In the past few years, GenCon has made a concerted effort to appeal to a broader audience than the stereotypical gamer geek. They have a areas set aside for kids to play boardgames, trips to the local museums and movie showings for gamer spouses, there’s even a giant highway billboard I see every day on the way to and from the convention that advertises GenCon as a family vacation destination. For the most part, I think they are succeeding. Even in the past five years that I have attended, I have noticed a significant shift in both the family-friendly offerings and a much larger family contingent of attendees. As I’m a big boardgaming fan, I managed to find more information on boardgames than can fit in a single article. So today I’ll focus on games and companies that are family-friendly. Next time we’ll cover boardgames that are cut out more suitable for enthusiastic gamers.

APE Games
Makers of the popular Duck! Duck! Go! at last years GenCon (a game players maneuver their rubber duckies around a hexagonal sink grid), Ape Games was back again and showing off an upcoming title that sticks with the rubber ducky theme. Duck! Duck! Safari is actually five different boardgames that use a double-sided game board, six animal duckies, some cards, and a set of numbered tiles. The five games include a race game, one based on high/low tile management, a go fish/concentration hybrid game, a tile laying game where players lay out tiles and then remove them, and a sort of advanced rummy game. The games range in target age from 6+ to 8+ years and should be out at the Boardgame Geek convention in November.

North Star Games
North Star Games excel at making fun party games that are enjoyable to a very broad range of players. Their flagship title, Wits & Wagers, is based around trivia but anyone can play since much of the game is based around betting which player came closest to the correct answer. Following up with their hit, Wits & Wagers Expansion #1 contains 700 new questions and 3 replacement dry erase pens (needed, as anyone who’s played the basic game too much knows). The North Star Games crew has gotten better at writing questions (many of these were written by Ken Jennings, the Jeopardy guy and a fan of the game) so not only do you get more questions, you also get questions that are more likely to provide you with a fun gaming experience.

Mattel
Probably THE most interesting thing I saw at the convention was at the Mattel booth. Mind Flex is a crazy contraption that measures your brain waves and uses the Bernoulli Effect to push a ball into the air. By concentrating your mind, the ball will go higher up in a column of air. Players then use a dial to move the wind column around a circle to try to maneuver the ball through an obstacle course. This is so crazy that I’ll come back to it in a few days when I do a “catch-all” round-up of the convention. (You’ll just have to wait.) Mattel was also showing off a new trivia game, Bezzerwizzer, (“smart-aleck” in Dutch I’m told). Players draw a set of topic tiles & rank them, then answer questions in their subjects for points. Players have three special ability tiles that can force tile trades with another player or toss in a “dare” tile for extra points when other players are answering their question. The final game I checked out was Skip-Bo Breakers. This game has a set of nifty v-shaped tiles numbered one to 14 or so. Players start with a hand of tiles and discard sets in higher and higher series to try to empty their hands. If I play two “4”s, you have to play two “5”s or higher, etc… Players can use 3 or 4 of a kind to break out of series if they don’t want to continue it. It is similar to man card discarding games, but the tiles make it a bit easier for younger kids to play.

Catalyst Game Labs
I was unfamiliar with Catalyst Game Labs (although I was aware of the Mechwarrior line of games) before coming to the convention, but was nonetheless quite impressed at the sheer number and variety of games they had out on display. First, Merchants should be out in Q4 of this year. It is a Knizia (a famous guy) designed game for 2-6 players. It involves taking and playing cards to collect and score goods. However, if a player attempts to score a good, everyone else also gets to score that type of good, so judicious playing of scoring cards is important. It is supposedly quite different with more players (as with fewer players there is less goods overlap). It should run about $20. Also out in Q4 is a game called Poo. Yes, players are actually monkeys and spend the game throwing it at each other. Thankfully it is a card game (and tastefully done so no ugly bathroom humor here) in the vein of take-that sort of revenge driven game play (also about $20.) They also had a huge display of their grand strategy game, Balance of Power, which could be compared to Risk but without the dice and with 3 kinds of units. Each unit has a strength and weakness (thus a rock-scissors-paper sort of effect in combat due to the units present). On your turn you can spend time bolstering your army or moving/attacking but not both, thus it is important to plan ahead for attacks both in quantity and quality of units. For those interested in the slightly more gamer-oriented Mechwarrior game (battles between giant people-driven robots), there will be a new starter set released in the near future featuring the basic rules, 28 miniatures, and several game maps. This should serve as a great starting-off point for anyone interested in getting more into this type of more complex wargame.

AEG (Alderac Entertainment Group)
I was familiar with AEG, but had thought of them as more of a collectible trading-card company due to their work with the Legend of the Five Rings franchise. However, they are getting into boardgames in a big way. I only had a short time to talk, but got an overview of Monkey Lab in which players are monkeys in an experimental lab of some sort. Everyone is trying to escape and players use cards and other tools at their disposal to help monkeys escape. I haven’t gotten a play in yet, but looks pretty good for the younger (read tween) set. Premiering at the convention was The Adventurers. This seems to be a sort of Indiana Jones exploration/romp through a temple where players try to get loot, avoid traps, and get out again. Take too much loot, though, and your greed may load you down and be your undoing. I didn’t get to look at it closely as all the games they had on hand sold out on the first day!

Winning Moves Games
Winning Moves produces many classic games and toys, but manages to get a few entirely new games out every year. The two I saw this year included Cirkis, a sort of tile-laying game where players try to use various interesting tile shapes to fill in stars or circles. Filling in a shape earns 5 points while having the majority of the shape filled in your color earns 10 points. However, players can only lay tiles adjacent to the previously laid tiles – thus limiting where any given player may place a tile. It looks to play fairly fast and has some nice color to attract reluctant players. The other game on display was a sort of dice/set collecting hybrid called Take a Chance. Players purchase color-coded cards or choose to “take a chance” and see what sort of payout comes up. Obviously, if you collect a lot of one color, then payouts of that color are very good, but they will probably come up less frequently than if you had diversified. It looked to be a nice family sort of game (a bit of strategy, a bit of luck) that could easily be played under an hour.

Wizards of the Coast
No tour through family-friendly games would be complete without a mention of one of the most exciting announcements at the convention (for me). Wizards of the Coast (a division of Hasbro) has taken over production of the popular action-figure game, Heroscape. Since moving production over to the folks at WotC, the new releases were slightly slower in coming out but the figures look excellent. At GenCon this year, WotC announced they will be producing a new “Master Set” with a Dungeons and Dragons theme. This set will come out in the spring of ’10 (maybe), and will probably on the smaller side for master sets, along the lines of the Marvel Heroscape set. The figures and terrain on display showed several “adventurer” types in a battle with a fairly decent sized dragon. There are a lot of ways to go with this game, and I’m interested to see what they do. (Will they release more than one stat card for each figure so a given figure could “level up” through a series of scenarios?, etc…)

That’s all the family games I have for now. My next article will feature games and companies that make slightly deeper strategy games. These will be more suitable for mid-teens and older – the thinking crowd. For now, its time for me to strap on my brain-belt and play me some Mattel Mind Flex!

Tags: Misc