Mattel’s fourth quarter gross sales were 3 percent higher in 2015, absent the impact of currency exchange rates, compared to the same period in the previous year. Full-year gross sales were up 1 percent in constant-currency terms, buoyed by 7 percent growth in Fisher-Price and a 22 percent rise from Hot Wheels. Mattel’s entertainment business, which includes both the digital and tabletop games categories, grew 16 percent.

A recently announced “strategic partnership” will see Stronghold Games handling all English-language games of eggerspiele in North America.

The two Toys “R” Us stores in Ireland are shutting down just 6 months after opening.

Queen Games has begun providing its games direct to distributors in North America, ending its distribution arrangement with Asmodee NA. Queen Games will use Ship Naked for fulfillment, with Hit Point Sales also providing an alternate sales vehicle.

For its part, Asmodee has acquired Nordic and Dutch distributor Bersgala Enigma and is renaming the company to just “Enigma”.

Patch Products of Beloit, Wisconsin has acquired STEM and construction toy company, Roominate. Patch also changed its name to Playmonster.

Spin Master has acquired the Etch A Sketch and Doodle Sketch brands, including all related patents, trademarks, tooling, and inventory, from The Ohio Art Company.

Bay Tek Games has purchased Skee Ball.

Playmore Games of Finland announced the closing of an Angel round of funding with €250,000 from Nolwenture Ltd. and Davigia Ltd. The investment will be used to expand the company’s distribution network for tabletop games, as well as to develop its Dized application for enhancing tabletop games with digital content.

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At the Fantasy Flight Games In-Flight Report (which I’ll cover separately), Christian Petersen talked about Asmodee’s grand plans. The company, he said, sees the possibility of achieving a scale similar to the largest international toy companies but doing so by building on the best type of toy, games.

Asmodee’s presence at Gen Con was certainly consistent with that attitude. The booth and demo space was again even larger than last year, the number and variety of games more than I could cover.

One I was not able to try, Mysterium ($50), was also one of the hottest at the show. A limited supply brought people running to the booth with the opening of the exhibit hall doors. Mysterium is described as a combination of Dixit and Clue. It has a game-master of sorts but is played cooperatively. The goal is to solve a murder mystery with clues provided by art cards.

My favorite was one that Asmodee will be distributing for Queen Games, Treasure Hunter by Richard Garfield. Due at Essen, Treasure Hunter combines an easy card draft with a straightforward process that totals up the players’ cards in each of three color categories and awards the ones with the least and greatest values bonuses or penalties, as the case may be each round. In addition to value cards for each color, players are also drafting the occasional modification card, as well as dog cards used to fight off trolls.

Mafia de Cuba ($30, September) is Asmodee’s entry in to the social deduction category. It also comes with a beautiful cigar box, which is used in the game to hold the godfather’s diamonds, as well as a group of role tokens (faithful henchmen, driver, FBI agent, etc.). After the box is passed around the table, the goal of the godfather is to figure out who stole his diamonds. But say, for example, he accuses someone who turns out to be the agent, well then that agent wins the game instead.

Starfighter ($30) is a two-player card-based spaceship combat game played in columns. The concept is fighter screens making runs at opponents’ cruisers. However, the fewer columns a player takes advantage of one round, the more cards they may draw the next.

Barony ($50) has players trying to elevate their noble characters to the rank of Duke. This is accomplished by recruiting knights, moving them around the board, upgrading them in stages, producing resources, and eliminating opponents.

2015 has been a big year for dinosaur games. In this category, Asmodee will deliver at Essen Raptor. It’s a two-player tactical game in which one person plays the scientists trying to capture baby raptors and the other side plays the dinosaur mother protecting her young. Gameplay involves the simultaneous selection of cards. The person who’s card number is lower gets to play their card’s special ability that turn. The one who’s number is higher, receives the difference in action points.

Another Essen-scheduled game from Asmodee is Doctor Panic. An action party game with a medical theme, Doctor Panic incorporates eight mini-games, every one of which must be completed within the total time limit. The mini-games include such activities as matching the pose on an x-ray card or sewing thread to match a suture pattern. A soundtrack counts down the time limit and sometimes also interrupts normal play with sidetrack tasks, such as running around the table.

For Days of Wonder, Asmodee was showing the prototype of a new Ticket to Ride double-sided map board. One side features the British Isles, comes with a new deck of cards, and adds technology development to the game. For example, at the start, players can only complete length-2 routes. To complete longer routes, they must first upgrade their trains by playing wild-cards. The other side of the board has a map of Pennsylvania and adds company stocks to the game. Each completed route provides shares in certain companies. At the end of the game, the majority shareholder in each company earns a bonus.

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Donald X. Vaccarino announced that Queen Games’ upcoming Kingdom Builder expansion’s Kickstarter campaign has been cancelled. Last week, the game designer made a public statement on BoardGameGeek.com’s message forums about lack of payment and the expiration of the contract. “The contract expires if they haven’t published the expansion by June 30 2015,” he writes. “[G]iven that they haven’t paid me yet for 2014, I’m not feeling inclined to give them more time.”

This morning, Mr. Vaccarino reports that Queen Games has been working with him to determine “just how much exactly they owe me for 2014, in a completely friendly fashion, and has paid most of it.” He attributes the post and the crossposting to the Kickstarter comments to have motivated the company to pay him.

Queen Games has published a statement about the campaign’s cancellation in a backers-only update. Queen says they will not have the rights to publish the expansion after the 30th of June and that the contract will not be extended by the designer. “Before the campaign started, everything was lined up for publishing the German edition by that time,” the update reads. “But for unfortunate circumstances we could no longer hold that date.”

The designers for Tortuga, Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim, also have stated they have not been paid by Queen Games for 2014. In a post on reddit’s boardgames subreddit, Jay Cormier says that the company only pays once per year, with ninety days after the end of the calendar to make payment. “It’s now June 19th,” he writes, “and we still haven’t been paid. We’ve sent them numerous emails – with hardly any responses.” The designers, who also developed a boardgame based on the Orphan Black television show as well as Belfort by Tasty Minstrel Games, state they are glad that Donald X. Vaccarino went public with his frustration and hope that spurs Queen Games to settle their account as well.

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Spinderella, published by Zoch, has won the Kinderspiel des Jahres for 2015. The KdJ is the “Children’s Game of the Year”, as selected by a panel of German board game critics. Hailed for Spinderella’s use of magnets and the spiderweb pulley system, the game beat out Schatz-Rabatz by Noris Spiele (a pirate-themed game) and Push a Monster by Queen Games (a dexterity game about placing monster tokens on a small surface). The Spiel des Jahres (“Game of the Year”) and Kennerspiel des Jarhes (“Hobby Game of the Year”) will be announced on Monday, July 6, 2015.

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Using Pelgrane Press’ Gumshoe system for a time-travel roleplaying game, TimeWatch is supposed to be rules-light, provide fast cinematic action, and facilitate improvisational GMing. Lead designer Kevin Kulp also promises that the game will “embrace using paradox and time-travel to your advantage when solving mysteries and battling foes; leave yourself a note from the future, or have your future self clock in to lend a hand when you need it the most.” At the ambitious stretch goal of $1 billion, he also promises to fund an actual time machine.

With Village in a Box, The Game Crafter is “experimenting” at Kickstarter. The company says it’s about building an economy of scale. For an $89 pledge, backers can get eight different games, each one of which has sold or will sell for around $20 on The Game Crafter’s website. However, I’m not convinced. There are nine pledge levels that bundle different combinations of the eight games, and add-on options further increase the number of permutations. When divided among the eight games, the project’s goal of only $1,500 doesn’t strike me as enough to guarantee scale for any one. Thus, I see it as more of a marketing device. Nevertheless, if you’re interested in any of the games and willing to pay up front, The Game Crafter is offering a pretty good discount and as a POD company should be able to deliver in a reasonable time frame.

Mora Games, who also plans to use The Game Crafter for Flip, may have a bigger problem. The game looks quite similar, as well as similarly named, to Flip Out from Gamewright.

Shoshana Kessock is raising funds to support the Living Games Conference at New York University. The conference is about LARPs and Shoshana, who’s running the conference as her graduate student thesis, would like to record its events for future scholarly reference.

Also in the LARP category is Sabertron. The project from Level Up aims to produce foam swords with built-in electronics that can record hits and differentiate them parried strikes.

Fat Dragon Games’ Ravenfell project is for the production of print-and-assemble 28 mm miniature terrain files. Fat Dragon promises a whole village’s worth of buildings that can be folded flat and reassembled, customized with add-on elements, and mixed-and-matched level by level. The thing is, I can’t find any indication of how many model plans the company considers a village’s worth. And while the project has hit a number of stretch goals, only the higher priced donors qualify for the extra rewards attached to them.

Query is a party game based on the auto-complete function of internet search engines. Each round players try to guess which phrase are a true search engine result and which are alternatives submitted by fellow players.

In Livestock Uprising, Dog Might Games looks to be producing a resource-driven war game, gimmicked up with farm animals as factions. For $250, backers can get “From Seed to Harvest”, a 70 page book of “articles, workshops, design tips, drawings, and artwork” about the game, and a hand-made, hardwood game box.

On Indiegogo, Noel and Tye are asking for funds to help them make a Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine costume. [Waiting for the C&D…]

On Ulule, Narrativiste Edition is seeking funds for a French translation of Evil Hat’s Spirit of the Century RPG.

Tasty Minstrel Games’ latest pay-what-you-want project is a western-themed, tile-laying game. This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the 2-4 of Us is worth $3 for the name alone.

Tasty Minstrel Games’ Scoville project stands out for doing a fantastic job of teaching the basics of the game in a 3 minute video. Actual play looks pretty good too. The game is about farming hot peppers, which are represented by wood cubes of various colors. The board represents a shared field for planting peppers, which when harvested peppers can be sold in the market (for various benefits) or used in the making of chili recipes (for victory points). Cross-breeding specialty peppers draws on the color wheel as a mechanism in the game.

Another project that does a good job of introducing game play in its short video is Nika from Eagle Games. Though applied to an ancient Greece theme, Nika is an abstract title where the goal is to move one’s pieces to the other side of the board. The twist—let’s say in comparison to a traditional game like Chess—is that while the pieces are all the same, their relative strength depends on how groups are configured and aligned together—in game terms, the size and shape of a phalanx.

I don’t think that Queen Games is really depending on Kickstarter success to print Tortuga, a game about pirates stealing treasure from each other that’ll come with a bunch of custom dice. But then again, I don’t think that it’s backers really care.

Modiphius Entertainment proposes to bring back the Mutant Chronicles roleplaying game in a 3rd edition with new rules. And it looks like the company is already well underway with an extensive playtesting program and has detailed plans for a full line of supplements. By the way, I have no idea what “dieselpunk sci-fi” means.

Silver Fox is producing a line of Call of Cthulhu 32 mm miniatures.

UPDATED 1/4/2014

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