TCGplayer has received a $10 million equity investment from Radian Capital. The company says the money will allow it grow staff while it expands its collectible market portal and retail support service from CCGs to board games, roleplaying games, comic books, sports cards, and video games.

Mayfair Games is closing up shop and has sold all its remaining game assets, as well as its majority stake in Lookout Games of Germany, to Asmodee North America. Lookout will continue to operate as a design studio of Asmodee.

Spin Master has signed a distribution deal with Toysmith for a variety of toy brands, including games and puzzles from Spin Master’s Cardinal subsidiary. The arrangement, which takes affect in June, will see Toysmith as exclusive distributor to the specialty market for the covered ranges.

North Star Games has instituted a minimum advertised pricing (MAP) policy, which is “non-negotiable for all North Star Games’ resellers and will be strictly enforced to ensure the continued value of its brand.” The company also issued a statement saying that, effective immediately, except for two unnamed parties, all sellers will be restricted from participating in Amazon’s Third-Party Marketplace. North Star promises to monitor product listings and suspend or terminate the accounts of those sellers that do not comply.

Hasbro has signed on as the master toy licensee for Power Rangers (Saban Brands), UglyDolls (STX Entertainment), Super Monsters (Netflix), and Top Wing (Nickelodeon), though only the announcement for Power Rangers specifically mentions games.

According to NPD, Mattel’s UNO card game was the top selling game in the United States in 2017.

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Mayfair’s latest title, Barenpark ($42), tasks players with fitting together various polyomino tiles (similar to Tetris shapes or the pieces from Mayfair’s own game, Patchwork) to build out individual bear zoos.

The challenge in this one comes not so much from fitting the pieces on the board—there are plenty of smaller two-square and one-square pieces to fill the holes—but in figuring out the best order of pieces to take and spaces to fill. Some but not all tiles come with victory points. And for some of those, as with achievements that vary each game, the victory point value decreases with each tile taken. At the same time, covering certain board spaces enables a player to draw additional tiles, take another board, or get access to higher value pieces.

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In Bärenpark (April or May, $42), you’re creating a zoo for bears! There’s four types of bears and crazy shaped puzzle pieces that are reminiscent of Patchwork, and amenities tiles for your zoo like Zooloretto, and when you cover up certain undeveloped areas you get certain bonus points or actions like in, well, Bärenpark. Like Patchwork, the conflict seems to be more in obtaining a certain-shaped tile before an opponent does as we all play somewhat separately. (And unlike Patchwork, it plays up to four players.)

The other big news from Mayfair Games is a re-release of Le Harve, expected before Gen Con (mid August, $70). Reprinting the original game, this new boxed edition comes with the Le Grand Hameau expansion and “some other promo cards that have never before been included in the base game.”

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Is for you the board-gaming experience coming up short as a sensory experience? Syrinscape has you covered with a newly released sound-effects player for board games. The base player comes with “ooh”, “aah”, rolling dice, and other sounds for adding drama, mocking opponents, and underscoring victories.

Like the company’s Fantasy and Sci-Fi players designed for roleplaying games, the Syrinscape Board Game Player provides much greater flexibility than just looping a prerecorded track. Users can set a selection of sound elements to play in a randomized pattern or mix them manually on-the-fly.

The Syrinscape Board Game Player is available for PCs (Windows and Mac), as well as Android and iOS mobile devices. Soundsets featuring individual sounds and preprogrammed environments for Chess, Casino, and Soduku are included. Additional soundsets are available at $10 each for Catan from Mayfair Games and Spellcaster and Spike from R&R Games. With the Catan set comes sounds for sheep, the knight and robber, sawing wood, a city marketplace, and more. The Spellcaster set includes unique sounds, in male and female sorcerer versions, for each of the games’ spells. The Spike set has a theme song and the sounds of trains and cargo.

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On display in New York, and at the same time making its way through distribution, was Flea Market ($21), the newest entry in Mayfair’s Fun Fair line. Flea Market is an auction game about buying low and selling high, but with a twist. Bids by individual players are, of a sort, fixed. That is, the players each roll two dice to determine both the priority of their bids and the prices they would have to pay—higher numbers go first but also have to pay more. As the item for sale in a round is selected randomly, the thing purchased by one player may end up resold to others (with the seller earning a bonus from the bank). The winner is the first player to turn a $24 stake in to $45.

Also on display by Mayfair were the rebranded Catan and a Catan Traveler Edition ($45, available in June).

UPDATE: As requested, here is a picture of the Catan cards:

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Fans of the show Parks and Recreation rejoice! The Cones of Dunsire, the game designed by the show’s Ben Wyatt, is very close to becoming reality. Now some people have been lucky enough to play a copy of the game at Gen Con, but now Mayfair is trying to produce of copy of the game for you to get your greedy, little hands on.

Want to make sure you get a copy of the game? You’ll have to pledge at the $500 if you do. Of course the game also needs to reach it’s $300,000 goal in the next 54 days, too. Something tells me they won’t have much trouble doing so.

At $500, I’ll never see a copy of the game on my shelves. Who knows. I may get lucky enough that I’ll see it at a convention one day.

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Kosmos and Mayfair Games have announced a joint restyling of Settlers of Catan, led by a title change. Dropping “Settlers of”, the game will henceforth be known simply as “Catan”. Additional art and design changes are also being made inside and on the box.

Catan’s new look will be previewed at the International Toy Fair in Nuremberg.

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The game that the Green Bay Packers love? Settlers of Catan, according to the Wall Street Journal. Introduced to the locker room two months ago, players on the NFL team have been “completely addicted to it,” says Packers tight end Justin Perillo. “We play it whenever we can.” Backup QB Matt Flynn says the players have taken the game very seriously. After a win in December, he was chastised when trying to play some celebratory music. David Bakhtiari (T) said he “wanted to hear the players talk and strategize. He was very serious. They take it to a different level.”

Packer teammates are no stranger to local Green Bay game store Gnome Games. Pat Fuge, owner, was “flooded with texts and calls” about Settlers of Catan after Perillo mentioned the game on a local sports radio show. Other Packers have been in to the store to purchase backgammon, chess sets, and other games.

The Green Bay Packers play the Seattle Seahawks at CenturyLink Field in Seattle, WA., this coming Sunday, at 3:05 PM EST, for the NFC Championship and a spot at the Super Bowl. (And as a lifelong Seahawks fan, I hope the Packers get to have lots of Catan playtime in their off-season, starting this Monday.)

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A game that started out as the ramblings of a television character is now set to be produced by Mayfair Games. The company is planning to publish Cones of Dunshire, which first appeared as the invention of Ben Wyatt (played by Adam Scott) on NBC’s Parks and Recreation.

At Gen Con last month, Mayfair ran a life-sized Cones of Dunshire charity event. The enthusiastic response has convinced Mayfair to develop the game in to an actual retail product. The company’s plans include crowdfunding a super-deluxe version, followed by the release of a standard version.

[via Entrepreneur]

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Under the watchful eyes of Bob & Angus, in a demo area thronged by ribbon-seekers, Mayfair Games gave me the lowdown on a variety of recent and upcoming releases.

Beadpans & Broomsticks, which shipped in June ($35), puts most of the players in the role of old folks trying to escape a retirement home. One player, though, runs the nurses, who try to stop them. Each retiree player gets two tokens, one for the actual patient and one as a decoy.

Villainy (at retail for $50 later this month) is a supers game where the players are up-and-coming bad guys. Starting with petty crimes like putting a kitten in a tree, and working their way up to bigger, nastier plans, such as decaffeinating the world’s coffee, players build skills and recruit henchmen with the ultimate goal of defeating Fantastaman.

Johari is a push-your-luck, set-collection game about buying and selling gems. Counterfeit gems are part of the mix, though players try hard not to get caught selling them.

Catan Collector’s Edition Ancient Egypt (November, $70) builds on Settlers of Catan (obviously) but incorporates the Nile river running through the board. Resources in the game are cattle, papyrus, and stone. With them players collectively build the Great Pyramid. And ten god cards work similarly to the Helpers of Catan scenario, each providing a unique ability to the player who holds it.

Among the games Mayfair has planned for release in 2015 are Extra Extra and Flea Market. The former has players running competing newspapers. They build stories (with a card drafting mechanism), sell adds, and do layout. Somewhere in that mix there’s also supposed to be worker placement and a lot of player interaction. The latter is a quick, silly dice game that has players collecting artifacts, sometimes from the center market and sometimes taking them away from other players.

Participating in Mayfair’s booth was Lookout Games, with whom Mayfair has a distribution arrangement in the United States. Lookout’s Gold Ahoy is a two-player tile-laying game, where the winner is the player with the most gems in a network of connected tunnels. Patchwork is a game about quilting that uses pentomino or Tetris-like pieces with 9×9 player boards. Players try to fill their boards by collecting pieces. Each piece, though, has a time value and a button value. Buttons are victory points but quilting time is limited.

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