Gamesmanship - What's new? Holiday gifts galore - Buyers Guide

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 2002

The holiday season is always one in which toys and games play a prominent role when it comes to gift-giving. This year's crop of the latter is an entertainingly varied one.

Old Century Baseball ($129.99) from Front Porch Classics, Seattle, Wash., is a spiffed-up version of a time-honored pinball game that reproduced the Nation's Pastime by having a batted ball fall into various holes representing hits and outs. The current version is richly crafted from aged woods, up to and including a triple-deck grandstand beyond the outfield, and the flipper/bat is triggered manually, rather than mechanically. The game, however, remains the same: Score as many runs as you can before three outs are recorded, and keep alternating turns at bat throughout nine innings--or more, if the score remains tied. Nostalgic old-timers and kids just learning to wear their caps backwards will literally have a ball with Old Century Baseball, whether with inter- or intragenerational contests.

Front Porch's Dread Pirate ($99.99) is a swashbuckling board game that will harken players back to Treasure Island or Errol Flynn debonairly dueling with Basil Rathbone on the quarterdeck of a corsair on the Spanish Main. The game, played on a treasure map that is cleverly aged and illustrated to look like it's right out of the pocket of Captain Kidd, is replete with all sorts of buccaneer paraphernalia--a wooden pirate's chest, simulated leather pouches bulging with doubloons, oodles of booty, and knuckle bones that serve as dice to move the players around. Grand fun can be had by those who cast inhibitions to the wind and cut loose with an occasional "Avast me hearties" or "Yo-ho-ho? though swordplay is a no-no!

Cram! ($34.99), Front Porch's final entry, is one of countless Trivial Pursuit wanna-bes, albeit a far more raucous one, as evidenced by its subtitle: "The intensely competitive laughing, guessing, acting, drawing, singing/shouting game" Pegged to a distinctly fictional college life--unless you attend Faber College of "Animal House" infamy--the game hinges on questions such as "Which of the following was the original name for singing duo Sonny and Cher?: Caesar & Coco, Hanky Panky, The Pancakes, Sunshine, or Blueberry Tricycle?" If you correctly chose the first answer, you're obviously ready to graduate trivia cum laude.

USAopoly, Encinitas, Calif., has been having a field day reissuing classic board games with new faces. The company's imagination seems boundless, as it has poured out versions of Monopoly based on cities across the nation (long bypassing the original Atlantic City version), colleges and universities, and sports teams, among many other themes. This year's crop encompasses the wide world of entertainment, with boards saluting "The Wizard of Oz" and "Spider-Man" from the movies, the long-running comic strip "Peanuts," Elvis (no last name required), and baseball's Dodgers, shrewdly making it appeal to both coasts by encompassing Brooklyn and Los Angeles icons. Each version is $34.95, except for Elvis and "Peanuts," which run $39.95.

Carrying on what has obviously proven a lucrative idea USAopoly has "celebrityized" other long-renowned games as well: backgammon featuring "Austin Powers" ($44.95); Clue, "Scooby-Doo! Where Are You?" ($34.95); Pictionary, "The Simpsons" ($34.95); and chess, with the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox squaring off against each other ($39.95). In the latter, each team's manager is the king; a pitcher is queen; two catchers are rooks; two batters are bishops; two outfielders are knights; and eight infielders serve as pawns, with the Yankees in their traditional pinstripes and the Sox in their home white uniforms.

Endless Games, Hoboken, N.J., has come up with new editions of the venerable Concentration ($19.99) and Password ($14.99), neither of which has lost its mind-stimulating charms over the years. Of newer vintage is Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon ($14.99), which became a cult phenomenon when someone figured out that you could link the actor with a virtually unlimited number of Hollywood stars by connecting him with a costar who appeared with actor A in another movie, and A shared the screen with B, and so on until you reached the desired second star--provided you could do it within six moves. It is still amazing that the linkage can be made to work for so many Hollywood luminaries and/or ubiquitous character actors. It helps no end, of course, if you're an inveterate movie buff.

Finally, tying in perfectly with the release of the second installment of J.R.R. Tolkien's cult favorite, there is a Lord of the Rings strategy game ($44.95) from Fantasy Flight, Inc., Roseville, Minn. Players assume the guise of Hobbits of the Fellowship and endeavor to destroy the One Ring before Sauron can get his evil hands on it. The game is complicated, requiring travel through a quartet of scenario boards while a master board traces their journey and the various character shifts as the ring keeps changing hands. Although the manufacturer maintains that you don't have to be steeped in Tolkien lore to play the game, it certainly helps players in remembering who is who and what the characters' roles are in the greater scheme in Middle Earth.