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I had already seen the new 2020 offerings from KOSMOS at the Spielwarenmesse 2020 trade fair in Nürnberg, Germany, as summarized in early February 2020, but I had something to check in on:
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I've already raved about Thomas Sing's The Crew — a couple of times in fact — and in my second write-up accompanied by video overview, I wrote:
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The only drawback I've found to The Crew is that the card quality is not good. The game was produced with a price point of €13, and the cards suffer as a result of that, with mine getting gummy after only a couple dozen plays. At BGG.CON 2019, I spoke with Tom Wetzel from Thames & Kosmos — the North American branch of KOSMOS — about this, and he informed me later that the card quality would be increased in the English-language version of the game due out in the first half of 2020. (Wetzel thinks the game will be available in Q1 2020, but he can't guarantee this.)
Turns out that the English-language version of The Crew is arriving at the North American warehouse in early March 2020, so the game should be available through retailers before the end of Q1 2020, and in case the image above isn't clear enough to see—:strip_icc()/pic5252179.jpg)
—the cards now have a linen finish and are much sturdier than the cards in the original release. The game also still has the US$15 MSRP originally announced.
A couple of T&K sales reps were at the booth when I took these pictures, and I might have raved a bit too much about this game while talking with them. That said, this game could be ideal for a broader audience that plays Hearts or Spades or Euchre, assuming that these players can make their way through the rulebook. In the best case scenario, someone at the game store would teach this to others during a game night, then those folks would evangelize and teach others — but I suppose that's true for every game, right?
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I already took a pic of the My City boards and components at Spielwarenmesse 2020, but I found the display at NY Toy Fair 2020 (as seen above) much more inviting. Let's compare by looking at what I saw in Nürnberg:
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Maybe the lighting was better at the Javits Center, or I dug the fake wood grain in the T&K booth appealing to my U.S. sensibility, or I was immersed in that deep blue of multiple copies of the game being placed together, although I also found this display attractive:
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So perhaps I should stick with thoughts of lighting and table surfaces.
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And here's the final entry in KOSMOS' 2020 "blue period".
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The movie "Bill & Ted Face the Music" will be released in 2020, so you will probably see many "Bill & Ted" items in stores that attempt to appeal to both young filmgoers and those filled with nostalgia for the earlier movies. (We're still deep into 1980s nostalgia at this point based on what I saw at NY Toy Fair.)
Bill & Ted's Riff in Time is a co-operative game from UK publisher Warcradle Studios that bears a description you probably could have imagined once you learned about this game's existence:
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Bill & Ted's Riff in Time combines a mix of awesomely detailed miniatures — from Socrates and Napoleon to former President of the United States of America Abraham Lincoln — with engaging and intuitive rules.
Meeting old friends and a whole bunch of new ones, Bill, Ted, Elizabeth and Joanna must work together to put things right and ensure the future is most excellent!
Meeting old friends and a whole bunch of new ones, Bill, Ted, Elizabeth and Joanna must work together to put things right and ensure the future is most excellent!
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Bananagrams' Judee Cohen demonstrates the upcoming party game Game Face in which you don a plastic mask, choose one of two suggestions on a card, then draw on your face to make others guess that secret answer. How well can you draw something when it's right in front of your eyes and you're looking at the pen while you're drawing?
You can also play by having someone else don the mask, then draw on their face — something that Cohen says kids prefer to do since they like to make their parents look foolish. I never would have guessed.
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I was mightily confused when I ran across this booth. How did a used toy and game vendor sneak into NY Toy Fair?! I mean, look at those old games on the shelves!
Turns out this guy sells clearance merchandise, and distributors and retailers could order stock from him for their own businesses. This is just one way that publishers clear out older titles so that they can reclaim warehouse space and stop paying storage fees on material that isn't moving.
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Here's the view you see down many, many aisles at NY Toy Fair: Nothing but walls. I feel like I'm driving on a road out of the city in the movie Brazil, staring only at ads and unsure whether those walls hide a desolated landscape or something fantastically intriguing beyond my reach.
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