Ready for ChiTAG – Chicago Toy and Game Fair

Even though the Chicago Toy and Game Fair (ChiTAG) is still over 3 months away, I’m getting ready for it. Because this year, for the first time, I’m going to be there!

ChiTAG started in 2003 and is the largest toy and game fair in the U.S. open to public. ChiTAG brings together hundreds of companies and leaders in the toy and game industry and thousands of participants for a few days of fun. In 2012, ChiTAG attracted over 25,000 people!

From what I hear, they put on a great show.

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Risk Legacy game #4 – Caleb wins!

If you hate knowing the end of the story before you even begin, then I apologize for the title of this post. But I’m so excited to report that our 10 year old Caleb won our latest Risk Legacy that I just had to put it in the title.

Now, on to the fun…

After a few weeks of scout camps and weekends away, my boys and I were finally able to get Risk Legacy back to the table last night.

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Finance 101 – Lessons From Monopoly

Have you ever read a book about board games?
We don’t mean reading a bunch of blogs with board game reviews and related topics – but rather an actual book.

As much as I love games, I haven’t read any books about board games before (not even a Chess book). But when Mc Graw Hill sent us “Monopoly, Money, and You: How to Profit from the Game’s Secrets of Success” by Philip E. Orbanes I decided to give it a go.

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Enjoy Summer!

We’re close to wrapping up our series of board game expansion reviews.
We have a bunch of board games on our “to review” shelf.
And we also have lot more new games on our “to play and review” shelf.

So going more than a week without posting a game review seems like a long time. The games and topics we want to write about just keeps getting longer and backs-up as days go by without a post.

But you know what – that’s ok!

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Best Games of 2012 – The Dice Tower Awards!

Out of the 3,000+ new board games, card games, dice games, family games, party games, war games, cooperative games, strategy games, and many more published in 2012 – the best have now been announced!

Well, at least according to the more than 40 top board game reviewers around the world these are the best board games. Every year The Dice Tower gathers recommendations from around the globe. Those reviewers then whittle the lists down to the nominations. From there the final votes are cast and The Dice Tower Awards are announced!

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Kingdom Builder: Nomads expansion review

Kingdom Builder is a fantastic family board game!
It’s easy to learn and play, has great components, and has a nice balance of luck and strategy. But one of the things we like the most is that every game has different win conditions. As such, every game warrants a different approach to keep things interesting.

So when Queen Games published an expansion to Kingdom Builder that provides more boards, more abilities, and more objectives, we were anxious to give it a try.

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Smash Up Awesome Level 9000 expansion review

Smash Up is a fun card game that pits players against each other with 2 mashed up faction decks of cards. The base Smash Up game includes 8 different factions from Aliens and Robots to Pirates and Ninjas. But there is also a lot of open slots in the game box – making it very obvious that more factions were to come.

So it really wasn’t much of a surprise when AEG relatively quickly released Smash Up Awesome Level 9000.

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