I found several African/American board games based on Black History & Culture that are both entertaining and educational. But the main thing is, these games looks awfully interesting =)
The Pleasures and Perils of 5 Coloredgirls!
“The Pleasures and Perils of 5 Coloredgirls!” is a hilarious but poignant game about five socially fragmented divas-in-waiting striving to make themselves whole – if necessary, at someone else’s expense.
The goal of the game is to collect enough puzzle pieces to form a whole woman. While searching for pieces along a yellow brick road, players must survive a variety of lifestyle ruts, social inequities, financial hurdles, health issues and the antics of Ray-Ray ‘nem. Read the rest of this entry »
This is pretty funny! =) (click to enlarge the image)
Read the rest of this entry »
Reiner Knizia (born 1957 in Germany) is a full-time game designer who has been living in England. He earned a PhD in mathematics and has previously worked in the banking industry. His first published games in 1990 were Gold Digger and Desperados. Since then he has been one of the world’s most prolific game designers with more than 500 games and books published in numerous languages and countries including many global licences such as Lord of the Rings, LEGO, Mensa, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Monopoly, Playmobil, Simpsons and Star Wars.Over 13 million games and books sold worldwide.
A number of Knizia designs have been redeveloped for the electronic gaming & console markets. Ingenious (aka Einfach Genial) and Keltis have both appeared in CD-ROM versions; Lost Cities was adapted for Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade. An original game for the Nintendo DS, Dr. Reiner Knizia’s Brainbenders was published in 2008; Keltis for the NDS followed in 2009. Knizia has also designed various game applications specifically for the iPhone, including Monumental, Roto and Robot Master.
You can find many of his paper-board games on boardgamegeek (just type his name in the Search form). But I would like to post some descriptions of his puzzle board games designed for iPhone and iPod.
Most of board game geeks prefer the “real thing” (playing with boards, bits, cards and human beings as opposed to an iPhone and AI). But with real live human opponents you can’t play a quick game of Robot Master during commercial break, a quick game of Poison waiting for the car to warm up, Money lying in bed at night or Ingenious while sitting on the loo =) . Read the rest of this entry »
Math Arcade is a branch of the Fun Brain Website (funbrain.com). Students in first through eighth grades can practice math facts and math skills through fun, interactive games. Math Arcade plays like a conventional board game: complete a series of brief and addicting games that involving certain math skills to move your game piece around the board to the finish line.
Math Arcade is a collection of 25 games at each grade level to play. You can select your skill level when you start the game. Games include: Ball Hogs, Moon Rocks, Mummy Hunt, Bumble Numbers, Pigg Toss, Math Basketball and more. Read the rest of this entry »
Cat Attack, made entirely in the EU, has all the attributes of a classic board game; it looks good, plays well and has a popular subject matter. It is suitable for two – six players. The game was designed as an adult strategy game but it soon became clear that bright 8 year olds could easily get their claws into it. Cat Attack can be tailored to suit even younger players by the removal of certain key cards and rules whilst still maintaining a high level of fun. The rules can also be adapted to create a more intense, strategic experience.
You are a hungry cat with nine lives. Can you survive to be the top mog? The game Cat Attack is based on the trials and tribulations of the domestic cat. The board represents a local neighbourhood. Each player has a cat that lives in its own house. Of course, each cat begins the game with nine lives; any cat that loses all of its nine lives is out of the game. (Retired to the country). Read the rest of this entry »
I found a couple of funny pictures with pets ‘playing’ board games’ =). Somehow they resembles my own cats)
Killer Bunnies is a funny and satirical non-collectible, action filled card game, in which you must try to keep as many Bunnies alive as possible, while eliminating your opponents’ Bunnies. Your opponents are armed with weapons and will stop at nothing to keep you from winning the game, which can get dreadfully vengeful, horribly nasty, hilariously messy, and just plain fun!
Can you keep from being attacked by the whimsical Whisk or the torching Flame Thrower? Defend your Bunnies with the Magic Spatula, or use a Feed The Bunny card to starve out an opponent! It’s off-the-wall strategic fun, where the goal is to survive and claim the Magic Carrot to win the game!
Each player is dealt 7 cards, 5 of which stay hidden and of 2 which must be obligated for play in upcoming rounds.
During the game, players collect Bunnies, which come in 5 different types and in 5 different colors. Bunnies are placed face up on the table in front of each player. Read the rest of this entry »
A great tour of European board game history (from 16 to 20 centuries) in pictures.
Most of them are from the British Museum Prints Database.
Hitting the road – or the water, or the rails, or the air – can be a trying experience. But if you’re prepared with something to pass the time, your trip will seem much shorter. These board games are all designed to go along with you.
1. Scrabble Folio Edition
The classic word game is available in a deluxe travel edition, with a board that features recessed spaces to hold the letters in place and a cloth bag to carry the tiles. The tight fitting tiles enable you to play wherever you are – at a friend’s house, on a plane, or in a car. The snap-in-place tiles and folding gameboard allow you to pack up in the middle of a game without disturbing words already played. When you’re ready to resume play just unzip your case, open the game board and you’re all set to play – right where you left off! Read the rest of this entry »
Goal! Pro Soccer is a fast action card, dice and chart simulation game played with pro and amateur teams and the players are rated for their abilities on the playing field. This game should give the gamer the actual feel of a game as it is played and should give adequate and realistic stats. It’s a very simplistic game that can be mastered within one or two playings and game times should range between 25 to 30 minutes per contest, sometimes less, and a whole tournament can be played out in a matter of a few weeks.
Pull out all of the charts and tables for use with the game. Then, place the playing field on the table, using a coin, chit, or other marker to track the progress of the ball up and down the playing field. Also, have a copy of the score sheet or a blank piece of paper nearby to record team data and match statistics. In addition, you’ll need one pair of dice, each die a different color. Read the rest of this entry »
Every football fan, at least in Britain, has owned a set of Subbuteo at one time. For those in the dark, Subbuteo is a fun and easy to play classic finger-flicking soccer-simulation action game. It is played on a large cloth playing field called a “pitch”, with teams of players that are represented by miniature men mounted on smooth round bases.
The men are made to kick the ball by flicking their bases, which causes the men to slide around on the pitch, hitting the ball. The rules simulate nearly all details of a soccer game including ball possession and passing, throw-ins, goal kicks and corner kicks. There is even a large section in the rules devoted to fouling.
Far more popular in European countries than in the United States, collectors can buy teams of men representing dozens of teams and countries from around the world, along with soccer stadium enhancements such as stands filled with cheering fans, referees that stand on the sidelines, even stadium lights. Read the rest of this entry »
Tantrix is a boardless game for a set of hexagonal painted bakelite tiles. Some sets of tiles can be use as puzzles, in which you have to arrange the tiles so that the edges match in colour, thus forming coloured lines or even loops. The tiles can also be used for playing a game with two or more people.
There are several different Tantrix tile sets available. There are various small sets, each containing about 10 distinct tiles, with which there are one or more puzzles to solve. There is however also a complete set of 56 tiles, and from that any of the small sets can be selected.
There are three kinds of line segments – straights, bends, and corners – and these lead to four different types of Tantrix tile. Each tile uses exactly 3 colours. There are 14 possible tiles with three colours: 2 with three corners, 3 with a straight and two corners, 3 with a straight and two bends, and 6 with a corner and two bends. The full set of tiles uses four colours (red, blue, green , yellow). Each tile is therefore missing exactly one of the four colours. This means that there are 4 sets of 14 tiles, for a total of 56 tiles. Read the rest of this entry »
Gift Trap is a fun, social party board game, invented by Nick Kellet (based on an idea inspired by his eldest daughter in 2004). You must know the people you are playing with a little in order for the game to work.
The object is to be the first person to satisfy your wishes as both a gift giver and gift receiver. You exchange gifts ranging in point values from 1 to 4 (the gifts with higher points get more outlandish).
Each card is double-sided and the starting player can pick a side to start each round. Deal some gifts and place them on the gift grid for all to see. Look at the gifts and look at your friends and decide which gift to give to which friend.
Now look at the gifts and choose which gifts you would want and which gift you wouldn’t want. The real fun and conversations begin as each player matches the gifts they received to the gifts they choose. If you give or get a good gift, you get points. Beware incorrect gift decisions as a giver or receiver or you will go backwards on the scoring track. Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s face it – the boardgaming hobby is wonderful. Boardgames provide a way to enjoy time with family, friends, or even complete strangers. They allow us to exercise and improve our mental capabilities as we learn the rules and nuances to the different games that we play. For some, it provides the opportunity to travel and meet new people. Boardgames provide a fairly economical way to enjoy a few hours of relaxation – and they have the added benefit of being re-usable.
I found one thread on a forum dedicated to board games geeks, I think it’s funny and somehow interesting. One boardgamer started a new thread with a question “Sure, you’re a gamer, but what else do you do?”. I only posted some main answers fom it.
Common arcade game is a coin-operated entertainment machine, usually installed in public businesses such as restaurants, public houses, and video arcades. Arcade games often have very short levels, simple and intuitive control schemes, and rapidly increasing difficulty. This is due to the environment of the Arcade, where the player is essentially renting the game for as long as whose in-game avatar can stay alive (or until runs out of tokens).
Games on consoles or PCs can be referred to as “arcade games” if they share these qualities or are direct ports of arcade titles. Many independent developers are now producing games in the arcade genre that are designed specifically for use on the Internet. These games are usually designed with Flash/Java/DHTML and run directly in web-browsers.
The origin of many arcade games is rooted in their close cousins, board games. Most popular board games, card games, and the like have been computerized to some degree or another. Computer game programs can be worthy opponents and can help improve one’s skill at traditional games.
Chess, Checkers, Othello (also known as Reversi), and Backgammon have world class computer programs. Mah-jongg and related games are immensely popular in China and Japan. Go is popular in East Asia. It is infamously difficult to program a computer to play Go well. Magic: The Gathering has had computer versions for some time.
Well-known boardgames Trivia are growing in popularity, especially on mobile phones where people may only have a few minutes to play the game. One common trivia game for Blackberry is MobileQs.
Here are some pretty interesting examples of such arcade board games (some of them are for Xbox Live). Read the rest of this entry »
Board games make a great gift. They work well as presents, and can turn a situation where your sitting around silently with people you only half know into a situation where you are OK, well, where you’re still sitting around silently with people you only half know, but now at least you’ll have something to concentrate on and, with any luck, a heavily spiked eggnog on hand. Alcohol may be the social lubricant, but sometimes you find yourself in need of an entire engine.
I decided to post a few games games from Board Games Gift Guide 2009 (boardgamegeek.com), which I found quite exciting :-)
Blokus might have the simplest rules of any game on the market. Put your pieces on the board, touching your other pieces, but only on the corners. Try to get all your pieces on that board. That’s it! But you will forever be experimenting with new tricks and strategies to expand your territory while hemming in your opponents’.
If Blokus is a hit with your recipients, they may also like the two-player edition, Travel Blokus, or the new Blokus Trigon with triangular instead of square pieces. Read the rest of this entry »
Scrabbles is a word board game in which two to four players score points by forming words from 100 tiles with printed letters on a game board marked with a 15 x 15 grid (not always but often the grid includes various ‘premium squares’ on which players can score extra points, each letter has a score beside it). The words are formed across and down in a crossword fashion and must appear in a standard dictionary.
The game was invented by American architect Alfred Mosher Butts in 1938, as a variation on an earlier word game he invented called Lexico.
The game is also known as Literati, Alfapet, Funworder, Skip-A-Cross, Scramble, Spelofun, Square-write, Palabras Cruzadas (“crossed words”) and Word for Word.
Snakes and ladders is a type of board game popular mainly with children. The game is played by 2 or more players on a square playing board on which a grid is drawn. The grid squares are consecutively numbered. On this grid are drawn a number of “ladders” connecting two squares together, and a similar number of snakes also connecting squares together. The size of the grid (most commonly 8×8, 10×10 or 12×12) varies from board to board, as does the exact arrangement of the chutes and the ladders: both of these may affect the duration of game play.
The aim of the game is to be the first player to reach the end by moving across the board from square 1 to square 100. Players travel the board from base to top, right, then left and so on.
The person with the highest amount on die starts first. The person with the second highest goes 2nd and so on. Each player starts with a pawn in the “1″ grid square (in the bottom left) and rolls a single die, moving the pawn the number of squares (in numerical order) indicated by the die roll.
Reversi is a strategic board game for 2 players played on an eight-by-eight square grid with pieces that have two distinct sides (black and white). Coin-like markers with a light and a dark face are typical.
The origin of the game is rather controversial. Japanese believe it was invented in Japan in the 1970’s but some resources say the game was in existence before that.[1] In Japan, the game was introduced in 1975 by Goro Hasegawa, who wrote How to win at Othello. It was named after the Shakespeare play Othello.
The object is to finish the game with more pieces turned to your color than your opponent.
The game is started in the position shown below on a reversi board consisting of 64 squares in an 8×8 grid (as it shown below). Black goes first. On your turn, you place one piece on the board with your color facing up. You must place the piece so that an opponent’s piece, or a row of opponent’s pieces, is flanked by your pieces (“sandwiched” between two of your pieces). All of the opponent’s pieces between your pieces are then turned over to become your color. You can capture vertical, horizontal, and diagonal rows of pieces. Also, you can capture more than one row at once.
English draughts (known simply as draughts in the United Kingdom and some other countries), also called American checkers, straight checkers, or simply checkers (especially in the United States) is a group of board games which involve the “jumping” of enemy pieces.
The game of draughts is thought to have originated in around 1100 AD, probably in southern France. It is thought the inventor created this board game by using a Chessboard, with the rules of Alquerque.
Checkers is played on an 8×8 chessboard, but only uses the dark squares. All draughts variants are played by two people, on opposite sides of a playing board, alternating moves. Traditionally the pieces are either black, white, or red, and the board alternates between red and black squares. The opponent’s pieces are captured by jumping over them.
Chess (the “Game of Kings”) is a board game played between two players. It is played on a chessboard, which is a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. At the start, each player controls sixteen pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns. The pieces are divided, by convention, into white and black sets. The players are referred to as White and Black, and each begins the game with sixteen pieces of the specified color.
White moves first. The players alternate moving one piece at a time (with the exception of castling, when two pieces are moved simultaneously). Pieces are moved to either an unoccupied square, or one occupied by an opponent’s piece, capturing it and removing it from play. With one exception (en passant), all pieces capture opponent’s pieces by moving to the square that the opponent’s piece occupies.
The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent’s king, whereby the king is under immediate attack (in “check”) and there is no way to remove or defend it from attack on the next move. Read the rest of this entry »
I think I should begin with the game that inspired me for this blog – Wild Board Games from COREL CORP (for Windows 95 :-) ) It’s a computer game featuring awesome board games, puzzles, 4 zany opponents with lip-synched digital speech, and 4 different rooms to play in.
Wild Board Games is a fun collection of board games for Windows, the fifth in Corel’s line of “edutainment” CD-ROMs for children before the company refocused its efforts on graphical applications in late 1990’s. The program includes five board games adapted to the computer: Chess, Checkers, Reversi, Snakes & Ladders, and Puzzle Game (which is a sliding-puzzle game, not a jigsaw). In each you are pitted against a different animal. In Chess you are up against a rabbit, in Checkers you are up against a monkey, in Reversi you are up against a dog, and in Snakes and Ladders you are up against a chicken. Read the rest of this entry »
