Winning Moves’ latest rereleased classic is is the 1990s Hasbro title Pretty Pretty Princess ($17). Spin to move and collect all the matching colored jewelry.
New titles include the mini stacking game Kozo ($20). Each turn, a player places one 3D piece, along with with one small blocking cube. Nothing, though, is allowed over the center square of the board. Points are accumulated over three rounds based on the number of cubes making up each placed piece but forfeited for the round by a player who causes pieces to fall.
Apocalyptic Picnic ($17) is a lighthearted zombie card game, where the goal is to convert all other players’ families to undead. Bite cards do the dirty work. Food cards protect. And there are many others cards to protect family from harm, return them to the living, and other effects.
Stink Bug ($17) is a card game where all the leaf-shaped cards are thrown in one loose draw pile. The idea is to make pairs of matching colors but only one of those loose on the top can be pulled by a player on their turn. Also, sneak-bug cards allow players to steal from each other, butterflies are wild cards, and love bugs make pairs for someone else.
Winning Moves’ newest games include an original abstract and two revived classics.
The abstract is Triple Cross ($20), which has players filling a vertical device with orange and green pieces to score the greatest number of three-in-a-row sets. The pieces slide in to horizontal rows and can be used to push an opponent’s pieces out the other side. Or a player can snap a clip on the end to fix that row.
Clue Master Detective ($30) is a super-sized version of the classic deduction game, with additional rooms, weapons, and suspects. The mansion board also has snoop spots, which allow a player to look another player’s cards.
A Milton Bradley title from the early ’90s, 13 Dead End Drive is kind of the inverse of Clue. Players divide up the game’s 12 characters in secret and then try to kill off all but their own. Each turn they can move any of the characters around a three-dimensional game board. When they manage to maneuver a character pawn in to one of the various danger spaces, they can press a little lever or switch and literally topple a statue or drop a chandelier on the piece to kill it. 13 Dead End Drive is exclusive to Go! Calendars & Games until January.
First up on my tour of the Winning Moves Toy Fair booth was a classic brought back to print by the company, Pente ($20 retail, available now). Reminiscent of Go, the goal in Pente is to either line up five in a row of one’s own pieces or capture five pairs of an opponent’s pieces.
Next was Monopoly: The Card Game ($11, now). This is neither the same as Monopoly Deal, nor the last Monopoly card game produced by Winning Moves. Instead, it’s more like a cross between Monopoly and Gin Rummy. Players can trade cards but to go out their hand must include at least one complete property color group. Card sets have a dollar value based on the properties in the namesake and the first player to a set dollar amount is the winner.
After that, Winning Moves was showing Classic Rummy Tiles ($15, now). It’s the company’s generic version of Rummikub with stadium-style tile racks.
Finally, there was the new Rubik’s Tower ($17, now) a 2x2x4 non-symmetrical version of the cube puzzle.
Recently resurrected under the Winning Moves label are original versions of Game of the States (a 1940 Milton Bradley title) and Cranium Cadoo (2001, last of Hasbro). Game of the States ($20) has players moving their truck pieces around a U.S. map, buying local products in one state, and selling them in another. Cranium Cadoo ($25) poses a variety of different challenges—acting, sculpting, solving puzzles, and more—with winning recorded by getting four-in-a-row across the game board.
For new titles, Winning Moves has two. In Sunk! ($15), players roll a die, dribble drops of water in to a floating bottle cap, and hope it doesn’t sink. They may also have to complete certain challenges, such as dripping the water with their opposite hand. Nibbled ($15) is for children ages 4+ and features a bunch of cute clip-on yellow fish. Players start the game with four fish clipped to their clothes or body and each turn they try to guess the color of the fish on the next card. If they guess correctly, they get to remove the number of fish showing.
Winning Moves also sells Rubik’s Cubes. New for this year are Rubik’s Build It Solve It ($24), a standard 3×3 cube that the customer assembles from parts, and Rubik’s Triamid ($18), which is a puzzle with non-moving parts but still has the goal of making every side a single color.
Winning Moves’ lead was giant pigs, or to put it another way, a Pass the Pigs Big Pigs Edition ($18). Same game, same foam pigs, just bigger. Big enough to be fun tossing around the room.
Another new game on display by Winning Moves was Brainspin ($5). This one’s a deck of cards with simple shapes and symbols. Three are turned over each round and the players have 1 minute to come up with as many answers as they can as to what each card may represent. Then the answers are compared and the player with the most unique answers wins the round.
My favorite of the bunch was Brynk ($20), a stacking game that’s also a balancing game played on top of a rolling platform.
Winning Moves’ classic reprints for 2016 include Scrabble to Go, Upwords, and The Velveteen Rabbit Game.
Scrabble to Go ($45), previously known as Scrabble Folio, is, as you’d expect, a travel version of the popular word game. It’s letter tiles snap in to the board and tile racks hide their contents in between games.
Winning Moves’ version of the multi-level word-building game, Upwords ($20), returns to the 8×8 original board configuration.
The Velveteen Rabbit Game ($15), includes flocked standee pawns and features graduated play for children ages 4 and up.
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.
The highlight of Winning Moves 2014 Toy Fair booth was for me Connect 4 & More ($6, available now). Instead of using an upright contraption, the game is played by laying tiles on a table. A player’s goal is still to get four in a row, however when placing a tile, all adjacent sides must have matching colors. By allowing play in all four directions, yet restricting moves on individual turns to matching spaces, I found this new version to be surprisingly engaging for a Connect 4 title.
Another variant that the company had on display was Jenga Throw’n Go ($25, available now). This one adds a die, which tells players which of the two colors they’re supposed to pull on their turn.
Two classic titles being resurrected by Winning moves are Aggravation ($20, available now) and Touring ($6, available now). Both were previously published by Parker Brothers. The former is a version of Pachisi. The latter, a card game about auto racing across the United States, was published for nearly 60 years but replaced in the 1960s by Mille Bornes, a card game about auto racing across France.
Finally, Winning Moves is launching a series of waterproof, washable, and floating card games, so kids can have something to play in the bath ($16 each, available now). Splashimals is a matching game about animals, Splash Pals a matching game about people. Splash Jack is a regular deck of playing cards. So is Splash Jack Royal, but with a design aimed at adults (also for bath time?).
With a license from ABC1, Winning Moves is producing a Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries Cluedo game based on the Australian television crime drama.
…Well, that’s it, actually.
[via Licensing.biz]
Stop It! is Winning Moves’ version of a card game where players play their cards in numeric order within each suit and the first to get rid of all their cards wins. The twist in Stop It! is that all 50 cards are dealt out at the start—which on its own would make the game pointless—but so are a number of “Stop It!” cards equal to one less than the number of players. Everyone knows that someone has the number 10 in each suit, so any one at any time can grab a Stop It! card to end play in one sequence and then start a new one.
Winning Moves continues to upsize Bogle with Super Big Boggle and a 6 x 6 grid of letter cubes. In this version the timer has been increased to 4 minutes, double-letter cubes have letter pairs on all sides, a blocking cube interrupts a row and column, and words must be a minimum of four letters long.
And this year’s crop of classic reprints from Winning Moves includes Yahtzee (in original packaging with an aluminum dice cup), Sorry (the 1930s era board with Point Sorry variant “for adult play”), and 5ive Straight. The last is a deceptively simple five-in-a-row game with an unusual board. Of course, the goal is to get five pegs in a straight line. The board is a 10 x 10 grid with spaces numbered 0 to 99 in a circuitous pattern. And the game includes a deck of cards numbered 0 to 99. Players start with four cards and each turn can either draw a new card or play a card to place a peg in a hole numbered that or higher. So it seems the lower-numbered cards provide more flexibility, while it’s good to target higher-numbered spaces for completing a line.