Dear Patent Office: It’s 2011. Why don’t you accept videos in your submissions, in addition to the wholly inadequate pictures? It would make the patents a lot easier to understand.

Team matching – From Microsoft. Using the ELO system to form teams. The abstract, and in fact the entire patent, doesn’t actually say that the patent actually does anything, only that the patent MAY do something; MAY being legalese to try to broaden the patent claims as much as possible, but in effect claiming nothing.

Problem gambling detection in tabletop games – Tons more tracking software to determine if someone is cheating, aka doing things differently than the other sheep.

Electronic investment and trading game with entertainment and educational purpose – A financial computer game, citing financial board games as prior art. The author is “not aware of prior art directed to an electronic entertaining and educational interactive multiplayer game directed to financial investment and trading”.

Multi-game deck of playing cards – ConfuZion cards. Yet another tweak on standard playing cards and the claim for multiple games based thereon.

Pick-it poker – From DigiDeal. A betting game where you bet on cards and then reveal them. Then you compare your revealed hands to the dealer’s hand. other than betting, there don’t appear to be any choices to make.

Press-your luck challenge. From Microsoft. Any press-your-luck game, where you keep drawing subsets of items (e.g. cards) from a pile until you stop or until the last draw fails to beat the previous draw.

System and method for playing a table and electronic card game – Gambling one card at a time against the dealer, and then the hand in total. And then give the dealer another hand and compare again.

Polygon identification board game – A trivia game about polygons where you get to place the landed-on polygon if you answer correctly. You win when you’ve placed all of your polygons.

Knight-walk puzzle game – A puzzle-game, where you have to figure out how to cross a path using knight steps.

Method of controlling a dice game and gaming machine – By Universal Entertainment, a Japanese co. A gambling machine were actual dice are rolled.

Table bingo game – A bingo game where the table has a big grid of cards and each player has their own card. After that, I got lost. Somehow you flip cards filling in the grid until someone wins, but I didn’t understand how.

Tethered ball game having targets and indicators – Electronic tether-ball with targets to hit.

Magic-themed adventure game – Yet another interactive wand patent from my favorite LARP for kids co., Creative Kingdom.

Card game – From GC2. Another patent for a poker game where you select a row or column of cards. I remember playing this game over 30 years ago.