Looking for a way to drive yourself insane as quickly as possible?  Never fear, Looney Labs has announced version 4.0 of their venerable Fluxx card game.  For those who’ve never played before, Fluxx is a card game with only one rule – every turn you play a card and then draw a card – play then passes to the next player.  Unfortunately, as you play through, new rules will be added tot he game, including victory conditions.  We’ve suffered through/enjoyed several themed versions of the game lately (most recently Monty Python Fluxx), but this new edition apparently adds color artwork, new cards and modifications to a few older cards.

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Jan Velinger has a nice bit up on Radio Praha about modern gaming in the Czech Republic.

Covered topics include Jakub Těšinský, who has worked at bringing the games to the Czech Republic, and Vladimír (Vláada) Chvátil of Czech Board Games who designed the well-respected Through the Ages.

(source)

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Green Ronin is offering a slew of products at a discount (while suplies last) as part of their “Recession Sale”.

Dozens of products are on sale between $2 and $10.

(sale information)

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Capcom director Adam Boyes explains why Talisman won’t be coming to your XBox or Playstation any time soon, even though The Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride did well on these platforms :

Complex board games like Talisman live and die on the social interaction of people. Whether it’s the taunting of the person sitting to your right or the planning of what the players should do next, it relies on people sitting together and talking. If you’ve played online games lately, you notice that not all players use their headsets. Social games like Talisman rely on that aspect, so if the people in your match aren’t going to use their headsets, the social aspect of a board game gets completely drained and becomes a slog as you could be sitting there for five minutes waiting for your next turn…

You can tear through a match of Carcassonne in 25 minutes, or build some railroads in Ticket to Ride and be all done with the game in just over half an hour. Those games are lighter fair, and I do think that they lend themselves greatly to the XBLA and PSN user base. If those games are light appetizers, Talisman would be a five-course meal. From the research we’ve done and looking at the games that succeed in the downloadable space, we found that people prefer the appetizers to hunkering down for a huge meal.

(source)

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If you’re going to play a simple card game, it’s nice if the cards are pretty to look at.

The Hummingbird Game from Ampersand Press has some pretty cards. The game seems to be a simple set collection, trick taking game with suits.

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In the early 1970s, Pacific Game Company produced a few 3D games, including 3D Chess, 3D Tic Tac Toe, and 3D Checkers, the latter of which I never saw before, but is available on eBay under the name of Space Checkers. Not to be confused with another, recent game called Space Checkers.

Rules? Not entirely sure, but white moves over and up, while black moves over and down. The plastic is your typical cheesy looking 70s “we-need-to-look-functional” design.

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World*Class has a large number of educational games for teaching math, vocabulary, time, reading, social studies, and so on.

Their game Inference sounds vaguely interesting, although I don’t know if the game explores inductive or deductive inference. And I can’t find it on World*Class’s site.

I found an alternate edition on eduPress, however, another company producing a large number of educational games.

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