Upcoming. You know you want it. This game will somehow allow you to play with all three board games together. ‘Nuff said. (source)

Meanwhile, the next Twilight Scene-It? Deluxe will also include clips from all three movies. (source)

(hat tip)

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Gigantic Mechanic makes city-wide augmented reality games. Gigaputt, for instance, is an IPhone golf game that turns any location into a 3-hole mini-golf game. Swing your Iphone and watch your golf ball sail down the city streets.

They are one of the founders and producers of New York’s Come Out & Play Festival.

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The 2010 Toy of the Year (TOTY) Awards were handed out in a ceremony Saturday night coinciding with the launch of New York Toy Fair. The TOTY Awards are selected by vote of the Toy Industry Association membership.

Bakugan took home the Boy Toy of the Year prize for the 7-in-1 Maxus Dragonoid, as well as the award for Property of the Year. We’ve written before about the success of Bakugan.

Game of the Year, which covers both tabletop and electronic games, went to the Sort It Out! board game by University Games. Sort It Out! is a trivia game that challenges players to sort five items in the order requested—for example, the following in order of heaviest to lightest weight:

• Elephant daily poo
• 3 standard house bricks
• Blue whale tongue
• Whole domestic cat
• 4WD Jeep Grand Cherokee

In the immortal words of the great Dave Barry, wouldn’t “Whole Domestic Cat” be a great name for a rock band?

Steve Peek of University Games With the Company's TOTY Award

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Jane McGonigal is one of the major forces in the world who takes games seriously. She will be speaking at TED this week on how online massive multi-player games can be harnessed – have been harnessed – to change the world for the better.

Essentially, Jane’s thesis is that while playing games, people are more highly motivated to overcome obstacles and solve problems for longer periods of time without giving up. The massive nature of online games provide a platform for tackling critical world issues.

An interview.

(source)

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Hasbro beat expectations and rose 77% for Q4 2009. Earnings of $165.6 million. (source) Gains mostly from Transformers toys and games, piggybacking off the film. It’s kind of sad when toys and games can only sell if there is a movie or TV series to boost them. Mattel doesn’t even pretend otherwise. Mattel was up 86%, on Barbie, Matchbox, and Mindflex. Earnings of $328.4 million. (source)

On the one hand, “Hasbro invites families to turn off electronic distractions, gather their favorite board game and reconnect with the people that matter most during a planned or spontaneous Family Game Night.” (source) On the other hand, Hasbro and EA sold over 8 million copies of electronic adaptations of Hasbro games last year. (source)

Analysts are bullish on both Hasbro and Mattel. (example)

Hasbro is raising money for shelters in Haiti through Playathons. (source)

The word for Hasbro in 2010 is “customizable” :

• Monopoly U-Build, with a customizable track made from hexagons (Monopoly meets Settlers of Catan?)
• Sorry! Spin, with a rotating board that can reposition all the pieces
• Guess Who? Mix and Mash, create your own people before guessing
• Cranium 2.0, with a collapsible or expandable game board to customize the time length of the game
• Cranium Scribblish, a game of Telephone with alternations of drawing and describing
• Pictureka 2nd edition and Disney edition

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SportPong. Paddles are projected at your feet and a ball is projected onto the ground. Have at it.

(source)

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Hasbro will introduce later this year a game that appears to be based on Dave Merrill’s Siftables technology.

The idea: five cubes randomly display letters, and then you have a set amount of time to arrange them to form words. Each time you form a word, the cubes beep, and your score is recorded.

It’s called Scrabble Flash in the US or Canada, and Boggle Flash elsewhere. Hee hee. Mattel’s trademark strikes again.

(source, image)

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Label Interactive is the first out of the gate with a suite of board games designed for the iPad. Product information at GameTable.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the product is that it contains no game rules; only board and pieces that you can manipulate at will. Which means that you can play any game you like using the manipulable components.

They began working on it well before Apple’s product announcement. It will cost 99 cents and be available in late March.

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As reported on Kotaku, market research firm Forecasting and Analysing Digital Entertainment (FADE) estimates that Microsoft’s 2009 revenue from Xbox Live Arcade totaled $103 million. Among the top grossing individual titles were two with strong tabletop game ties. Ranked fifth was Hasbro’s Family Game Night with $4.2 million in sales. Magic: The Gathering took the seventh spot with $2.8 million in sales.

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Well, we can’t cover all the toy and game expos but I will be at New York Toy Fair coming up in about a week. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you’d like to see from the show. According to a survey by TDmonthly Magazine, games are the most anticipated category by retailers this year, so I’m expecting a pretty exciting show.

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