Coming in April from Griddly Games is Rocket Lander ($27). Played on a gridded board, Rocket Lander continues until one player has managed to place 25 points of rockets on contiguous spaces. Getting there, involves rolling three dice on every turn. Two are used for grid coordinates, one for selecting a rocket of that point value.

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Last year David had posted about 5 Stones, a modern take on the ancient game of Knucklebones. The game was just in a prototype form then, but this year I had a chance to check out the final product.

The final version has ditched the bag in favor of a sturdy cardboard box with a lid that velcros shut. The stones are still hematite, and the same shape as we’d last seen them. There’s also rules for 5 different games in the box, and Griddly encourages players to come up with their own games and share them with the company.

The cost is still $8.95. Ages 6+.

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For its newest product, Griddly Games is going old-school, very old. In April, the company plans to release 5 Stones, a version of Knucklebones (also known as Fivestones or Jackstones and similar to Jacks, Kugelach, and Gonggi) with five hematite stones and a bag for $9.

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For 2013, Griddly Games is planning a Make Your Own Board Game Kit. The first version will be “Rainbows and Storms” and include a board with a path of blank spaces, a deck of erasable cards, 250+ embellishment stickers, pawns, and dice. Meant for younger children (ages 5+), it provides the components for a basic roll-and-move game but allows the kids to customize it with their own imaginations. Game designer training-wheels, if you will.

Also on display by Griddly was Show Me the Kwan. (I’m told that “kwan” means “awesome”.) This is a word game using dice and cards with categories. First you pick a card and read one of the categories. Then you roll the die with numbers. It tells you what letter position you’ll be using this round. After that you roll the rest of the dice, the ones with letters. At this point, the players can grab any die for which they can come up with a word that has the die’s letter in the select position and that fits the category. For example, if the category is “beach” and the position number is 2, then you can take a die showing “A” by saying “sand” and a die showing “C” by saying “ocean”.

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