The upcoming Monopoly: World Edition will jettison the old Water Works and Electric Company spaces in favor of spaces featuring wind and solar energy.

So you can now “own” solar or wind energy? Doesn’t that defeat the ecological point? Considering that nobody buys either of these spaces, I don’t see how this matters, but there you go.

(source)

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NYC24 reports on a surge in popularity of board games, quizzes, and trivia nights in NYC barrooms, where people are searching for organized social face-to-face experiences.

Michael Evanchik, one of the organizers of the popular debate night at Lolita Bar on the Lower East Side said people like to be challenged, even while hanging out with friends. “We were sick of having inane conversations in bars,” he said, explaining how debate night got off the ground, “so we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to go out and actually talk about interesting things?’”

(source, hat tip)

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icWales reports on the growing popularity of poker, instead of Bingo and previous trivial pursuits, among middle age and older women in Wales. It’s apparently becoming popular in the old nursing homes.

One player is quoted as saying that women have a natural advantage in the game when playing against men because men never really know what women are thinking.

Local casinos are cashing in on the trend.

(source)

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Palatka, FL: Man discovers three others killed at an all-night poker game. This is the second card game  shooting incidence in Putnam County in the last month. (source)

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On slow news days, the mass media sometimes trots out articles pimping old board or card games. Here are some for Strat-o-Matic baseball and Canasta.

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Sri Lankan disaster management experts are attempting to use the game Snakes and Ladders as a tool for teaching disaster awareness.

Other than teaching one to avoid snakes and board games that offer no decision-making skills, I’m not sure how they plan to use the game to do this.

(source)

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A number of 3,000 year old board-games carved into rocks have been discovered on the Iranian island of Kharg.

Some of them may be Backgammon prototypes.

(source, source)

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Crystal Caste, makers of funny shaped RPG dice that look something like geological rocks, won a patent dispute against Hasbro who used dice with the same design for their Monopoly Millennium edition without permission.

And this even after admitting that they saw the dice at a convention and made a feeble attempt to license the design after producing them. Cost to Hasbro: $446,182 in royalties.

For myself, it’s the money in Monopoly Millennium that sucks most; it looks like oil-stained regular Monopoly money.

(source)

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Hasbro up 9% adjusted for foreign exchange rates. (source)

Mattel down 2% : down 11% domestically and up 8% internationally. (source)

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