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Latice Hawai'i

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We found Latice Hawaii in a thrift shop on our Sedona trip.  It was colorful and the box was unusually heavy, and I had never heard of it.  So my curiosity got the best of me. Unboxing it, there was an attractive board and long stacks of plastic tiles, along with a heap of plastic gems, all high quality.  The rules looked complicated at first but in between the helpful images it wasn't hard to follow.  Each player gets a stock of tiles and a tile holder.  Draw five tiles to start. Most of the tiles are pictures and to place a tile you must match all adjacent tiles by either color or icon.  Then there are Wind tiles which let you bump any piece one space ... you discard the Wind tile and then play again. So, it's just a tile dumping game?  Technically true, but then the gems come into play.  If you match two adjacent tiles you get a half stone, match three get a sunstone, match all four to get two sunstones, and if you place your tiles on a sun spa...
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Retro Arcade: Pinball Quest (Jaleco, 1990)

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I came across this surprisingly big pinball game on my game box.  Pinball Quest has four tables available.  The top three are decent tables on their own, scrolling up and down as the action happens, with extra flippers and plenty of action. But the real discovery is the 4th table, called "RPG Mode"?  RPG Mode for a pinball game, really?  You start out on a simple board with two trees and a little angel who comes out to say hello.  But if you knock the ball up to the top left, the whole layout slides down to show the second level where some skeletons dance and you have to knock their blocks off. If you finish them off, you get a devil to fight, who drops a key.  Go through the door at the top to get into a room with a little demon character where you have three options: PURCHASE, LEAVE and STEAL.  My version was in Japanese, so I didn't know what I was clicking on until I watched some videos of people playing the English version.  You can buy flipp...
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Retro Arcade: Klax (1990)

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Klax is a very simple game where bricks come tumbling down a conveyor belt toward your catcher.  Catch them, move them, drop them to try and make matches.  The sound f/x of the tiles flap-flapping down the screen are hilarious at first, but a bit annoying as the game inevitably speeds up.  The overall feel is a kind of mutated Tetris, but it's not a blind race to fill rows like Tetris.  The levels have different goals: 3 diagonal matches, 3 horizontal matches, survive 50 blocks, etc. It can be played in a browser here . (no explanation of the keys to use) or here  , and there is a good history here . There is a screen for Options and one for "Stuff".  The Options were: Drop Meter On/Off, Difficulty, Ramping On/Off, Sound FX and Music On/Off.  The Stuff screen had options for Drum Test, Sound Test and a bizarre little hidden sub-game called Blob Ball.  But it's more properly a fragment of a game, just a one-paddle Pong where the ball has a lot of r...
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Retro Arcade: Checkers and Othello?

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On the game box I got recently, among the hundreds of old NES games, there were a few games that were so basic, I don't understand why they were released at all.  Let's start with Checkers.  You probably have a checkers set in your closet somewhere, so why would you spend money on a Nintendo cartridge for that? That being said, the game worked as expected and I was able to beat it on the first game.  I didn't see any options. Next up is Othello, which also might be in your closet.  It's also very common in game collections.  Again, the game worked as expected and I beat in on my first try. In both cases, the controls were a bit awkward.  To select the piece I want, I have to go left left left up up SELECT, then to move it: up right DROP.  And so on.  ON a real game board, you just pick things up and move them.  You know, like humans do. I am sure I programmed my own versions of these games as starter projects when I was learning code ages ago...
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Retro Arcade: Family Pinball (Namco, 1989)

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I also played this one on the game box.  The thumbnail had a logo for "Family Guy Pinball" but that felt out of place.  The file was simply "Family Pinball", and it was confusing as all hell.  There were multiple screens to choose different pinball tables, some with flippers that moved around or did not work at all until I screwed with the buttons for a while.  The main selection screens were in Japanese, but it was fun clicking and seeing what was what anyway. Here are a few of the only links I could find for this one: link one , link two .  I could not find the game manual in the usual online archives. Here are some people playing it: The VideoGame Museum  and Crow Continuum . In the first choice, you get a Pac-Man themed standard pinball.  It took some fiddling to find out how to get both flippers working.  There were the LEFT and A buttons. In the next game (Battle Flipper), you play a head-to-head pinball game, but I was the only one playing....
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Sudoku Square

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Anne is a big fan of sudoku puzzles.  She doesn't go through whole books of them like she did when we first met.  But we play a game once in a while.  I found this Sudoku Square game in Sedona, only to find out it really has nothing to do with sudoku at all, except for the name. Well, it looked like a cute puzzle anyway.  The idea is that each player gets a board and a set of pieces.  There are a bunch of dice with weird symbols.  Roll those dice and there's a setup phase that feels like Bingo: read off the letter and symbol on each die and put a stopper at that location. That's all the setup.  Now, just try to fit all those wooden pieces onto the board with the stoppers blocking those squares.  The rule book claims that there will ALWAYS be a solution, but I don't see how they guarantee that at all. Still, it took me about four minute to solve the first one, and Anne got hers, too.  For some reason, the second puzzle only took me about thirt...
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Post #400: The Toy Hall of Fame 2025

On the way to work last thursday or friday, the guys on my usual morning radio show were talking about the winners of this year's Toy Hall of Fame.  It was their job to be entertaining and silly, and a bit outraged by each other's choices.  Here they are. https://rock1053.iheart.com/featured/follow-along-with-the-show/ They raised the same questions that always come up when so many activities have to be grouped together.  Do board games count as toys?  A "toy" should be something you (especially the younger version of you) can play with -- do whatever you want to do, make something up, entertain yourself.  We don't really play "with" a board game.  We just play the game.  But that means following rules and trying to reach win conditions.  It's a different feel altogether. The winners this year show how hard it is to classify our hugely creative range of activities.  Then were: Battleship (which started as a pencil and paper game), slime, and ...
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