Rubik’s Cube
Brian Johnson solved a 2×2 cube in just under 1 second (0.95) for a North American record.
Jan Bentlage’s three-solve average of 25 moves for the 3×3 Rubik’s Cube qualified as a world record for fewest moves.
Draughts
Latvian player Zoja Golubeva’s win at the Draughts World Championship for Women represents her 15th time taking that title.
Host country Uzbekistan led the medal count at the Asian Draughts Championship with 34 gold, 25 silver, and 25 bronze.
Magic: The Gathering
The Magic Online Championship brought the best online players together in the same room to play each other via laptop. The winner, Magnus Lantto, qualified for the Pro Tour and World Championship and took home a prize of $25,000.
For the release weekend of the Modern Masters set, there were coordinated Grand Prix events in Chiba, Japan (with 5,000 attendees); Utrecht, Netherlands (another 5,000 attendees); and Las Vegas (11,000 attendees total, though the competition was split in to two). Four couples were married at the events, and Wizards claims 1 million people watched online. The winners were Yuki Matsumoto in Chiba, Davide Vergoni of Italy in Utrecht, and Aaron Lewis and Scott Markeson in Las Vegas.
Monopoly
A group in Suisun City, California claims to have broken the world record for largest Monopoly board ever assembled.
Chess
When Natalya Zhukova of Ukraine won the European Women’s Chess Championship recently, it was a repeat of the same feat 15 years ago. However, her win was marred by some controversy.
Wei Yi, who only turned 16 during the tournament, won the Chinese Championship and broke in to the top-30 of FIDE internationally ranked players.
Jeffery Xiong of Texas, is only 14 years old but won the Chicago Open, broke the 2500 ratings mark, earned his third GM norm.
Connect 4
Guests, 314 of them, at Butlin’s Minehead Resort in Somerset, U.K. got together to break the world record for most people playing Connect 4 at the same time.
Scrabble
The winner of the 2015 Bayer National Scrabble Championship in India was Mohan Verghese Chunkath, a former Chief Secretary of the government of Tamil Nadu. Among his 24 games, Mr. Chunkath scored 56 bingos.
Winning Moves is bringing back in their classic styles this year the counting game, Hi-Ho! Cherry-O, and the deduction game, Guess Who?.
But the company is also bringing to market Connect 4 Twist & Turn, which takes the slotted playing-field and wraps it around a cylinder. No right or left edges and rows that turn independently make for a game much more interesting than the original.
Winning Moves’ other new game for 2015 is Fish Fish Squish. It’s a matching game with a unique reward element. A player that finds a match in the grid of cards gets to squish the fish their opponent molded from dough.