Holiday Toys & Games - gift-buying guide - Buyers Guide

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 1999

Trivial Pursuit has undergone the most extensive makeover, starting with the pie-shaped tin box and continuing through various cosmetic changes, such as translucent plastic pie wedges (each of which signifies completion of a category) and card holder. The most significant are the redesign of the game board, which now unfolds into a circle embellished with historical photographs, and more than 100 question cards with full-color photos on the reverse. In keeping with the game's tradition of constantly upgrading itself, the Millennium Edition comes with 3,600 brand-new questions spanning the past 1,000 years--a true test of just how cluttered with trivia your brain is.

The special editions of Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit are $39.99, while Clue is $34.99. The collectibles market being what it is, shrewd people might want to buy two of each--one to play and one to tuck away for a descendant to sell for mega monetary units at the third millennium.

GAMES FOR ADULTS, GAMES FOR KIDS

The traditional wedding day attire of a bride includes something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. While this year's crop of games skip the blue, there is considerable dependence on borrowed and old, with a modicum of new.

Under the borrowed category, there are myriad knockoffs of the hallowed Monopoly board game. It is none of our business what the copyright ramifications of these variations are--we'll leave that to the legal department of Hasbro, which currently markets the original version--so let's just consider what's out there.

Late for the Sky Production Co., Cincinnati, Ohio, has practically customized the game to suit anyone's specific interest. More than four dozen major colleges and universities have boards featuring their campus' buildings and landmarks and a box sporting a title to match, such as Beaveropoly (Penn State), Sooneropoly (Oklahoma), Irishopoly (Notre Dame), Harvardopoly, and UCLAopoly. Big cities (i.e., New York in a Box) receive similar treatments. To get in on the rush to the 21st century, there is even Millenniumopoly, with board squares starting at Year 1000 and ending at Year 2000, as significant people and events go around the game in chronological order. The various versions run $24.95 apiece in college bookstores and big-city souvenir shops, as well as local toy and game stores.

The premise goes three-dimensional in Triopoly ($39.95) from Reveal Entertainment, Inc., Abilene, Tex. This game for Donald Trump-Gordon Gekko wannabes sends greedy entrepreneurs scurrying back and forth over three tiers to buy up entire cities and corner the real estate market, then build shopping malls, skyscrapers, and gas stations on every block. Become a bull on Wall Street or break the bank in Las Vegas. Greed is good!, as Gekko said in "Wall Street."

Something old is the approach of QuickGames from Amerigames International, Glen Cove, N.Y. Designed to introduce classic games to children as young as four years or to provide a few minutes of quick entertainment for adults in a hurry or with short attention spans, the games include Quick Backgammon, Quick Chess, Quick Checkers, Quick Parchisi, and Quick Tic-Tac-Toe. The first four have abridged boards and a reduced amount of pieces, while the tic-tac-toe version goes in the opposite direction with four boards forming a large square that allows the game to expand to six letters in a row instead of the traditional three. Since this makes the game far more complex and time-consuming, it would appear to go against the overall theme of this series. Without this variation, though, it would be hard to justify the cost vs. just using a pencil and sheet of paper for a few seconds of passing the time.