The Game of Real Life is a parody on the Game of Life, but it’s actually for sale.

In Real Life, your first experience might be to get aborted and have to start over. Then you travel through a world of sex, drugs, and war, experiencing wealth or poverty, parental love or rejection, and so on. The object is to end with the most happiness.

Sounds farcical, but some open-minded educators are actually using the game as a springboard for discussion.

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The Sunday Mail is offering its readers a chance to win one of ten free copies of Scottish Quest, a trivia game about Scotland.

The makers of Scottish Quest have been busy. They now have English Quest, Irish Quest, and Welsh Quest games, as well.

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The simple answer: there are less women Chess players. And not, as some studies try to argue, because women ae inherently less intelligent or less spatially adept than men.

So presents Ed Yong at Scienceblog, discussing a paper by Merim Bilalic, chess player and researcher from Oxford University.

Far more men play chess than women and based on that simple fact, you could actually predict the differences we see in chess ability at the highest level. It’s a simple statistical fact that the best performers from a large group are probably going to be better than the best performers from a small one. Even if two groups have the same average skill and, importantly, the same range in skill, the most capable individuals will probably come from the larger group.

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Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president of FIDE, addressed several of the controversies that occurred throughout the year within the Chess world.

He addressed the repeated cancellation and last-minute venue changes for the new Grand Prix and Global Chess games, the drug testing controversies, including this month’s scandal from Vassily Ivanchuk who refused to submit a urine sample at the Chess Olympiad, and the vast inflation in the number of grandmasters which threatens to dilute the title’s prestige.

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Harris Dvores has been inventing games for thirty years. His latest is a card game called States. Players try to collect four states with adjoining borders. States with fewer adjoining borders are worth extra points.

Harris’ twenty-odd games include a version of Crosswords, strategy war games, space games, auction games, and poker variants. Many are free to download and play.

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A quote from Philippians 4:13 is now a board game from Leta Barnes in Applegate. To be specific: I Can Do All Things Through Christ.

Sample question: (Proverbs 18:24) “Jesus is a freind [sic] that sticketh closer than a brother.” Question: What does this mean to you? Answer [on the card]: The members of our family are usually there to help us, but Jesus is always there. He never lets us down.

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Amazon.com had record year end business.

It’s top sellers were: Nintendo Wii, Samsung 52-Inch LCD HDTV, the Apple iPod touch, and Blokus. Yep, the Wii had a great year, putting to rest the old notion that video games are all about lazy, anti-social misfits; those people bought the TV. The IPhone is not just a phone, but the newest gaming platform. And lookie here: a board game.

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The BBC wraps up the year with one more look at board games. Finlo Rohrer examines the lessons learned from such games as Monopoly, Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, Cluedo, Risk, and Diplomacy. (source)

The Toronto Star weighs in with some board game recommendations for New Year’s Eve: Tiki Topple, Gather Round Dinner, NHL Questions of Hockey 2, and Eye Know. (source)

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Kristina Retherford’s Daleville Junior-Senior High School etymology class has been creating board game projects on and off for the last eight years.

Many of the games are based on Monopoly, of course. The challenge is to find a creative way to memorize the origin of up to 300 words.

They may be interested in The Moot Game, all about etymology and probably one of the world’s toughest trivia games.

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