While there may not be much game to it, I had a lot of fun playing with Educational Insight’s upcoming Smash Pong ($22). It’s got an air-pressure canon, ping pong balls, challenge cards, and a bucket that doubles as target and storage. The canon (excuse me, it’s officially called a launcher) is powered by smashing your fist down on an air bladder. Of course, it’s really meant for much younger kids but that didn’t stop me from having a great time blasting balls across the aisles in to neighboring booths.

Providing more of an intellectually-focused experience but still for younger children, the company has Kanoodle Jr. ($15). It’s a challenge puzzle that like its senior counterpart involves fitting a variety of colored pieces in to a tray-base while matching the partial patterns on hint cards. What makes it more suitable for the junior crowd is its square tray and squared-off pieces.

For the very younger children (ages 2+), there’s Peekaboo Barn ($25). As you can imagine for that age, game play is quite simple. Press the chimney to spin the animals around, grab the closest animal, make its sound, and put it in the barn. If instead of a cow or sheep, it’s a rooster that comes up, the rooster’s cock-a-doodle-doo will wake up the last animal and draw it back out of the barn.

Sunrise Safari ($22) is, like the company’s Even Steven’s Odd, a fast-play dice-matching game. To make it suitable for players as young as 4, though, the matching process is slightly simplified and done with images of animals instead of typical dice with pips.

An introductory strategy game for ages 5+, Royal Roundup ($20) features a board with a bunch of mixed-up interconnecting paths. Each turn, players cross one path and collect a treasure. The idea is to think ahead, selecting the optimal paths for collecting the most high-valued treasures.

Another strategy title, Wiggle Waggle Whiskers ($22) pits cat player versus dog player, with each adding a new fence section every turn, and the first to surround all their cats or dogs being the winner.

Word on the Street ($20), formerly an Out of the Box Publishing game, plays kind of like tug-of-war with letters. Every time a letter shows up in a word used to respond to a question, that letter is pulled toward the answering team’s side of the street. There’s no right or wrong answers, only answers that pull more or better letters. Word on the Street Junior ($20) is exactly the same. It just comes with questions more appropriate for children.

Finally, another word game added to Education Insights’ catalog this year is After Words ($22). It’s one of those where players try to come up with words that begin with a specific letter. When they do, they can toss a matching letter card from their hand—getting rid of all seven is a win. The twist is they also have to match the final letter to the last letter marked on the board.

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Recently resurrected under the Winning Moves label are original versions of Game of the States (a 1940 Milton Bradley title) and Cranium Cadoo (2001, last of Hasbro). Game of the States ($20) has players moving their truck pieces around a U.S. map, buying local products in one state, and selling them in another. Cranium Cadoo ($25) poses a variety of different challenges—acting, sculpting, solving puzzles, and more—with winning recorded by getting four-in-a-row across the game board.

For new titles, Winning Moves has two. In Sunk! ($15), players roll a die, dribble drops of water in to a floating bottle cap, and hope it doesn’t sink. They may also have to complete certain challenges, such as dripping the water with their opposite hand. Nibbled ($15) is for children ages 4+ and features a bunch of cute clip-on yellow fish. Players start the game with four fish clipped to their clothes or body and each turn they try to guess the color of the fish on the next card. If they guess correctly, they get to remove the number of fish showing.

Winning Moves also sells Rubik’s Cubes. New for this year are Rubik’s Build It Solve It ($24), a standard 3×3 cube that the customer assembles from parts, and Rubik’s Triamid ($18), which is a puzzle with non-moving parts but still has the goal of making every side a single color.

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Beirut, Lebanon has two escape room locations, Exit Beirut and Escape the Room Lebanon, each with two individual rooms to escape. Also recently opened in Beirut is the game, pop-culture, and comic shop, Multiverse.

On Kickstarter, Keiran Franklin is raising money for a game cafe in Brighton City Centre, UK. At 8BitBoards, customers will be able to play both board games and retro console games.

Game Kingdom Games & Hobbies in Bullhead City, Arizona does sell some board games but is primarily a public play space for tabletop and video games.

Milwaukee-area retailer, Board Game Barrister, is opening its fourth location March 1st in the Mayfair mall. It’ll be a relatively small location for the chain but will still have play space.

Opening soon in Rochester, Minnesota with 1,900 square feet of retail and play space is D6 Games.

BlackWater Roasters and Gaming Cafe opened on the east side of Cleveland last week. It serves pastries, sandwiches, fresh roasted coffee, and of course, board games.

After running pop-up shops, convention booths, and special events, B&E Games recently opened a retail location in San Jose, California.

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Play Fair, which began as an open-to-consumers auxiliary event at New York Toy Fair 2016, is moving to a fall show and will take place this year on the weekend of November 4th and 5th. It will remain, though, at the Javits Center in Manhattan.

At the inaugural event last year, 20,000 people attended Play Fair. Among the exhibitors already signed on for this year’s Play Fair are LEGO, ALEX Brands, K’Nex, Snazaroo, SCS Direct, VTech, Mattel, Hasbro, and Safari.

Play Fair is hosted by the Toy Industry Association and LeftField Media.

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Margaret “Margo” Georgiadis, most recently President, Americas at Google, will become the new CEO of Mattel effective February 8th. She will also join the Board of Directors.

Vacating the CEO position is Christopher Sinclair, who joined Mattel’s board in 1996 and took over the CEO position from Bryan Stockton in 2015. Sinclair is credited with helping turnaround the company, which in recent years lost its #1 position in the industry to Lego and the Disney princess license to Hasbro. He will stay on as Executive Chairman of the Board.

Stockton received good news recently when a Deleware court put an end to a Mattel shareholder suit that sought to force the company to seek the return of $10 million in severance that was paid when the former executive was let go.

In addition to Google, Georgiadis held past positions with Groupon, Discover Financial Services, and McKinsey & Company. Her hiring comes as Mattel puts more effort in to technology-based products, including a 3D printer and a personal assistant appliance.

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The Google-sponsored AlphaGo computer program, which had previously defeated world Go champion Lee Sedol, racked up 59 wins playing anonymously online against a variety of masters.

Sergey Karjakin, who had lost the recent World Chess Championship to Magnus Carlsen in tiebreak games, managed to best his rival on tiebreak criteria to claim the top position in the World Blitz Championship. At the same tournament, Vassily Ivanchuk won the World Rapid Championship, while Anna Muzychuk won both rapid and blitz titles in the women’s section.

Wesley So won the London Chess Classic, putting him at the top of the four-stop Grand Chess Tour. His total prize winnings on the Tour: $295,000.

University students in Wageningen, Netherlands created the world’s largest Monopoly board, along with dice and houses all to-scale. Made with the support of Hasbro and certified by Guiness World Records, the board measured 900.228 m² (9,689.97 ft²). The previous record, set in the United States earlier this year, was 744.867 m² (8,017.69 ft²).

It was two Dutchmen who faced off in the World Draughts Championship. Roel Boomstra came away the winner.

In December, Feliks Zemdegs solved a 6×6 Rubik’s Cube in a world record 1 minute, 32.47 seconds. Then in January, he beat his own record with a 1 minute, 27.85 second solve.

Here’s a machine solving a standard 3×3 Rubik’s Cube in 0.637 seconds:

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New fellowships are available for research at the The Strong’s National Museum of Play. The idea is to support researchers accessing the museum’s library; collection of toy, doll, and game artifacts; and video and electronic game resources. The G. Rollie Adams Research Fellowships will provide academic professionals, independent scholars, museum scholars, and advanced graduate students at the masters or doctorate level with $500 per-week stipends. Applications are due April 20th.

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In the Hunan province of China, a mother allegedly locked her 3 year-old son in a dog cage so she could play Mahjong undisturbed. The woman admits she put her son there because he was being noisy but says she wasn’t playing Mahjong and someone else locked the cage. The person who found the boy said, “I don’t know who his parent is. After I shared the news on social media, I hurried to get someone to open the cage.”

In Hong Kong, a 62 year-old man is under arrest for allegedly stabbing to death the friend with whom he often played Mahjong. Police suspect there was a debt involved.

The Japan Shogi Association, which had previously banned 9th-dan-ranked Hiroyuki Miura for possible cheating (noting that he had left his seat an unusual number of times during a tournament), has now apologized for the action and reinstated the player. A third-party investigation found no evidence of cheating. The association’s three executives also promised to take a 30 percent pay-cut for 3 months.

Someone broke in to All Aboard Games in Kamloops, British Columbia and stole X-Wing Miniatures figures. The getaway was caught on video.

A man who robbed a Mahjong parlor at gunpoint in Zhengjiang, China claims that he intended to get caught. Police traced his getaway vehicle and in his home found the 10,000 yuan he stole, as well as the gun he used, which turned out to be fake. The man then told police that being sent to jail was the only way he could figure to avoid a 300,000 yuan debt to a loan shark. The money he borrowed, by the way, he used to finance his own high-interest loan. It was after his debtor failed to pay up that he concocted this brilliant plan with the fake gun.

The government of Venezuela raided the warehouse of toy distributor Kreisel, confiscated its inventory, and then promised to give the toys away free to the public. As explanation for the action, the government claims that the company was hoarding toys during a period of rapid inflation.

In 2012, professional Poker player Phil Ivey, along with a woman, Cheng Yin Sun, who had learned through many hours of study to spot subtle variations on the backs of certain playing cards, managed to win $9.6 million playing Baccarat at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City. Relying on the same skill, they later also did well at a London casino. The London casino, though, withheld their winnings and a British judge ruled their actions cheating. After hearing of that case, the Borgata sued to recover its money. Now, a U.S. federal court judge has ruled that what they did in Atlantic City wasn’t fraud because it didn’t break the rules of Baccarat. However, the judge did find them to have violated New Jersey’s Casino Control Act “in complete contravention of the fundamental purpose of legalized gambling” and he’s ordered the pair to return their winnings.

Military police in Phuket, Thailand raided a townhouse that was set up to host illegal gambling on Mahjong. Eleven people were arrested.

After a Lords vs. Commons Chess match several MPs in the U.K. are resurrecting efforts to have Chess recognized as a sport and, therefore, exempt from VAT. Some say they would accept the alternative of defining Chess as a “mindsport”, so that it would not conflict with the Council of Europe’s Sports Charter.

Someone stole the Franklin Mint Civil War Chess set that a woman inherited from her grandfather. It was taken from the trunk of her car as she was preparing to move out of West Jordan, Utah. About a week later, after the theft was reported on local TV news, the set was anonymously turned in to local police.

A 39 year-old man is under arrest in South Carolina for showing up at his girlfriend’s house drunk, throwing her board game to the floor, and flinging the pieces around the room—also for allegedly putting her friend in a hammerlock when she asked him to pick up the mess.

A Bristol, UK jury has cleared a man of sexual assault charges. A woman had claimed that he attacked her during a game of Scrabble.

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Red Bull TV is sponsoring a mind games tournament they’re calling the Escape Room World Championship. Scheduled for March 25th in Budapest, the event will see 20 international teams compete in a room based on “quantum logic” designed by Scott Nicholson.

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POPsnacks, creator of the Knight Light, actually reached out to me today with some cool pics of this lamp/display shelf. After a bit of back and forth they linked me to their Kickstarter page where they’re trying raise enough money to make these available to consumers. They even provided a pre-written interview with Daniel Cytrynowicz. I mean, why not?

Can you talk a little on the process?

First we had to hand-make the acrylic trays right here in Los Angeles using a laser-cutting machine and also make a metal mock-up of the gear component, placed on the base. We then sent those parts abroad to have molds made. Finally, we received a couple samples, made a couple modifications and the base was ready for manufacturing. The shades are printed (high-res) and made in-house and in-demand in our studio/workshop in Los Angeles. The packaging is also made locally. The box turns into a waste-paper basket!

What gave you the idea of Knight Light?

We’ve been designing and manufacturing lamps for around 20 years. We always had special requests to make personalized lamps, lamps that spoke directly to customers’ tastes, lifestyles and passions. We finally decided to create a line of lamps that would make rooms brighter in more than the traditional sense. Light and dreams, style, memories, passion and smiles.

How did you make it?

We first created the shades, by printing translucent material with non-fade archival inks, using state-of-the-art printing processes. Ultimately customers will order shades printed with their own content for the ultimate shade! This particular base was created to house a small collection of treasures, in order to transport the customer to his/her favorite place, state-of-mind or hobby. Instant gratification and maximum pleasure!

What are your favorite games?

Although I do play some on-line games, I tend to favor old-fashioned board games such as Stratego, Battleships, backgammon and Chess.

Why are custom shades so cool?

Custom shades are cool because they are YOU! They are conversation pieces, they allow you to display your most prized artwork, they make you go back over and over again to your favorite vacation spot, they bring you closer to a geographically distant loved one, display your favorite game, or remind you daily of how much you love tacos. In any event, these printed shades are always communicating something…you’ll never feel alone!

The idea of the Knight Light is something I can get behind. As a lover of collectibles, miniatures, etc… this would be perfect to sit in my cubicle at work and display some cool goodies. I’m not completely sold on the shades, though. I’d have to create my own to fit whatever I was displaying and I’m not that great at that sort of thing.

Anyway, if you’re interested you can get in on the ground floor with $40 if the project gets funded.

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