I’ve come to realize that either you like speed games or you don’t – which is similar to people who like games that require great fine motor skills like Jenga or Topple.  You’re either good at them and you like them or you stink and you probably hide when someone suggests playing one. (go figure, no one likes losing) Well, in general I like speed games – but I LOVE dice speed games.  It goes back to that little dice addiction I have.  (Read: “I LOVE Dice Games” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) So Ligretto Dice definitely gets a thumbs up from me!

You may have heard of Ligretto as it’s a pretty popular card game (and also called Dutch Blitz) but the dice version isn’t quite as popular (but it’s also newer – 2009 versus 1988).  But it doesn’t really matter because you don’t need to know anything about the card game to enjoy the dice game!  The game is simple, all 24 dice are put in the black bag and each player blindly draws a set number of dice.  (12 for a 2-player game, 8 for a 3-player game, etc.)  The dice go in your cup and when someone yells Ligretto! (or in my world Go!) everyone starts frantically rolling.  The goal is to be the first to get rid of all of your dice and you get rid of dice by placing them on the matching spot on the board.  There are 4 rows (1 for each color die) and there are spaces showing dice numbered 1-6 in each row and you can’t put your yellow 2 down until someone has placed a yellow 1 and you can’t place a red 4 until there’s a red 1, 2, and 3 on the board.  Got it?  So once you’ve placed all of the dice on the board that you can, you put the remaining dice back in the cup – including your yellow 2 — and keep rolling.

All of the players are going to be frantically rolling & placing dice, which makes the game a bit chaotic, but it’s also extremely quick.  So if you were bested in the first game – go ahead and play a second since you probably have time.  There is also a scoring system if you plan on playing a bunch rounds or you’re just that competitive.

Ligretto Dice Stats:

• ~$15 Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, AreYouGame.com, FunAgainGames.com, some mom & pop retailers
• 2-4 players
• ~3-20 minutes depends on if you are using the games scoring or just playing a couple rounds
• Ages 8 and up (although I’d say 6 and up)

**Like this and want to find out about other speed games? Click the SPEED GAME in the tag cloud to your right.

Great two player games don’t cross my desk all that often.  I find that a lot of games say they can be played with two players but for a really great experience, you need more than 2 players.  Not with this week’s game – because it’s a true two player game.  Like backgammon or chess, you can only play City Square Off with two players – and I’m addicted.

I mentioned Gamewright’s City Square Off in one of my 2011 Toy Fair trends articles (you can see it HERE).  I talked about how tile-placement games (ala Blokus and Cir*Kis) were still on the rise and although the trend may start to feel stale soon, I though that City Square Off was different and fun.  And I was so right!  At Toy Fair I rarely get to play games from start to finish, so I only get the general idea of what is going on and if it might be fun.  And City Square Off is.  Gamewright was nice enough to send me a copy to try out and we played about 20 times over Memorial Day weekend alone.

In City Square Off each player starts with a board and a “city.” I like using the city I’ve lovingly dubbed “the Skywalker Residence” because it looks like the place Luke grew up on Tatooine (okay maybe not a lot like it…but it does look like it belongs on Tatooine).  There are three other cities to choose from and it really doesn’t matter which one you pick but it needs to be placed over the Gamewright logo in the middle of your board.  From there, the cards are shuffled and then the top one is flipped over.  Both players take the piece shown on the card and place it adjacent to their City.  Pieces can be rotated in any direction and even flipped over so how you put it on the board is up to you, it just must be touching the City or, as the game progresses, another piece.  The game ends when a player cannot place a piece on their board without it hanging off the side.  If both players can’t place a piece on the same turn, then each person counts up the biggest mass of adjacent open spaces and whoever has the highest number wins!

There are also a couple game variations in the box that are just as fun to play, but I’ll let you discover them on your own.   I highly recommend this game and hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Note: I also have to give mad props to whoever designed their packaging.  The box looks great — but it’s the inside packaging that made me melt.  There is a black plastic piece sorter that has 4 spaces: 2 for the colored tiles, one for cities and one for cards — and oh my gosh – the boards snap in place like a lid so the don’t get all jumbled up inside the box.  OUTSTANDING!

City Square Off Stats

• ~$20 Amazon.com, FatBrainToys.com, Gamewright.com and some mom & pop retailers
• 2 players ONLY
• ~8-10 minutes per game
• Ages 8 and up is what the box says…I say 6 and up

As many of my regular readers know, I’m not really a fan of abstract strategy games.  They’re just not my thing, but every once in a while I come across one that I can’t help but love.  I first played Stomple at the 2010 Chicago Toy and Game Fair and included it in my “ChiTAG picks” article (See HERE).  And now that I’ve had a chance to subject some of my play testers to it, I think it deserves it’s own article complete with great inventor story!

To remind you quickly how to play (if you didn’t read the ChiTAG Picks article), the board is a 7×7 grid of marbles and players use “Stompers” to push the different colored marbles through holes in the board.  On your turn you push down or “stomp” a marble adjacent to your Stomper’s position on the board.  If there is a marble of the same color adjacent to the one you just stomped you must do that one too until there are no marbles of the same color next your stomper.  At anytime you may move to another part of the board by jumping to and stomping a marble that matches the color of your Stomper.  This is particularly useful when you find your Stomper with no marbles around you since you MUST stomp a marble on each turn.  If you can’t stomp a marble on your turn you must remove you Stomper from the board and you’re done for the round.  But if your Stomper is the last one on the board you get 1 point for each marble left and 3 points for special red cat’s eye marbles.

Greg Zima, of GaZima Games, is the inventor of Stomple – although he initially called it “Stomp.”  He came up with the idea of stomping marbles through a board and thought it was a fun, toy-esque concept but the game play didn’t come together right away.  At first he thought of stomping things around a track but really, it just wasn’t right.  So he did what a lot of inventors do when they’re stumped.  He tossed it on the backburner and let it simmer in the back of his brain for a while.  About 18 months later he had the “ah ha!” moment he was waiting for.  The game play was developed in just a couple days and his business partner Stefan Maroudis put together a prototype and they play tested it until they thought it was pretty close to perfect. (See pic of prototype above, courtesy of Greg Zima)

Stomple is manufactured by Spin Master and first time the game was shown to them, they weren’t interested because they weren’t doing games.  The second time, however, was a totally different story.  In Greg’s words:

Stefan and I were at the licensing show and we always bring a couple of games with us even if we don’t have meetings – just in case.  We called Ben Dermer (Spin Master) and asked him if we could meet and he said ‘meet me in 5 minutes’ and we literally had to run, in our suits and dress shoes, across the conference center all the way up do Ben’s room — it had to have been about a mile!  When we got there we were out of breath, but we showed him the game.  He LOVED it and pretty much optioned it on the spot!

Fast-forward to now, Stomple was just named one of the Mensa Select award winners earlier this spring, which is extremely cool!  I asked Greg if he found it difficult to license an abstract strategy game and he admitted that earlier on they tried to add some faces to the marbles to give it a theme and some artwork, but he said,

“Really you just have to remind [inventor relations people] that there are other very successful abstract strategy games out there like Tetris and Blokus.  But it helped that our game also incorporated the toy-esque stomping.”

I agree that the stomp is super-satisfying to the point that I kind of don’t mind if I’m losing because it’s so enjoyable to stomp marbles on every turn.  I also like that the games are quick so if I happen to lose, we can play again right and way and I can regain my position as supreme stomper.

Stomple Stats:

• ~$30 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and many others
• 2-5 Players
• ~5 minutes per round
• Ages 8 and Up

There’s something about those old school, hotel desk bells that is just awesome.  One of my all time favorite games – Pit – has that style bell.  The quick, frenzied game Halli Galli that I’m reviewing here also has that bell. Seriously, who can resist like a game that you have to hit a bell?!

I briefly mentioned Halli Galli in a holiday posting a couple years ago, but really the game deserves it’s own review.  But since I’ve already touched on it once, I’ll keep it short and sweet – kind of like the game!  Halli Galli is a simple to learn card game with, like I said, a bell in the middle.  Players keep a stack of cards with 1-5 pieces of fruit on them in front of them.  Everyone turns their cards over at the same time and if you see a total of EXACTLY five similar items on the table you ring the bell and collect the cards.  The player with the most cards wins and there are penalties for ringing in at the wrong time — like if there are too many or two few of one piece of fruit.

Halli Galli is a great game for tweens and kids because they have wickedly fast reflexes.  It’s been on the market since the early 1990s and has sold more than 2.5 million games worldwide but I think the odd-sounding name scares some people off.  Don’t let it!  And as a fun tidbit, rumor has it that it was originally called Tutti Frutti but then an erotic game show was launched with the same name so – for good reason – it got changed!

Halli Galli Stats:

• ~$16-20 at Amazon.com, AreYouGame.com, Barnes & Noble, and many more
• 2-6 players
• ~10-20 min.
• Ages 2-6 and up

I mentioned the ThinkFun game Solitaire Chess in my 2010 Picks article and said I needed to play it some more.  Well I got to play it some more during the holidays and I really enjoy it….to the point I leave it on my desk in case I have some down time.  (which I don’t ever, but it motivates me to try to make some!)  Before I tell you about Solitaire Chess, we’re going to do a little flashback to the late 1980s…

When I was in grammar school I was lucky enough to be pulled out of class a couple times a week and put into what my school called “challenge.”  We played board games, did logic puzzles, played with tangrams, learned advanced problem solving techniques.  At the time I truly had no idea why I was being pulled out of class and to this day I’m convinced it was just so I didn’t end up totally disenchanted with school because I was unhappy or bored when I wasn’t in “challenge.”  Maybe this is why I invent games, regardless I think that veering away from the traditional math/English/social studies/science made my school experience far more enjoyable and I wish every kid got a “brain recess” a couple times a week!

Sadly, most schools out there that don’t have anything similar to a “challenge” program but I think every kid — and adult — should get a “Brain Recess.”  I guess I should specify that “Brain Recess” is not when students’ brains take a time out – we have TV for that – instead it’s when students get a break from the math equations and science terms that they are bombarded with all day and have the opportunity to let their brains play!  Luckliy, there are plenty of products out on the market today that can be fun, challenging and can be enjoyed solo.  Personally, I’m a fan of tangrams, pentominoes, logic grid puzzles, edge-matching puzzles and of course products that come from ThinkFun (which was called “Binary Arts” back when I was a kid!).  They have the fantastic Rush Hour puzzle series which has been out since 1996  (read my review of that HERE) and now I’m totally geeked about their newest puzzle product, Solitaire Chess!

I’ll admit I’m not a huge chess player, mostly because I don’t have the time to play and study it enough to be a decent player, but I love the idea that different pieces can move in different ways and this is what Solitaire Chess capitolizes on.  It’s a logic puzzle with 60 challenge cards that dictate which of the pieces you’ll be using and where they go on the 4×4 grid.  Then it’s up to you to find out how to knock off all of the pieces so only one piece remains on the board (you must knock a piece off every move you make).  If you get stuck there’s a booklet that will give you hints like which piece should remain on the board and which is the first piece you should move, so it’s not horrible to people who give up easily when they’re stuck.  I’ve really enjoyed playing with my copy of Solitaire Chess and I think it would have been something we would have had in our “challenge” room if it existed in the mid-80s.

Last Thursday the folks at ThinkFun released the Solitaire Chess app!  (awesome)  Try it now:

And a funny video about Solitaire Chess…(not by me.)

Solitaire Chess Stats:

$17-$20 at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Fat Brain Toys, and mom & pop stores
1 Player
How long do you want to play for?
Ages 8 and up

]]> http://www.thegameaisle.com/solitaire-chess/feed/ 9 http://www.thegameaisle.com/shut-the-box/ http://www.thegameaisle.com/shut-the-box/#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:52:03 +0000 Kim Vandenbroucke http://www.thegameaisle.com/?p=1064

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

A friend of mine was over recently and asked if I could recommend a card game that’s “like UNO, but not UNO, but is easy for non-game people to get, like UNO — oh and it also has to be fun for two players.”  Huh.  So we headed up to my hallway of games and I started pulling products out for him to look at.  He really wanted something simple, fun and that takes 2 seconds to learn.  Something “familiar.”

The game that really resounded with him was Ratuki by USAOPOLY.  This game has been through testing several times and has made it to my list of games to review, but it kept getting pushed down the list because it almost felt “too familiar” in my opinion.  All of the play testers really enjoyed playing the game, but EVERY ONE of them said “it feels like another game I’ve played with just cards.”  And they’re right, it does BUT it has one neat and unique feature that makes it different and those are the cards themselves.  Instead of all of the cards being numbered in the same fashion, they have five different ways of writing the numbers 1-5.  They use pips on a die, roman numerals, the word, a hand and the standard number.  (see the image above)  This little change makes all the difference – and makes the game worth owning.

Ratuki is all about speed and each round ends when a player runs out of cards.  During a round, there is the potential of three stacks in the center of the play area and everyone can play on those three stacks.  Using the deck of cards in front of them, players build on the center stacks by playing a number one above or below the top card on the stack.  The goal is to get play a five and capture the stack.  At the end of the round, players count up the cards they captured, subtract any cards of their own they were left with and that’s their score.  Play by rounds or play to a certain number – it’s up to you!

The game is fast and frenzied, and to reset for a new round is a snap because players have their own color cards.  My friend and I played one quick round of the game and he really enjoyed it.  Like the other game testers, he thought the game had a familiar “feeling,” which was exactly what he was looking for, a “comfort food” kind of game.

Also, if you don’t have time to read the directions – check out the nice graphic explanation at www.playratuki.com.

Ratuki Stats:
$10-$15 at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Specialty Retailers
2-5 Players
3+ Minutes (totally depends on how many rounds you play or how many points you play up to)
Ages 7 and up

ChickyBoom is a balancing game in which you pile up hay bales, wagon wheels, and adorable wooden chickens on top of a long platform and once you’re all set, you carefully move the platform to the rocking perch.  That’s where the game begins.  One at a time, each player removes an object.  Hay bales are worth 3 points, wagon wheels are worth 1 and the chickens are 2-3 points depending on their size.   The goal is to have the highest number of points when the platform comes crashing down.  And as an additional stroke of bad luck, if you’re the player that caused the crash you lose 5 points from your total.

The rounds are quick and without the “you touched it, you must remove it rule” it’s a really satisfying game to play.  I think the only negative the game has is that it can be hard for little ones to get the platform onto the perch and then balanced once it’s stacked high with chicks and hay.  Still, that’s very minimal setup help from mom or dad!

Like many other Blue Orange products, ChickyBoom is a beautiful all-wood game that is durable and cute.  Blue Orange makes it a priority for their company to be “green” and plants two trees for ever one that is use to make their games.  And bonus to you parents who are always losing pieces rendering games unplayable they have a replacement piece shop on their website!  You can find that here: http://store.blueorangegames.com/repi.html

We here at The Game Aisle think that Blue Orange did a great job on this game and I’m sure this one will stay in our collection for a long time!

ChickyBoom Stats:
$20 – $25 at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Target and some specialty retailers
2-4 Players
5-7 Minutes
Ages 4 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

To me it’s sad that there are so many fun, entertaining and overall good games on the market that are virtual unknowns – especially when they cost less than a single movie ticket.  And all we really need is a glowing review from someone who’s actually played the game to convince us to try it.  So maybe there’s a lesson here.  Read more articles on this website (shameless plug) or ask your friends to play or borrow their favorite games.

I’m sure you’re wondering which game was so good that I insisted on recommending it to a total stranger; it was Gamewright’s There’s a Moose in the House.  While Gamewright isn’t the biggest game company out there, I’m sure you’ve seen at least a couple of their games marketed under the “12 Minute Games” brand (of which my favorite is Wig Out).   There’s a Moose in the House takes approximately 15 minutes, so it didn’t quite make the 12 minute cut but it’s still a winner in my eyes.  Gamewright’s too.  When the inventor, Scott Anderson, showed it to Gamewright it was love at first sight and it quickly rose to be one of their top selling games of all time.  They even liked his photo-real artwork so much that they kept the style when they produced the cards.  This is really impressive since games usually go through a series of modifications and changes so the product you see on the shelf is often quite different from the game that was initially pitched to the game company, especially when it comes to the artwork.  It’s similar to books going to an editor before they are published; they’re polished and tweaked until they are the best they can be.

So then where does one get the idea to make a game around a moose invading different rooms of a house?  You’ll never believe it but Scott got the idea from seeing a moose attempt to wander into a woman’s house on an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos!  With this humorous image in his head, he set out to make a game he could play with his kids and that’s just what he did.  There’s a Moose in the House is a non-reading game for kids 8 and up and it’s just as fun for adults as it is for the under ten crowd.  The goal is to put as many moose as you can into the rooms of your opponent’s house but they can block you by playing door cards to close off a room or trapping a moose by using, what else, but a moose trap.  Who knew an oversized mousetrap baited with lettuce could trap a moose, but then again if it’s going to keep the moose out of my bathtub, that’s fine by me.  In the end, the only place a moose belongs in your house is on your game shelf or in your refrigerator, but only if it’s chocolate mousse.

There’s a Moose in the House stats:

• ~$6 at any major retailer
• 2-5 players (but 2 is not as fun)
• ~15 minutes
• Ages 8 and up