Not counting swag, such as branded poker chips and playing cards, ESPN has released five board games, all in the last four years:

ESPN All Sports Trivia Challenge – 1,500 sports trivia questions.

Scene It? Sports – 1,100 sports trivia questions. And a DVD.

ESPN Jeopardy Game – 1,000 sports trivia questions.

ESPN 21st Century Trivia – 1,000 sports trivia questions.

ESPN Monopoly

And that, folks, is what happens when people who think they know games make games: four trivia games and a Monopoly game. I won’t argue that sports devotees are nuts about sports trivia. But surely ESPN could get behind something like a Formula De, Strat-O-Matic, or some other kind of sports simulation game.

• 3 Comments

Filipina Aurora de Leon has created two Pinoy (Filipina) board games that she is hoping to market more extensively.

2005’s Pinoy Ka Ba? teaches “the merits” of Filipino culture. The recent Pinoy Ecology Game teaches waste management and ecology protection.

The game may play a lot like Snakes and Ladders crossed with Candyland, but do note the Filipina pieces as tokens and “the vibrant colors of the boxes”.

(source)

Update: Another Filipino board game is Mismo.

• 1 Comment

The long-awaited RPGGeek.com has launched, except it’s not rpggeek.com; it’s rpg.geekdo.com .

Geekdo is the new base web site for both RPGGeek and the venerable BoardGameGeek, which suggests that other genres are sure to follow. The RPG db is already primed with over 7,000 items for 1,300 RPGs.

As you can see from this data entry guide, they’re approaching the classification of RPGs with a more complicated system, something I’ve already suggested should be projected back onto board games.

• 0 Comments