Toy Fair 2013—Winning Moves

Stop It! is Winning Moves’ version of a card game where players play their cards in numeric order within each suit and the first to get rid of all their cards wins. The twist in Stop It! is that all 50 cards are dealt out at the start—which on its own would make the game pointless—but so are a number of “Stop It!” cards equal to one less than the number of players. Everyone knows that someone has the number 10 in each suit, so any one at any time can grab a Stop It! card to end play in one sequence and then start a new one.

Winning Moves continues to upsize Bogle with Super Big Boggle and a 6 x 6 grid of letter cubes. In this version the timer has been increased to 4 minutes, double-letter cubes have letter pairs on all sides, a blocking cube interrupts a row and column, and words must be a minimum of four letters long.

And this year’s crop of classic reprints from Winning Moves includes Yahtzee (in original packaging with an aluminum dice cup), Sorry (the 1930s era board with Point Sorry variant “for adult play”), and 5ive Straight. The last is a deceptively simple five-in-a-row game with an unusual board. Of course, the goal is to get five pegs in a straight line. The board is a 10 x 10 grid with spaces numbered 0 to 99 in a circuitous pattern. And the game includes a deck of cards numbered 0 to 99. Players start with four cards and each turn can either draw a new card or play a card to place a peg in a hole numbered that or higher. So it seems the lower-numbered cards provide more flexibility, while it’s good to target higher-numbered spaces for completing a line.