paper, pencils and a mini dictionary crammed into the Boggle box so I could take it with me on trips.  But the bad thing was, the old Boggle game was designed so if you put the clear plastic cover on top of the dice tray, it wouldn’t fit in the box.  Annoying right?  Then Hasbro fixed that problem by giving the lid a new odd shape, but the dice didn’t shake as well in that one (and it felt kind of cheap) so I didn’t even bother purchasing it.  Well now they’ve completely redesigned the dice holder and it’s a very cool travel-friendly solution.  You twist it to shake the dice, then twist back to lock them in place.  So now, with the absence of a removable lid, you don’t have to worry about losing one of the dice.  And then to make it an all-in-one game, it’s got a timer built in.  Now all you have to do is hunt down some pencils and paper and you’re ready to roll!

Boggle’s been around since 1972 although it failed and was relaunched in 1976 after some revisions – including the addition of a shaker.  It was invented by Alan Turoff and as a fun bit of trivia the longest words that can be made are 17 letters long because the Q and U are on the same tile.  They are: inconsequentially, quadricentennials, and sesquicentennials.  Personally, I’ve never been able to get any of them.

Boggle Stats:
~ $15 at Wal-Mart, Target, Toys ‘R Us and pretty much everywhere that sells games
2 or More Players
~5 Minutes per round (including scoring) so it’s up to you
Ages 8 and up

Regardless of how you pronounce the name Rummy-CUBE, Roomi-CUBE, Rummy –CUB, if you’ve played it you probably like it.

Rummikub has to be my favorite two-player game and I’ll admit it took me a long, LONG time to learn to play it.  Wait…let me rephrase, I got it pretty quickly once I read the directions but back when I was young my sister got a copy for Christmas we never bothered learning to play it.  Why?  It’s filled with numbers and it looked like math was involved and after summers and summers of math workbooks forced upon us from my math teacher mother there was NO WAY I was going to spend a minute of my free time with anything that looked like math was directly involved.

Silly me. It’s not a math a game – it’s a rummy game, hence the name.  But in my defense here, the rummy we played was called Shanghai so I really had no idea what rummy was at the time.

So when I finally got around to learning how to play Rummikub I couldn’t believe what I had been missing!  I am now the proud owner of 2 of the over 50 million copies that have been sold since Ephraim Hertzano started hand making copies back in the 1930s.

According to the Rummikub people it’s the bestselling tile game and the third best-selling family game in the world.  So then why am I even bothering to write a review?  Because if you are one of the people who hasn’t played it maybe because you fell into the “oh my God – it’s got numbers, there must be MATH involved” trap I fell into, I feel it is my duty to inform you otherwise.  You use the tiles you’re given (and the ones you draw) to make straights of the same color or groupings of  matching numbers (not of the same color).  But what makes it so cool is you can rearrange the tiles in the playing area to slide in your own tiles just as long as every tile still is apart of a straight or number grouping.  Oh my gosh, it sounds so easy!  And it is.

If you haven’t played, try it.  If you have and don’t like it, I’d keep that to yourself.  A big percentage of that 50 million people really like it and you don’t want to upset the mob.

Rummikub Stats:
~$11 and up at Target, Toys ‘R Us, Amazon.com and tons of other places
2-4 players, I think 2-3 is best – especially if you’re playing with “thinkers”
20-45 minutes (really depends on the players)
Ages 8 and up

Earlier today I had an interesting conversation with the owner of the Chicago toy and game store Cat and Mouse about how there are tons of games that ”borrow” the play patterns of other games.  Some even look the same: Bananagrams and Scrabble Apple (both which are similar to Take Two), Yahtzee and Kismet, Connect Four and Toot and Otto to name a few.  Now my mother always told me that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” so I guess that the duplication indicates that the initial product had a level of success that the new game would like to attain.  And that got me thinking.

As an inventor I’d like to believe that the original version is always the superior one; for how could anyone improve upon my idea?!  Well, after quickly glancing through my games when I got home I found the perfect example of when the newer version improved upon the initial game and believe it or not the NEW version had been out since 1954.  (My copy is from 1962 & it’s seen a lot of games.)

Mille Bornes was developed by Edmond Dujardin and was very, VERY similar to the game Touring which was invented around 1906 and then picked up by Parker Brothers in 1925.  Touring was manufactured until it was replaced in their line by Mille Bornes sometime after 1954 which makes sense because who really needs two automobile racing card games in their line?

So what was the improvement that made all the difference?  The coup-fourré.  This is when a player earns a large bonus for stopping an opponent from playing a hazard card such as a flat tire or an accident that would impede their progress.  You do this by having “Safety” in your hand when the hazard is played.  This little difference made the game so much better.  Now when you go to play a hazard on an opponent your actions could be very costly.  However once a particular safety has been played (there are four different ones, seen below) it’s kind of a free for all.  Sounds a little complicated, but really Mille Bornes is a very easy and fun game to play.  Hence the half a century — and then some — this game has been on the market.   In fact, you can still find it at Target and Toys ‘R Us today for right around $5.99 if you don’t already have a copy.  Look in the card game area, it’s manufactured by Winning Moves now.

Now I know that this one example should not indicate the rule, but I think it goes to show that sometimes game play can be improved upon.  But more often I think that the copy-cats are reusing a particular style of game play so that it is familiar, fun and easier to learn – something I guess we should chalk up to flattery.

Mille Bornes Stats:
~$5.99 and up at Target, Toys ‘R Us, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com
2, 3, 4 or 6 Players (commonly played as a partnership game with 4 players, 2 per team)
35-45 Minutes
Ages 8 and up

**Cat and Mouse Game Store is located at 2212 W. Armitage in Chicago and is absolutely worth a look.

As a kid my older sister and I would frequently get games as gifts for birthdays and holidays.   And even though we’re only 13 months apart, we didn’t often see eye to eye on which games we liked.  I liked Life she liked Monopoly.  I liked Candyland she liked Chutes and Ladders. Maybe it was because we were TOO close in age and we were both grasping for some sort of individuality, but since my degree is in Industrial Design and not psychology we will not dig any further into that particular area.

Thankfully there were a freak few that we both liked otherwise we may never have played games.  PayDay was definitely a favorite of ours because it could be a long game or a short game since you play month to month.  On a rainy Saturday we would play a full 12 months while on a school night it might have only been a 3-4 month game.  The only thing we didn’t really like about the game is that the board is one month long so you played the same month over and over and over.  Well that all changes this year!  Laura Pecci of Winning Moves came up with a very clever solution to this in their new release called Big PayDay.  It fits into the “why didn’t I think of that” category of games.  It’s so simple; the board has channels that you can replace any day with a random new day tile, which allows you to play a different month every month.  It keeps those “year-long” games much more interesting.

When I play we start with the regular board and then add 1 special tile per player the first month, we then clear the board and place 2 special tiles per player on for the second month and so on.  We blindly draw tiles and each player can place it wherever they want and there’s a little bit of strategy to it.  Extra “Buyers” at the end of the month are a good idea whereas covering up some of the mail days is also wise if you keep drawing the $800 auto repair bill whereas your opponents receive cheesy advertisements and postcards.
Big PayDay keeps all of the charm from the 1975 classic PayDay while solving the redundancy with a quick and clever solution.  Fair warning that it’s still the same game as before – one I loved in my tween years — but it’s still a nice and easy game for families to play and for some of us it brings back warm and fuzzy childhood memories.

Big PayDay Stats:
~$30-$35 at Amazon.com, Winning-Moves.com
2-6 Players
~ 15-30 Minutes (depending on number of players and number of months)
Ages 8 and up

I love clever ideas; they just make me happy.  (And sometimes envious that I didn’t think of them myself!)

This past February when I was roaming around Javits during New York Toy Fair I saw the cleverest feature in the Winning Moves product King Me.  It’s such a simple “duh” idea that I am still smitten with it.  You know what it is?  Self-crowning checkers.  Yup, that’s right, the crowns rise up from each checker when you twist them.  How cool is that?!

There have been thousands of versions of checkers including The Simpsons checkers, Dinosaur checkers, magnetic checkers, oversized checkers, designer checkers but none of them have ever tempted me to buy a new game of checkers, until now.   So who came up with this clever feature?  Phil Orbanes did while he was in the shower.  (I swear, the shower is a great place to think.)  Anyway, for those of you who are in the industry you probably know who Phil is.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Phil, he’s one of the founders and current president of Winning Moves and before that he was the Senior VP for Research and Development at Parker Brothers, which means he knows a bit about good games.  He also has written a bunch of books about Monopoly and the book that is currently sitting on my desk called The Game Makers: The Story of Parker Brothers from Tiddledy Winks to Trivial Pursuit.

Good work Phil!  I like the way you think.

King Me Stats:
~$15 at Amazon.com, Toys ‘R Us
2 Players
~15 Minutes
Ages 7 and up

If your family is anything like mine, there’s a whole shelving unit dedicated to old games in the basement of your parent’s house.  There are some well-worn classics like Monopoly, Sorry and the version of Clue with the stable and fountain from the late ‘80s.  But it’s also teeming with games you’ve never heard of and definitely never played because they sound so dull you’d rather clean the basement than play the game.  Like “The IRS Game” I recently unearthed in my father’s house.  He’s a CPA so I’m sure it was some sort of gag gift, but honestly, who would want to play a game about the organization that makes sure we stay good citizens and pay our taxes?  I left that one where I found it.

The game I was looking for comes in a small box and was invented just after the turn of the century — the last century that is.  It’s called Pit and although the name isn’t bad, it’s the “commodities trading” theme that is outright unappealing.  I’ll admit, it’s pretty hard to convince a group of players to sit down for a fun game of commodities trading, but I managed to sucker some friends into playing recently.  They didn’t have much of a choice since we were out of town and their alternatives were pretty slim, but I was happy that they obliged and promised it wouldn’t disappoint.

As one of my all-time favorite party games, Pit is easy to explain, even easier to learn and it’s quick.  The game is made up of rounds that are a free-for-all of people trading cards until they’ve “cornered the market” on one commodity, meaning they managed to collect every single wheat or soybean card in the game.  During this process people are feverishly yelling how many cards they want to trade, reaching across the table and over other player’s hands to conduct the card swap in hopes of finding the last couple cards they are missing.  The frenzy comes to halt when a player triumphantly rings the bell to signal that they have cornered the market.  As the other players sigh, the winner collects points and the next round is started.  The quick, fast rounds keep everyone excited, but adding twists like silent rounds or playing with the bull and bear cards add another level to play with the bull acting like a wild and the bear like an old maid.

While I have an older version of Pit that I found buried in a dusty corner, this game can be purchased new for less than $20.  It comes with eight different commodities to trade and a bell.  Sadly, since this game isn’t as well known as it should be, it probably won’t be available in your local Wal-Mart, but according to the manufacturer, it can be found at Toys ‘R’ Us stores nationwide.  There are also plenty of online retailers including Amazon.com who carry the game and it’s worth the 3-5 day shipping wait.  But if that’s too long, check out www.winning-moves.com to find a store near you that carries this classic game.

In the end, even though my friends had some pretty low expectations going into the game, when we finally decided to stop and grab some dinner they were all amazed at how much fun it was.  There have already been some requests for me to bring Pit with me whenever we get together next.

So grab 3-8 of your closest friends (over the age of 7) and spend the afternoon “cornering the market!”  Maybe just leave out the game’s theme when you ask them to play.

Pit stats:

• ~$15 Toys ‘R Us, Barnes and Noble or online retailers
• 3-8 players
• ~2 minutes a round (so play lots!)
• Ages 7 and up