Space Faces

"Space Faces" is what you call a game that includes 120 different (that is correct, different, as in no two alike) alien-like heads, printed, in full color, in six concentric rings on a large game board - a board full of Space Faces.

If you happen to look at the faces, eyes, mouths and noses of the 120 different Space Faces, you just might notice that there are 5 different colors of each. So, if you happen to be looking for, say, a Space Face with a yellow face, blue eyes, purple mouth and red nose, you'll find one, and only one.

Which one you're supposed to find is determined by the "Alien Identification Device" - a plastic saucer with a transparent dome, 5 marbles (each of a different color), and a concave surface for the marbles to roll around on, and 4 holes, one for each facial feature. So, you shake the saucer, and the marbles find their holish destinies. One of the holes is twice as deep as it should be, so that the first marble that falls into it is covered by the second. Thus, 5 different colors (marbles), 4 different attributes (holes). It's such an elegant device, and works so efficiently, and it's so fun to play with, that it, alone, is almost enough to make the game a strong candidate for Major Funhood.

Space Faces is a family game for 2-4 players. The challenge (matching, visual discrimination, speed) is enticing and complex enough to interest an adult, and yet well within the mental capacities of a kindergartener.

So now we do in fact have a game that is Major FUN award-worthy. Easy enough for a 4-year-old to understand, complex enough for an adult to enjoy. This is a major achievement in game design.

The game also includes elaborate, toy-like scorekeeping devices, that actually do make the process of keeping score easier. I, on the other hand, prefer not to keep score. It might have something to do with how embarrassed it might make me to reveal how visually inept I am. On the other hand, the game is so much fun that you don't really have to keep score at all. All the more Major the Fun, I say. Especially when you're playing with kids who don't really understand what winning is for or why you should be happy that you made the game end.

IceTowers

In order to appreciate IceTowers, you need to know that, despite all appearences, IceTowers really isn't a game. It's a toy. A toy you make games with. A set, actually, of plastic pyramids. A lovely set of transparent (well, except for the white set), nesting plastic pyramids, each set consisting of three different size pyramids. That's a total of 60 of them.

So lovely a set that it would be unfair to judge it by any single game that you might find yourself playing with it. Which is why that in addition to the rules on the box, you find rules for six more games on cards and more rules for more games in the accompanying rulebooklet. Which almost explains why you also, in the very same box, find a paperback book titled "The Empty City."

A paperback book? Indeed. A 150 page story, by the game/toy's inventor Andrew Looney. You read correctly. Andrew Looney. Of Looney Labs. A fantasy about "a secret city whose dreams blur with reality, eccentric characters populate the diners and donut shops, and instead of chess, everyoneplays an exotic game with pyramids."

As for the suggested game, whose rules are printed on the very box, the official, so to speak, IceTowers game in which everybody plays simultaneously while building stacks and, in a similarly simultaneous manner, trying to capture each other's?

The older folk didn't find the fun of it that apparent.

But our two teenage Tasters did. A lot of fun. Which made us think again about the game, and realize more about what it takes to discover the fun of it, and how much fun therein awaits.

So we decided to think of it a toy. And award it accordingly.

Thing-a-ma-bots®

Gamewright's card game "Thing-a-ma-bots" is a silly game, naturally, because I designed it. (So this is not a review, even though I personally happen to think that the fun to be had is most clearly Major FUN variety.)

Built completely from parts of other games, the parts I Iike best – Thing-a-ma-Bots is a 'junkyard approach' to card game design. A unique, new game, built from a combination of rules from other, older games. A card game designed to challenge everyone equally, kids and adults, based on collections of rules that make people exercise both mental and social abilities. Rules that are often very surprising, and most important to me, rules that make people laugh. Like, for example, that bit from the game Steal the Old Man's Bundle where "If you play a card that matches the top card of an opponent's bundle, you steal their whole of their bundle and add it to the top of yours, placing the matching card that you played on top." Very fun little bit. Makes it impossible to know who's going to win until the very last minute of the game. (more)