Welcome to Purple Pawn, covering games played around the world by billions of people every day.

Electronic Catch and Keepaway

cosmic_catchYes, more electronic adaptations of games that really don’t need any.

Cosmic Catch is catch, only the ball tells you to whom to throw, at ever increasing speeds. Each player wears an RFID bracelet. Cosmic Keep Away is an entirely separate product with nearly identical functionality, but different rules: one team keeps the ball away from one team.

Two separate products for this? Really? You couldn’t just upload the new game rules to the old ball?

Herd Your Horses

herd_your_horses

Talicor’s best selling game is the board game Herd Your Horses, allegedly by a designer named Jim Kelly. It sells even better selling than Talicor’s UnGame, VeggieTales, and Bunco lines of products.

The game is unsurprisingly about horses, and includes breed information and trivia. It’s roll-and-move, with some choices about which direction to take on the path.

Pretty Pretty Princess

pretty_pretty_princess

You’ve waited far too long for this one.

Pretty Pretty Princess is a roll-and-move “game activity”, the whole point of which is to put on and take off various pieces of costume jewelery. What makes it even more fun for its five-year-old girl marketing targets is when their father is the one putting on the jewelery.

The game comes in a several versions: Original, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella.

Electronic Boggle

electronic_boggle

Nearly any electronic game is more costly and more fragile than its analog equivalent, but Electronic Boggle appears to be an exception.

A cover flips over the letters and the shaking is actually quieter than the original. The built-in timer beeps softly when time is up. And it costs less than any other version of Boggle, except for this keychain version.

Classic Novels Play Chess

cabinetI’m sure none of you understand the subject. Is he talking about chess games depicted in novels? Did he mean novelists?

No and no.

In the fall issue of Cabinet, D. Graham Burnett and W. J. Walter describe the following procedure:

  • Assign letter combinations to the squares of a chessboard (e.g. d4 might be the letter combination “te”).
  • Take two classic novels (e.g. Jules Verne’s Voyage au Centre de la Terre vs Jane Austin’s Sense and Sensibility).
  • Assign them as chess opponents.
  • Play: starting from the beginning of the book, whenever a valid letter combination occurs in the text to indicate a piece position, and then another to indicate a valid destination position, the book makes that move.

Some of our astute readers may ask the following question: huh? Oh, you readers.

Both a work of literature and the royal game, he suggests, unfold in time within strictures that inexorably invoke “life and the struggle for life.” There is, as he puts it, a “symbolic shadow” that lengthens over a chess board, since 
the way to the end is the way to a death, “a death for which you yourself are guilty.” The novel, of course, 
is the literary form that has evolved precisely to afford 
language the means of erecting and choreographing such a metaphorical life space. And thus it is no surprise that the novel, too, is haunted by a long shadow: all plots, as Don DeLillo memorably put it, end in death. Moreover, en route to their respective endgames, both chess and the novel offer powerful arenas in which to investigate the question of questions: the ever-vexatious issue of the relationship between fate and agency, between necessity and freedom. Every move is our own, except when it’s not. Either way, the board thins, the sheaf of paper in the right hand dwindles, sifting 
left as if blown by an inexorable wind—though of course, we turn every page.

Does that answer your question?

(source)

P.S. Voyage au Centre de la Terre toasted Sense and Sensibility in a scant 25 moves. Every game!

Daryl Hannah Designs a Game

42638649That game is Liebrary. The game was co-designed by another actress, Hilary Shepard, and is a game where players try to come up with the best first line of a book. Apparently the two came up with the idea for the game while bored on vacation.

While I just found out about this today, it seems the game has been around since 2005.

MomLogic is currently doing a giveaway for the game, if you’re so inclined to enter.

(source)

About Jenga

about_jengaAbout Jenga was written by the inventor of Jenga, Leslie Scott, also the co-founder of Oxford Games.

It tells the story of Jenga, humble beginnings, branding, marketing, and metaphors.

b00le0 Card Game

b00le0bOOleO is a boolean logic card game from sggc Tessera Games.

Each player has a row of 6 bits, and must play 15 logic gates (OR, AND, XOR) in a series of smaller rows so as to reduce to a single bit. NOTs are used to cancel other cards or flip the original bits.

An expansion adds new gates, including NOR and NAND.