I know that there are plenty of toy and game inventors that read this site so and I’m sure they’ve had similar experiences – but there’s no feeling in the world quite like seeing your game on the shelf!  It makes all of the hard work and late nights worth it, and dulls the pain of all of the rejection letters that go with being in the business.  My big game this year is Scattergories Categories manufactured by Winning Moves.  Now, I don’t entirely think it’s fair that I review …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …