Game Blotter

For a family in County Durham, U.K., the Ouija game was a good-news bad-news kind of thing. The husband said that he drowned and dismembered the dog because the Ouija board told him to do it. The wife and daughter, however, said it was also a Ouija that warned them about the impending house fire.

In Iran, they take the term “political dominoes” literally. A group there recently put on a display in which the international conflict over the country’s nuclear program was symbolically represented by the toppling of dominoes. This included one large element featuring a missile destroying an Israeli flag.

The NCAA is claiming a trademark both on the term “bracket” and the image of brackets with regard to tournaments.

A mom who went to a Target store in Canada looking for discounts, instead found $800 worth of marijuana in an Angry Birds Telepods board game.

Ten banks were fined a total of $43.5 million for promising to publish positive research results in exchange for a piece of the Toys “R” Us IPO business.

The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected Panini’s attempt to trademark the term “Limited” with regard to trading cards. The Board sided with Topps and found that Panini had failed to prove that the mark, a descriptive term, had acquired sufficient distinctiveness.

The owner of Chez Geek, a game store in Montreal, says the Quebec government is pressuring him to stop selling board games that are not in French.

Spielbound, a game cafe in Omaha, Nebraska, has successfully registered its game library as a 501c(3) tax-exempt nonprofit with the IRS.

While Hasbro has come up with a replacement for the phallic Play-Doh extruder, some are complaining that the new tool looks like a certain kind of sex toy.

Hasbro also took some flak for the way it responded to a question about the number of toys based on female Star Wars characters.

Disco choreographer, Deney Terrio, is suing Hasbro. He claims that the Vinnie Terrio character in Littlest Pet Shop copies his signature dance move, the finger point made famous by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

In Tune is a game that provides players with the opportunity to practice observing physical boundaries and consent. Using video game controllers it electrifies the players such that it’s able to register the places they touch each other.

Hasbro has settled with Mexican tax authorities, paying $65 million out of the $250 million sought by the government.

Lego is accusing Mega Brands, makers of Mega Bloks, of copying Lego Friends. Mega Brands, however, says that Lego can’t seek the help of the U.S. International Trade Commission because Lego doesn’t meet the ITC’s domestic industry requirement.

Sheldon Adelson, the owner of several casinos, is lobbying for laws in the United States that would prohibit online gambling. He calls it a moral issue.

Police in Trenton, New Jersey arrested seven people for playing dice in the hallway of an apartment building of which none of them were a resident.

Police in Staten Island, New York are running Chess and Checkers tournaments for at-risk youth. In Atlanta, a Chess program run by probation officers and attorneys is for youth already convicted of crimes.

A Chicago-area high school student visiting Peoria, Illinois for a Chess tournament was able to give a young girl CPR and save her life.

By order of the country’s parliament, Chess will be compulsory in Spanish schools.

Students at Padjadjaran University in Indonesia claim to have developed a card game that can train people to detect when others are lying.

A woman in China is up on murder charges for stabbing a man she claims got her husband addicted to Mahjong.