Looney Labs now offers a new color for Treehouse pyramids: Pink Treehouse. Like other all pink games, a portion of the proceeds of Pink Treehouse will go to fight breast cancer.

You can save $5 off any Looney Labs products at their store until January 31st using the code HAGHC5.

• 0 Comments

Drueke was once a well known name for wooden board games. They started in the game business in 1914, and sold out in 1990 to the Carrom Company.

For some reason, Carrom ended the Drueke production of Shut the Box, a well-known wooden dice and box game. Carrom doesn’t appear to be carrying their own version of the game.

Now Bill Drueke has started producing his own versions of Shut the Box, the way his father and grandfather used to. The Drueke’s called the game Clapper 12, and new versions are for sale through Bill’s educational wooden products store.

My only concern is that Bill has tried to register a trademark for Drueke Games in Michigan, and I don’t think the Carrom County is going to be too happy with that.

(source)

• 0 Comments

W. Eric Martin has a nifty article up on Board Game News about how to view the field of game development: art, science, engineering, or some combination.

So where do games fit in this art/science dichotomy? My natural assumption is to view games as works of art. As with poetry, the universe of potential games is infinitely diverse, with the preponderance of words at our disposal being reformed in any number of ways to create new rulesets that define the entirety of a game. All of those games exist as possibilities in some Platonic sense, shadows on the wall that become concrete only when nailed down by a creator.

(source)

• 0 Comments

Berkeley researchers have found that some, but not all, low-income children had brain functionality associated with damage to the frontal lobe. From this, the research director concluded this to be a result of less reading, less gaming, and less visits to museums.

I didn’t realize that many poor children play less than other children, but it must be true because a researcher said so.

The treatment: more games. They are collaborating with Berkeley neuroscientists to use games to improve the prefrontal cortex function, and thus the reasoning ability, of school-age children.

Staving off the effects of brain damage on impoverished children through the use of games? Maybe we could try, I don’t know, reducing poverty?

(source, hat tip)

• 0 Comments