The Times Online asked its readers for short story submissions based on the game Cluedo (Clue, for you Americans). It got over 100 entries.

The winning entry was posted online here.

Miss Scarlett danced on to Mike’s lap. The chants of “going down, going down” stopped abruptly and Jack started to apologise.

In his haste to gulp back his drink and get the glass on the table he’d managed to scatter the pieces everywhere. Reverend Green was now swimming in a puddle of alcoholic communion wine and Miss Scarlett was living up to her reputation.

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A helpful timeline:

Late 2007: Mattel and others busted for high levels of lead in their toys and games, force to issue numerous recalls.

Feb 2008: The Consumer Product Safety Commission passes a law that threatens to shut down every second-hand and small business that manufactures or sells items directed at children, with a law that blanketly forces everyone to pay for expensive lead tests on every single one of their items. The law gets delayed, and clarified, and delayed again.

Aug 2009: Mattel secretly finds a way to exempt itself from these tests, claiming that their own internal testing is now really good, and no way could that ever happen to them again. Meanwhile, all the little people will still have to pony up for the expense (not second hand sellers). Other companies clamor to also be exempted.

Oct 2009: Mattel settles the lead fiasco from 2007. Thank goodness that’s all behind them!

Nov 2009: High levels of lead found in some Barbie and Disney products (Barbie Bike Flair Accessory Kit and Disney Tinkerbell Water Lily necklace). (source)  (To be fair, the Barbie product is manufactured by someone else under Mattel’s Barbie license.)

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Blox is a clean abstract game of demolishing and re-building towers on a grid. It’s designed by Hans Raggan, Jürgen P. Grunau, and Wolfgang Kramer, and published by Ravensburger.

The towers are made from blocks of four different colors. Using a hand full of cards, each in one of four colors. Each turn, you:

• Play a card and move your piece.
• Play one card of each color in a tower to remove it from the board and gain points equal to the number of blocks removed.
• Play one card of each color to rebuild a tower from blocks you’ve removed to rebuild an incrementally higher tower, gaining you points for the size of the tower.
• Toss cards and gain a new hand, re-activating your personal “wild” card that can be used for any color.

There are restrictions for moving, demolishing and playing that change over the course of the game. I played it at BGG.con, and recommend it for the same audience that likes Blokus, though it’s slightly more complex.

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Here’s an excuse to mix some roleplaying in to your family gathering for Thanksgiving. It’s the new Plymouth setting book for Colonial Gothic. The $1 PDF from Rogue Games includes 50 pages of maps, background information on the Pilgrims, and adventure hooks for the landing place of the Mayflower.

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Time to clear out the post queue …

San Fransisco Chronicle pimps the Just Awesome board game store (these guys seem to press about an article a month). (source)

4TNZ pimps the designer of the Twilight New Moon Board Game. (source)

Chicago Tribune pimps Darryl Hannah, Liebrary, and a brief mention of CHITAG. (source)

WGN TV pimps Tim Walsh, toy suggestions, Jishaku, Blurt, and CHITAG. (source)

Auburn Pub pimps Analog Hobbies toy and game store. (source)

RC2 pimps itself by renaming itself “Learning Curve”. The re-branding will take place over the next few months. (source)

The Village’s Sun (FL) pimps Euchre, (source) while The Buffalo News pimps Bridge. (source)

The Friday Morning Show on 91.7 KAXE pimps board games. (source)

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Rite Publishing has just realesed Fantastic Maps: The Dragon’s Lair as a PDF on RPGNow. Cartographer Jonathan Roberts designed the map, and apparently he’s a big name in this sort of this. The Dragon’s Lair is just what it sounds like it is, a (wait for it) dragon’s lair.

The PDF weighs in at 63 pages, and you also get high-res JPGs of the map, and Maptool files along with the PDF.

The whole package costs a whopping $1.35. That’s a lot of content for a little scratch.

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The 2009 Chicago Toy and Game Fair was a terrific success.

From the quality and content of the Toy and Game Inventor’s Expo that precedes it, to the emotion of the TAGIE Awards ceremony, to the activity and spirit of the ChiTag exhibit floor, everything came together as we wanted. Several exhibitors were selling out including their demo copies. Children were everywhere, from building towers to playing new board games to mushing clay.

The show is and will always be a celebration of invention. The Rio Grande Design Contest delivered designs of such caliber that Jay Tummelson agreed to publish 4 of the finalists. Reuben Klamer, Leslie Scott, Daryl Hannah and many others were all signing copies of their games. And an amazing showing by our future game designers. The Young Inventor’s Challenge produced some great games. While I was too busy to play all of them, the two I played were really solidly designed (Samurai Petrify and Umbra), with high quality prototypes and interesting mechanics.

The board game library was a new addition this year, and it saw some great activity. In fact, we had to grab tables from another section of the hall to accommodate all the players we had for our special “One night in Essen” event, where attendees got to sample a selection of 24 games brought back from Essen Spiel 09. All the games were raffled off for charity on Sunday morning, and we collected $907 from the ticket sales to donate to Child’s Play.

It will take some time for us to sort through everything following the show, and we’ll have more information will be available in the coming weeks.

It was a lot of work from a lot of people to get to this point. Thanks to the efforts of Mary Couzin and numerous volunteer staff, the Chicago Toy and Game fair 2009 made some terrific breakthroughs and is taking its place among the great play destinations in the USA.

Nate Scheidler

Director of Community Marketing
Chicago Toy and Game Group (www.chitag.com)

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