A while ago I asked on Twitter what everyone’s favorite speed games were and I got a variety of answers but one stuck out to me, “Jungle Speed.”  I was curious about this game as it was suggested by a couple tweeps who share my taste in games. Shortly after I got an email from the manufacturers of Jungle Speed and I figured the cosmos was trying to tell me that I’d enjoy this game.  And I do.  And apparently I’m not the only one since more than 2 million copies of the game have been sold worldwide.  That’s a lot of games!

In a way Jungle Speed is similar to Halli Galli as all players are flipping cards and looking at the cards to see if they find the right combination.  (see review of Halli Galli HERE) If they do, in Halli Galli they ring the bell but in Jungle Speed you grab the “totem” in the middle of the table.  In Halli Galli you’re trying to collect all of the cards, whereas in Jungle Speed you’re trying to get rid of your cards and they go to whoever wasn’t quick enough to grab the totem.  There are some small differences between the games but the big point of difference is that Jungle Speed includes cards that change up the play.  For example, you go from looking for the same symbol to the same color or it’s whoever is the quickest to grab the totem.  It keeps things fresh and players on their toes.  You can watch how to play here:

There’s one other thing I feel I must mention in this review.  In the past you’ve all heard me rant about boxes and how flimsy boxes don’t play nice on my game shelf.  Well, Jungle Speed has a flimsy box BUT they also include a nice fabric bag to contain the totem, cards and instructions, which is awesome, especially for travel.  So ditch the box and store everything in the nice bag!

Jungle Speed Stats: 

~$20 at Amazon, Target, ToysRUs, Barnes & Noble, mom & pop retailers
2 to 10 players
~10-15 minutes
Ages 8 and up

Is it me or is Easter REALLY close to Mother’s Day this year?  And because they’re so close you really can’t get your mother flowers and candy since the Easter Bunny delivered those two weeks ago.  So what are you going to do?!  Sounds like the perfect time to give Think Fun’s Chocolate Fix!

I know – a lot of you out there don’t consider 1-player puzzle things “games” but we’re going to ignore that just like we did for the Rush Hour and Solitaire Chess reviews.

Chocolate Fix has been out for a little while, but the folks at Think Fun just issued all new puzzles so it seems like a good time to do this review.  (Side note: you can tell the new ones because they have the blue chocolates, not the pink ones) The game is well loved by many because it’s so easy to jump right into a challenge when you’ve got some spare minutes.  The challenges are bound in a cute little spiral notebook and they give you hints on where to put the chocolates so the right color and shape end up in the correct position.  Sometimes the hint will say what color needs to go in a particular spot, sometimes it only gives you the shape.  Other hints may tell you what colors or shapes go near each other.  You can see an example of what this looks like in the pic at the right.  It may look a wee bit complicated but you will pick it up really quickly.  For example – look at #5; this means that you will need to have a pink, dark chocolate and light chocolate in one of the three rows in that order.  And #7 tells you that in the upper right hand corner it will DEFINITELY be a triangular dark chocolate.  So from #7 you now know that the row shown in #5 is NOT the top row.  Get it?  You will.

Like all Think Fun puzzles, Chocolate Fix comes with challenges that range from “a monkey-can-do-it” easy to my “brain’s-really-flexing” hard.  And it all fits neatly into a little nylon bag for easy travel and storage.  It’s cute, it’s sweet and Mom will thank you for not breaking her diet!

Chocolate Fix Stats:

• ~$18 Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and pretty much any store that sells Think Fun products (*It’s $14 right now at Amazon!)
• 1 player
• as long as you’d like to spend playing it!
• Ages 8 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/yamodo/ http://www.thegameaisle.com/yamodo/#comments Fri, 29 Oct 2010 18:49:11 +0000 Kim Vandenbroucke http://www.thegameaisle.com/?p=1855

Yamodo! I have no idea how to pronounce it or what it even means, but I think that might be the point.  Originally, I ran across Yamodo! in the basement of Javits at Toy Fair and the people working their booth were very perky and forced me to stop and take a look.  At the time they were selling this sheets of paper with a crazy nonsense word at the top of each page, a haphazard line or two in the middle of the page, and “Is…” and a couple lines at the bottom of the page and they told me it was a game.  I was like “huh?!” Didn’t get that.

Yamodo! IS a fun brain exercise that you can do by yourself or a group.  Using the nonsense word at the top of the page, you create a drawing around or incorporating the random little lines on the page and then define it on the lines at the bottom.  I’ve found that it’s most enjoyable to start the drawing and definition, pass it to another person and go back and forth until it’s done.  It’s especially humorous when one person thinks that “doofax” is a fax that has arms so it can do extra work for you and the other person thinks that it scans poop and sends it as a prank.  Yuck.   There are now lots of different SKUs of little spiral Good To Go Yamodo! books including Magic & Mayhem…and after watching those hilarious insurance commercials with the character named “mayhem” I’m having a BLAST playing with that book!  But do the names of the books really matter?  No, it’s all what your brain can come up with and my brain is pretty funny if I do say so myself.  ha!

After enjoying some of the Yamodo! spirals, I still don’t get how they’re a game (I like having winners and losers).  But now they’ve come up with a REAL game called Yamodo! Party Time where the second line in the instructions says, “players compete to WIN…” YAY!

Now, if you are a regular Game Aisle reader, you know that I don’t really care for drawing games because I don’t like showing off my less-than-stellar sketching skills in public.  But I have to appreciate the creativity that this game promotes.  It’s got a bit of an Apples to Apples feel in that there is one person who judges each round and everyone else offers up a drawing that they can lobby the judge to select as the best.  The drawings are done on Yamodo! pages and everyone fills in the space for the  nonsense word at the top with the same word (from a deck) and then they get a tag line like “2 for 1” special from another deck to get their brains chugging.  Sheets get passed around and at the end of the round the judge selects a winner and whoever doodled on that sheet last wins the round.

A couple thoughts – sometimes the passing thing stinks because you added the funniest part of the drawing and you didn’t win because someone gave your hilarious monkey shaved like a French poodle a rhinestone banana necklace at the last minute.  So feel free to skip that part.  The other thing is that having the poor artists EXPLAIN what their drawings were supposed to be was HILARIOUS.  That thing that looked like an amoeba with feet…no, no that was actually a mailman in a wetsuit.

Regardless of skill, if you can dream up something fantastic you can still win Yamodo! Party Time.

Side note here – Yamodo! also has a 2-second (if that) spot in Toyland, the movie!  How cool is that?!

Yamodo! Stats:
$15 for the Original Yamodo! at bookstores, Amazon and ToysRUs.com
$10 for the Yamodo! Good To Go spiral skus including: Gizmos & Gadgets, Magic & Mayhem, and Monsters & Aliens at bookstores, Amazon and ToysRUs.com

Yamodo! Party Time Stats:
~$25 at Amazon, Toys R Us and Barnes & Noble
4 to 12 Players
~20-45 minutes
Ages 12 and Up

I first got to play with Scrabble Flash at the Hasbro showroom of New York Toy Fair this past February and I desperately wanted to take it home with me, but I’m pretty sure that the hoards of other people waiting to play would have noticed.  It’s just so cute and magical that it’s hard not to like it!  The game is made up of five small LCD square tiles that recognize when they are touching each other, which allows the tiles to identify if they are in the proper order to make a word.  This concept is the backbone of all three games you can play with your Scrabble Flash tiles.

When you turn all of the tiles on by pressing each of their buttons, the tiles give you a choice of games 1, 2 or 3.  Game 1 is a 1-player game in which you find as many 3, 4, and 5 letter words as you can from one set of letters before the little timers appear on the screens.  Every time you line up the tiles to make a word they flash to let you know that the word’s been counted.  In a way it feels a lot like the old Boggle handheld just with fewer letters to choose from.

Game 2 is also a 1-player game where you find as many 5-letter words as you can in the allotted time.  After you find a word, you get a new set of letters to unscramble.  The third game is the same as game 2, but it’s for multiple players.  Once you get a word you pass the tiles to the next player.  If time runs out while you’re looking for a word it will display OUT and you have to pass the tiles to the next player.  Last man standing wins.

The cute little tiles also score!  At the end of game 1 if you line up the 5 tiles your score will appear as well as how many words were possible.  At the end of game 2 it shows you not only the word you missed but also how many sets you were able to unscramble before time ran out.  The only downfall I see is that it doesn’t save scores so there’s no running high score that you’re constantly striving to beat.  But I will totally forgive that small shortcoming because it comes with a nice hard plastic travel case!  You get to toss out the big box you brought home from the store and instead everything – including the instructions – packs easily into a box that’s a little larger than 2 in. x 2 in. x 4 in.  How nice is that?!  And because it’s not intrusive, it’s been on my desk for weeks now – I use it as a mini-break every now and then.  Love it!

Scrabble Flash Stats:
$30 at Target, Toys ‘R Us, Kmart, Amazon and many others
1 or more players, most games are for 1-player
~3 minutes per round so it’s up to you
Ages 8 and Up (although some words might be difficult for an 8 year old)

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)