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”.