22 Oct
Posted by David Miller as Modern Board Games
The first board game video reviewer to 1 million subscribers is the winner! That’s the premise of Watch This Game!, a new title out of the partnership between publisher Buffalo Games and licensing house Pocket.Watch.
On the box cover are a bunch of kid YouTubers known for their video toy reviews. Inside are dice, dice cups, and cards.
Three new cards each round define the dice combinations needed to acquire subscribers. Players roll their dice as fast as they can, setting aside those they like on each card. The first player to match the full combo on a card gets to book it. When all three have been claimed, a new round begins.
Besides subscriber cards, there are also troll cards, which drive subscribers away from an opponent, glitch cards, which force an opponent to divert their dice away from the subscriber race, and system crash cards, which make them start all over from the beginning.
Watch This Game! is available from Target at $18 and will take up to six players.
21 Sep
Posted by David Miller as Modern Board Games
Founders Paul and Eden Dedrick have sold Buffalo Games to a group of current management led by CEO Nagendra Raina and backed by private equity firm Mason Wells. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Buffalo Games makes Watch Ya’ Mouth, Brain Games, and a variety of party games. The company is also a major producer of jigsaw puzzles.
Social media trends make for hot games these days, doubly so if they incorporate a fun action element. So it should come as no surprise that two companies at this week’s NY Toy Fair were promoting upcoming games based on water bottle flipping.
Hasbro’s Flip Challenge, due this summer at a retail price of $10, will include a set of targets and challenge cards but is BYOB (bring-you-own-bottle).
Buffalo Games’ Flip Tricks is also scheduled for the summer but at around $15 will include challenge cards and one specially designed bottle with a flat cap and made from heavier duty plastic. The company also plans to sell extra bottles in various colored patterns.
Two other water bottle flipping games are available now. Kap It ($20) comes with two square bottles and one target mat divided in to several point zones. The recommended game has players flipping bottles until one wins with 21 points. With Bottle Flip ($25), you get one bottle, challenge cards, a target board, and a scoreboard.
For adults—complete with “Parental Advisory” sticker—Buffalo Games will have later this year an officially licensed Urban Dictionary Game (August, $25). The box comes with challenge cards and definition cards. Most of the challenge cards are fill-in-the-blank but some require that turn’s judge to act out or draw something. Then the other players submit definition cards and the judge chooses a favorite.
For the kids, Buffalo has three-dimensional plans. Raptor Run (August, $18) is a dinosaur-themed board game with a single track running back-and-forth up the slope of a volcano. The volcano also works kind of like a dice tower. Through its top players on their turn drop a die, which serves two purposes. First, it simply tells them how many spaces up the track to move their dinosaur pieces. Second, as it drops, the die may knock some of those pieces off the track, forcing them to start the trek over.
Two more vertically oriented games are the Princess Adventure and DC Super Friends 3D Floor Puzzles ($15). As you might infer from the name, the boards are large and must be pieced together before play. After that, they’re pretty straightforward cooperative spin-and-move games—either collecting keys and racing a wizard to the top of the castle or racing against the Joker to rescue the baby octopus.
Buffalo Games newest is Celebrity Throw Down. The game includes 300 celebrity cards and 162 situation cards. Players start each round with four celebrity cards. Someone draws a situation card (for example, “Who’s the best celebrity to read you a bedtime story?”) and then everyone submits one card representing the celebrity that they would choose. The player who drew the situation chooses one celebrity to eliminate. Then the player who’s card was eliminated chooses another, and so on, until only one celebrity card is left. At that point, whoever’s celebrity is left keeps the situation card and a new round begins. The winner is the first player to collect five situation cards.