Britain’s Got Talent the board game is a licensed product from the famous(ly annoying) show of the same name.

You choose easy, medium, or hard tasks to perform, and the board plays along. Instead of watching other people make fools of themselves on TV, you can make a fool of yourself in your living room while your loved ones buzz you off the set with a cruel red X.

(video advertisement)

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Evanston, IL: Chess coach sends pictures of kids to inmate, possibly along with graphic letters. (source)

Nottingham, UK: War gamer and war game site organizer murdered, possibly related to an argument on the site. (source)

Iowa City, IA: One man murders his neighbor in a confrontation over a Chess game. (source)

Imphal, India: 17 killed by motorcycle bomb, and 30 injured, while playing Jhasi Munda, a dice game often played before the Diwali festival. (source)

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Straight Up Chess offers Chess boards that hang vertically on your walls. This allows you to display your game in progress.

Each row has a ledge upon which the pieces stand. Boards come in a variety of hard woods, and pieces in marble, onyx, pewter, or other compositions. They also have a selection of special sets.

They come with little tags for “last moved piece” and “check” to help you remember the game status between moves.

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Integrated Parenting wants to know why modern mass-market board games are made out of such garbage compared to the same games made last generation.

Her kids play the solid Monopoly, Sorry, and Stock Ticker games at her parent’s house that were bought 30 years ago. The same games in new versions that she bought for her own house have boards of half the thickness, easily broken plastic pieces, and wafer thin, poorly laminated cards.

My advice: pick up Settlers of Catan and start playing better games. It’s not only the components of older games that have become thin and weak over time.

(source)

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Stop watching so much television and playing passive video games, and start playing with more active sports, thinking games, and constructive toys.

That’s the advice from the new report by the American Association of Pediatricians.

Play is essential to development because it contributes to the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children and youth. Play also offers an ideal opportunity for parents to engage fully with their children. Despite the benefits derived from play for both children and parents, time for free play has been markedly reduced for some children. This report addresses a variety of factors that have reduced play, including a hurried lifestyle, changes in family structure, and increased attention to academics and enrichment activities at the expense of recess or free child-centered play. This report offers guidelines on how pediatricians can advocate for children by helping families, school systems, and communities consider how best to ensure that play is protected as they seek the balance in children’s lives to create the optimal developmental milieu.

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Haunted Destinies is the latest free print and play game from Invisible City Productions, which tries to release one free print and play game each month.

This one is one of their most elaborate, and it looks nifty. It seems to play something like an Arkham Horror lite, except one player is secretly the Opener whose trying to destroy all of reality, while the others are trying to close the gates before the Opener can come through.

(download)

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The Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital in Burlington, Ontario holds an annual fundraising Crystal Ball. Previous balls have raised 2 million dollars.

This year’s ball theme is Monopoly, for which Hasbro has graciously waved licensing fees. It will be held on April 18, 2009.

Proceeds from the ninth annual Crystal Ball will go toward the purchase of the Emergency Department Patient Management System. Right now, the 45,000 annual visitors to the emergency department are tracked on a whiteboard.

(source)

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High recommended, from amykins111 shop on Etsy.

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Gold, the “web series that does double damage”, is a production about professional RPGers coming this fall. It is written by David Nett & Andrew Deutsch, from a story by David Nett.

Carpe DM.

View the trailer

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Proving that IP rights have no place in the game world, Obscurity is a game that looks a lot like Boggle, but worse.

Instead of cubes that give you infinite replay, you get 80 preset word search cards. The cards store in a handy drawer in the box, and the game board includes a scoring track.

The first player to find 10 words shouts “Obscurity”, and then scoring proceeds similar to Boggle, except that you use the word list on the back of the card.

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