The Upper Delaware Boardgames Meetup Group is profiled by Delaware Online.

Mentions of meetup.com and club favorites, which include The Great Dalmuti, Balderdash, Apples to Apples, Guillotine, Sequence, Taboo, The Settlers of Catan, and Carcassonne.

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Wildcraft is a cooperative board game for kids that teaches herbal lore.

Unlike most cooperative educational games (in which players have no possibility of losing), Wildcraft uses a corruption track similar to the one in Lord of the Rings; only here, it’s night falling, and you all have to get home before dark.

Now, barring that, there’s really not much in the way of skill involved, but I think it could be turned into a slightly more skillful game without too much trouble. And in any case, it looks like a neat first game on the way to other cooperative games like LotR.

And they offer a guarantee: if you’re not entirely satisfied, they’ll give you your money back and let you keep the game, too.

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The Vue Weekly introduces us to two games from Edmonton area artists:

• Leaving Edmonton – Adam Waldron-Blain created this tongue and cheek card game based on the rules to Dvorak. Adam is an organizer of massive hide-and-seek ARGs called “Manhunts”. Check out his Manhunt Edmonton.
• Risk 1919 – Raymond Biesinger created this Risk variant, which documents the world after WWI and then lets you conquer it.

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Industry: New Zealand is a game by and for New Zealanders, with some limited appeal to non-Kiwis as well.

There is no description on the official site, but from a review on BGG, it sounds like a bit more than your typical roll and move game. The game is divided into three parts, some of which involve resource collection and trading.

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Some Maryland retailers have just removed Elmo’s Take Along Card Games from their shelves, more than a year after these games were reported to have excessive amounts of lead content.

You can find a big list of contaminated toy and game products here.

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io9, Gawker Media’s science fiction blog, is now sponsoring a new tabletop gaming blog, Robot Viking by Ed Grabianowsky.

Given Gawker’s resources, it promises to be a highly interesting blog in the tabletop game space. Welcome aboard, Ed.

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Gamewright is looking forward to 2009 with the following scheduled releases:

• Walter Wick – Can You See What I See? Finders KeepersTM Game – Kind of a competitive Where’s Waldo for small kids.
• Ring-O Flamingo – Tiddlywinks crossed with ring-toss, as you try to flip your rings around the heads of Flamingos. Also for small kids.
• Too Many Monkeys – Flip and swap cards in numerical order.
• Say Cheese – Roll dice and be the first to match a picture and shout “Cheese!”
• Pool Sharks – A teeny Billiards game, with fishes for pockets.
• Polar Derby – A push-your-luck dice game of collecting polar bears.
• This Big! – Go Fish with some extra cards.
• Funny Business – A “Balderdash” style game; try to think of the wittiest name for two merged companies. Points earned by who gets the most votes from the other players.

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In Hays, Kansas, Raven Youngblood was looking for a fun and educational activity to bring local children together. After research, he settled on the most wholesome game for young minds I know, Warhammer 40,000!

So with the support of Games Workshop, a sponsoring record company, and a local shop that he convinced to carry the miniatures, Raven is organizing tournaments for kids as young as 8.

Math is a central component of the game, he said, as players must calculate the distance between pieces to determine if they are in range of being hit with weapons.

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Start them really young on the road to becoming gamers with Welcome to Monster Isle. This amazing picture book tells the story of a shipwrecked family as they get to know a menagerie of legendary monsters including the Gryphon, Quetzalcoatl, Abominable Snowman, and Catoblepas.

(hat tip)

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