Dirty Deutsch is a Go-Fish like card game (with some extra complications) that teaches you how to curse in German. Very educational. I can see it being added to elementary schools across America.

Form sets of three cards to make a German insult. Then read the insult out loud and laugh at your friends.

The background color of each card indicates approximately how offensive the words on the card are:

Green will get you laughed at.

Yellow will get you dirty looks.

Orange will get you fired.

Red will get you beat up.

The author has a page that actually makes sense as to why it’s important to learn a culture’s swear words and their offensiveness if you plan on being in that culture.

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Booya is a fancy-shmancy abstract game. It comes with a box and 24 pegs that slide into each of the 24 holes in the box. You could as easily play it with pencil and paper.

Each player gets 12 pegs, six of which are regular, and six of which are “booya”. The booya pegs can push out previously placed regular pegs, and cannot be pushed out. Form as many three-in-a-rows as you can.

That’s it.

(information)

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Bet Your Brain is a new trivia game that promises “the questions, the game mechanics, the cards, and the board – everything is new and different from anything you’ve played before.” So you might think that an entire page about the game might actually tell you something about the game.

Naturally, you’d be wrong. Instead, you get long copy about how much fun it is, how different it is, and how much the focus groups liked it. And it’s patented, too. Isn’t there anything about the game on the site?

Well, there’s this vague sentence: “The fantastic thing is that you don’t need to have a backpack full of trivia knowledge in order to win this game, but if you do, it will just be easier to answer the questions.” Which makes precisely no sense.

And finally, the only substantive sentence about how the game is different: “Bet Your Brain the [physically] heaviest trivia adult board game in 2008!” Ah, I see.

In fact, it’s a game where, after one player gives an answer, the other players can bet on whether they think the answer is correct. Which is hardly revolutionary.

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The Detroit Institute of Arts will be holding an exhibition of thirty chess sets from the collection of Dr George and Vivian Dean of Bloomfield. The exhibition is called Master Pieces.

The Dean’s collection includes 500 year old sets, a million dollar Faberge set, and another set linked to Napoleon.

(source)

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MSNBC ran a segment on the new Clue makeover. Actually, it was mostly about three guys named Steve who meet to play Clue. Whatever.

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Pardon the lack of background info, but it’s been too long since my high school Spanish class. Nevertheless, I have to point you to Toposolitario, even if your language skills are like mine. That’s because, there you’ll find some fantastic free (donations accepted) downloadable paper model patterns for science fiction vehicles, ships, and buildings, as well as instructions for making this cool feature from a CD case.

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Did you know there is a Professional Wargame League? No, the members don’t get paid to play. Rather, the league organizes Kriegsspiel command post style games, like those employed by real military organizations for training. This means there’s no hex maps, no cardboard counters. Two players each have their own standard map of the conflict area and relay their unit orders to a neutral umpire by email. The umpire, who’s the only one who needs to be concerned with rules, moves troops on the map, resolves combat, and sends back reports to each side. The advantages of this style of play include a focus on fog-of-war and limited command-and-control.

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Board games work for Hanukkah too! Over on BellaOnline, Megan Romer describes this family tradition for holiday gifts and family time. Mom and Dad purchase seven board games randomly chosen from family-member recommendations made in advance of the holiday. Each night (after Dreidel the first night), the family opens one wrapped box and plays the new game together.

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