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NY Toy Fair 2018 Round-up III: Blood Bowl Blitzed, Adventures with Space Marines, and Feeling Blindsided by Nyctophobia

NY Toy Fair 2018 Round-up III: Blood Bowl Blitzed, Adventures with Space Marines, and Feeling Blindsided by Nyctophobia
From gallery of W Eric Martin
Let's jump into another round-up of tweets from NY Toy Fair 2018, although honestly I sent way more tweets away from the show than I did at it. While you're on site in the Javits Center, you just shoot-shoot-shoot, trying to capture everything you can in the short time available to you. Then you process everything later, at some point finally making game pages in the BGG database for all of these titles unless someone else beats you to it. Please, beat me to it.




I don't have a background in Games Workshop, so I was surprised by the enthusiasm exhibited in response to this tweet, but apparently folks have been waiting for a shorter version of Blood Bowl. I wish that I could tell you more than what's written above, but I shot this image after 6:00 on Saturday when everyone was already heading for the exits.




I didn't initially notice the "do not open" text on the card backs/packaging inside the box, but an eagle-eyed GW fan did, which hints at what kind of game experience you might discover later.




While some game trends at NY Toy Fair are driven by movies and other obvious cultural happenings, sometimes these yearly trends pop up unexpectedly, as with the use of blindfolds in multiple games, such as Pandasaurus Games' Nyctophobia. The short description above came from a PSI representative; here's a more complete description of this design from Catherine Stippell, courtesy of the game's Unpub page:

Quote:
Nyctophobia is a cooperative tactile maze game for 3 – 5 players. The catch? The players are blindfolded and have to feel their way around the board.

The players play as a group of friends who went camping in a forest only to find out that the rumors of a crazy axe-wielding madman were true. Players take actions on their turn in an attempt to locate their car so they can call for help before one of them gets killed. The madman is controlled by a deck of AI cards resolved by the Moderator who oversees the gameplay (the only sighted player).


Here's one of the other "blindfold required" games at NY Toy Fair 2018, courtesy of Hasbro, which also offers this appetizing number:



This game merges two of this year's "hot" trends: blindfolds and poop. That is not a sentence I anticipated writing at any point in my life, but here we are. For the demo set-up at NY Toy Fair 2018, Hasbro reps were using plastic turds, but in the actual game you're supposed to craft artisanal poop from the clay included in the box, then hope that others destroy your work through a misplaced footstep.




Board Game: Who Did It?
In Europe, Blue Orange Games will use the box shown at right for Who Did It?, a game of trying to avoid blame for the animal poop found around the house. In New York, a BOG rep told me that the box was the better choice for Europe, while the friendly pile bag with the zipper would be more appropriate for the U.S. market. Having spent time looking at numerous poopy items at NY Toy Fair, I could hardly disagree.




To add more detail to what's above, on a turn in Ya Blew It! from Wonder Forge, the active player draws a card from the deck, then decides whether they want to take the stash or not; if not, other players in clockwise order decide whether they want to roll their dynamite stick to attempt to steal the current stash. If they roll a number present on one of the cards, then they take all the cards in the stash; if not, they get nothing and they're out for the round. If no one steals the stash, then active player draws another card to increase the stash.

Some of the cards provide special bonuses or abilities, everyone has a color that costs them points at game's end, and sometimes cards will force you to roll to see whether things blow up in your face and cost you gems.




No, really, Deadpool kept popping up in all sorts of places at NY Toy Fair 2018. I didn't check out the action figures while visiting the Hasbro rooms off-site from the Javits Center, but I've seen pictures posted by others, and it's somewhat surprising to see the toymaker embrace this "adult" superhero.


And we'll close with another sampling of tweets about which I need say no more than what's already written:







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