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

On the very edge of the Chicago suburbs, right at the last exit that divides the bustling commuters from the nothingness that spans to westward to the Rockford oasis there is a Cabela’s store.  It outfits hikers, hunters and other people looking to venture away from the city.  This weekend I made the trek from Chicago proper to this oversized log cabin to return an ill-fitting Christmas gift.  As I wandered through the maze of camo and fishing gear, I spotted a game I knew, Find It.  It’s a charmingly simple game that can be enjoyed by a kid suffering through a fishing trip with their father, to an urban executive killing five minutes before an important conference call.  What a great find!

Find It is as simple as the name suggests.  Each tube contains 40-50 themed items surrounded by a zillion recycled plastic pellets.  The goal is to shake, twist and spin the tube until you find all of the stuff inside.  Each game comes with a tear-off pad with the list so you can cross them off as you go, but there is also a sticker on top that tells you what’s inside so you don’t have to bring the tally sheet with you.  I have the Find It Original, but when I was in Cabela’s I saw the “At the Zoo” and “Bird Watch” editions.  I know there are quite a few other versions including Find It Deluxe which has 70 items inside and a whole game built around it with cards and a spinner (that I have yet to play).

Find It is the brainchild of Bob Knight who I had the pleasure of meeting at ChiTag back in 2008.  He had an idea, prototyped it using plastic tubing and birdseed and with a lot of hard work and enthusiasm built a line of products that can be found in a wide variety of stores – including Cabela’s.  It appeals to almost everyone – old, young, gamers as well as those who aren’t – and you can play it for 2 minutes by yourself or pass it around a group until you find everything.  And for you parents out there, it’s a great way to keep the kids quiet during a car trip.

Find It Stats:
~$20 at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and all sorts of specialty retailers (~$30 for the Deluxe Edition)
1 or more Players
As little or as long as you want
Ages 8 and up

When you have a hallway full of games there are often ones that you know you like but they just never get pulled out and played.  I really have no idea why this happens but I think it’s like certain movies.  You love them but you need to be in the right mood to watch them.  And then when you finally are in that mood you’re like I LOVE THIS MOVIE!  Well, that recently happened with TriBond.  We played a little bit at the bar during the Toy and Game Inventor’s Expo (TAGIE) and it put me in the mood to pull out the TriBond box and make an evening of it.  Who doesn’t like trying to find out how three items or images are related? It’s a great mental workout.

TriBond has been out for quite a while; in fact it was invented by college buddies Dave Yearick, Ed Muccini and Tim Walsh (inventor of BLURT!) more than two decades ago.  In 1983 they decided to invent a game after they saw the success of Trivial Pursuit, but it wasn’t until 1989 that Ed came up with the idea of a “Threezer” riddle.  Could they make a game based on the question “what do these three have in common?”  They could and they would.  Within weeks they created a prototype, named it TriBond and started a company called Big Fun a Go Go, Inc.

Now I wish I could say that it was an easy ride to success from there, but it rarely is for people starting up in the game industry.  For TriBond to become a success took a bit of time and a ton of effort.  In 1990, after publishing 48 copies of TriBond Dave, Ed and Tim showed it at New York Toy Fair and by the end of the show they had only sold 30 games.  Obviously, not the success they were looking for.  Stunned that their AMAZING game got so few orders they knew they had to do something to promote it.  So they entered TriBond into every game competition they could find and lo and behold – it won some of them!  Mensa chose it as “One of the top three new board games for 1990” and “One of the top five best new mind games for 1990.”  Slowly they got new orders, reorders and a couple more awards but they still weren’t making any money – in fact they were deeply in debt to a bunch of investors including Ed’s dad.  But in 1992 everything changed.  They got Patch to license the product and Tim joined the company as their Marketing Director to help them promote the game.  By 1993, you could find TriBond in mass-market stores everywhere and they sold almost 150,000 games before December 1 — a huge increase from less than 15,000 the year before.  Since then, TriBond has been translated into 9 languages, sold in 14 countries and in 2000 it was inducted into the Games Magazine Hall of Fame.

Fast forward to 2010, which is right around the corner.  TriBond will be celebrating its 20th anniversary.  Very impressive and congrats to Dave, Ed and Tim!

TriBond is great for large groups and can be played in teams.  I also like snagging the box of questions and taking it with me on long car rides and we play until our brains hurt!

TriBond Stats:
~$25 and up at Amazon.com
2 or More Players (large groups play in teams)
45-60 Minutes (I know this is a LONG game for me to be recommending but you can always figure out ways to shorten the game or just play with the cards – still fun!)
Ages 12 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

Continuing the theme from my last article (travel games) this game may not be the easiest one to find, but if you do, it will make any road trip feel like a party.  ReFraze is a trivia game that takes movie, song and TV show titles and changes them (using synonyms) so you have to decipher what the names actually are.

Want to try one?  It’s a TV show:  “Carpet Mice”  Do you know what it is?  If not, there is one clue each card – for this it gives the genre, which is “Children’s Show.”  Now do you know?  (The answer is at the bottom of the article.)

The concept behind ReFraze is a pretty straightforward and it has a great brain teaser/trivia feel to it.  It was invented by Ann and Ron Fowler and this is what Ann had to say about it’s inception:

A few years ago, I was responsible for coming up with games for our annual Book Club Christmas party.  Along with a couple of other silly games, I took the names of Christmas songs and carols and “Refrazed” them.  Everyone loved it, and after a couple of different people asked for copies of what I had done, I had one of those ‘aha’ moments.  With Ron’s know-how, ReFraze was born.  (If it was only in my hands, I’d still be walking around with a bag full of slips of paper!)

Recently I took my copy of ReFraze: Movies 1986 to Present on a road trip with me.  There were four of us playing and we played it almost the entire trip!  The only downfall was that we plowed through about half of the 400 cards on our one-day journey, but did we enjoy it?  Absolutely!  Did it dull the pain from the never ending view of the flat Illinois countryside?  Oh my gosh yes!

I know there are people out there who like to do trivia on long road trips and I urge them to toss ReFraze into the mix.  As you can see there are plenty of different themes to choose from — I had a bunch of movie junkies with me so I stuck with something I knew they would love.  So go ahead and find one that will shorten your next long car ride – just be sure to grab paper and a pen if you want to keep score!

Oh and I also hear that there is an electronic game in the works…can’t wait for that!

A: Rugrats

ReFraze Stats:
~ $17 for Standard Editions and ~$15 for the Junior Edition and look here to find where it can be purchased near you.
2 or More Players (can be played in teams)
Play for as long as you want!
8 and Up for the Junior Edition (but closer to 12 or 15 and up for some of the other editions)

In this photo you can see my husband playing Ms. Pac-Man at the airport in San Juan.  They have old arcade games peppered throughout the terminals and given that we had five hours to sit around, my husband and I really appreciated them.

Here in the US if you end up in an American Airlines Admiral’s Club you can find games by Buffalo Games, Fundex, Out of the Box, Hasbro. Rio Grande, Top Trumps, Live Oak and more.  They were put there by Nate Scheidler, Organizer of the Chicago Boardgames Meetup Group, to give weary travelers not only something to do but also exposure to new and different games.  It’s a great idea and I wish it could spread beyond the doors of the Admiral’s Clubs, but until that happens, you’ll have to pack your own.

I personally think that games are the best way to kill time.  As I mentioned in my Yahtzee article, I keep a dice and some score sheets in the trunk of my car in case of an emergency.   I also toss in my bag a couple games when I’m traveling because you never know when you’re going to be stuck in an airport or in your hotel because of rain and nothing makes those long waits more enjoyable than a couple rounds of your favorite game.   This trip I brought: Cinq-o, Yahtzee and Bananagrams and I wished we had room for the travel backgammon.

So what should you pack?  Chung Wu who is a Design Manager at RC2/Learning Curve (and my ex-coworker at Meyer/Glass) says “Containment is key.” He selects things that won’t explode into a billion pieces if dropped.  I think that it should be small, light weight and have a TON of repeat play value.  To make your selection a little easier I’ve asked a couple people what they bring and here were their answers:

• Nate brings Pickomino, SET, and My Word!
• Chung Wu brings his electronic versions of Boggle, Battleship, Yahtzee and Connect 4
• Game inventor and craft guru Peggy Brown brings Toss Up with her everywhere
• ChiTag director Mary Couzin brings a just a plain deck of cards
• My sister Emily brings UNO, Skip-Bo, Cinq-o and a plain deck of cards
• My other sister Amy brings Apples to Apples if she’s going with a group

What game(s) do you bring with you when you travel?

Earlier this month I was at Richard Gottlieb’s “Future of the Industry” conference and someone brought up the issue of packaging.  Given that “green” is a trend; the absence of throwaway packaging is definitely an a-peel-ing part of Bananagrams.  (Couldn’t resist a good pun!)  While this game feels familiar to other crossword games like Pick Two, we all agreed that the adorable zippered banana sack and the hanging merchandiser helped make this item a standout.

The game itself?  I think it’s great!  (FYI – I really like quick word games.)  The only real negative is that it’s not heavy on the player interaction because you’re working on your own mini-crossword while everyone else is working on theirs.  The other players essentially set the pace of the game.  When they need a new piece, you have to draw one too.  If you need a piece, they select one as well and this continues until all the pieces are gone.

Keeping up is key in this game.  You also need to be flexible; quickly morphing your words to include an unfortunate letter tile is essential.  It’s not easy to squeeze an X or Z into an existing crossword but the faster you can, the less likely you will fall behind.  It’s also advantageous to have a couple open spots to create quick short words like “it” and “am” towards the end of the game.

Bananagrams was first introduced at London Toy Fair in 2006 and has swiftly become a big success.  It’s hard to ignore their booth at toy shows because it is filled with tons of fabric bananas so you just have to stop to find out what’s going on!  And apparently the deluge of bananas has worked because Bananagrams is now stocked in Target, Barnes and Noble and a wide variety of retailers.  So maybe the next time you stop at the store you’ll pick up some bananas – from the game aisle.

Bananagrams Stats:
~$15 at Target, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, local Mom & Pop stores
2- Players
2-5 Minutes
Ages 5 and up

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve got a degree in industrial design and ending up in the game industry was somewhat a fluke.  I needed a job, they were the only ones hiring after 9/11 so voilà -  “toy/game inventor Kim.”

Now if you don’t know what an industrial designer is, consider what a graphic designer does for 2D designs; industrial designers do that for 3D products like cars, electronics, household goods, furniture and the list goes on.  Essentially it means that I have a weakness for beautifully designed products.  And the sad truth is that I don’t come across much in the game aisle that makes me drool, so when I opened the Pentago box it was like I could hear the design angels singing.  It’s BEAUTIFUL.

I purchased mine at Target so it’s the plastic version of the game (as seen in the photo here).  I know there are wooden versions but I am so satisfied/enamored with my mass-market copy.  The plastic feels nice, the moving parts are smooth, the marbles are real marbles – not cheap plastic things.  It’s so amazing that I’ve been raving about it since I opened the box.

The game is simple: you need to get 5 of your colored marbles in a row.  The catch is, on each turn you must place a marble on the board (or move a marble) AND rotate one of the quadrants ninety degrees.  The movement of the quadrants is so fluid.  It slides out and rotate with such ease I had to stop the first game we played to take a closer look at it’s manufacturing.  And then to boot it comes with a nice plastic clip on cover that holds the marbles in place if you decide to drag it with you somewhere and don’t want the fuss of a big box.

The game itself definitely falls into the “abstract strategy” category, but it’s so simple to learn and satisfying to play that it’s really enjoyable.  It was invented by Tomas Flodén in Sweden and in 2006 it received the Mensa Select Award, but don’t let that deter you non-strategy game people from trying this one out.

As a side note here – Pentago has been around for a little while (2004-ish) but just showed up in my Target now.  It’s been on my “to purchase list” but as I am not a huge fan of abstract strategy games it wasn’t purchased until I saw it on the shelf there and I felt guilty that it was not already in my collection.  Points to the Target game buyer for snatching this one up; it’s not often that we see something like this amongst the boxes and boxes Twister, Clue and Monopoly games but it truly is a treasure.

Pentago Stats:
~$20 at Target, Amazon.com
2 Players
3-30 Minutes (30 minutes seems really high…but this is what it said on the box.  None of my games have been anywhere near that long, but I’m still working on mastering this game.)
Ages 6 and up

Another dice game that I just love is Cinq-O, from Mattel.  One of the best things about it is that it comes in a handy carrying case that easily clips to your backpack for on-the-go play.  Surprise, surprise, this can also be found in my car, neatly tucked within the Yahtzee box.  This game is a slightly similar to the style of Yahtzee because all players are taking turns with very little player interaction (versus Easy Come, Easy Go which has lots of stealing and retaliation).  In Cinq-O you’re rolling five dice trying to get the lowest or highest possible dice total which earns you points and the first one to 100 wins.  There is also a multiplier die which keeps things interesting and provides a great catch-up factor.  Overall, it’s simple to learn, easy to take with you and it definitely satisfies my dice craving in a pinch.

Now here’s where the product becomes a bit more interesting, it was invented by Reyn Guyer who also invented some products you may have heard of: Twister and Nerf.  Crazy right?  Well initially Cinq-O was going to be a Milton Bradley product but it fell out of the line at the last minute because they didn’t want to market two dice games.  But good for Reyn and for us dice lovers, a couple years later Mattel decided it was a good fit for it’s line.

And then there is the bad news…I don’t think this game is on the market anymore.  I didn’t see it at my last trip to Target and it’s not online at Amazon.com either.  So then, where to find it…eBay?

Cinq-O stats:

• $10 and (up if you can snag a copy)
• 2 or more players
• ~10 minutes
• Ages 7 and up

Thankfully, it’s not just me; I think my entire family has a weakness for dice games. Every one of us has at least one well-loved copy of Yahtzee and if you asked, I’d say we probably all have a copy tucked away in our cars “in case of an emergency.” I’m not kidding. Two winters ago, I was riding through the middle of nowhere Wisconsin in a blizzard with my father heading to my aunt’s 50th birthday party when we slid off the road. As we waited for the tow truck to arrive, I climbed into the back of his van to fish out Yahtzee. We played about ten games before the tow truck arrived. Unfortunately, I lost almost all of them, which seems totally unfair since he was the one who drove us off the road. Guess luck had to roll his way at some point!

Yahtzee is really a well-loved classic and if you haven’t played in a while, it’s worth another look. There were tons of similar poker-dice style games that are probably quite a bit older than Yahtzee, like Yacht and Cheerio. But Yahtzee showed up on store shelves in the mid-1950s and beat out other similar dice games like Kismet to become probably the best-known dice game of all time. And since the mid-1970s it’s been a strong dice-game brand with more than ten line line extensions, although classic Yahtzee is still my favorite.

As a note to parents, Yahtzee is a great way to teach your kids math (adding & multiplying) and probability. Take the time to let them add up their dice, and explain why they’d have better odds rolling for one thing over the other. Unfortunately they may start beating you, but it’s still a heck of a lot more fun than insisting they do math workbooks.

Yahtzee stats:

• $10 and up at all major retailers
• 2 or more players
• ~5-30 minutes (Depends on how quick the players are)
• Ages 8 and up