Tag Archives: International TableTop Day

It’s Follow-Up Friday: TableTop Day edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, I’d like to return to the subject of puzzly holidays!

Saturday, April 11 is the third annual International TableTop Day, a day that has been set aside for family and friends to get together and play games. Board games, card games, role-playing games, puzzles… anything that involves gathering in person and having fun around a table fits the bill!

Although the actual holiday is tomorrow, we’re celebrating early around here! The PuzzleNation Crew is getting together with our friends from Penny/Dell Puzzles for a few hours of TableTop Day fun this afternoon!

[A few of the games we’ll be partaking in today.]

I’ll be posting pics on social media throughout the day, and there will be a full recap in Tuesday’s blog post!

Not only that, but we’ve added two new collections to our library of puzzles for in-app purchase for the Penny Dell Crosswords App! The April 2015 Deluxe Set has 35 puzzles to challenge you, and Collection 5 has a whopping 150 puzzles to choose from! Just in time for TableTop Day!

 

Will you be participating in tomorrow’s festivities, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers? Let me know! I’d love to hear about your plans!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

PuzzleNation Looks Back at 2014!

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The year is quickly coming to a close, and as I look back on the past twelve months, I’m both proud of everything we at PuzzleNation accomplished and optimistic for the year ahead of us.

It’s been both a pleasure and a privilege to explore the world of puzzles and games with you, my fellow puzzle lovers and PuzzleNationers. I’m closing in on my 300th blog post, and I’m even more excited to write for you now than I was when I started.

Over the last year, we explored dice games and tile games, apps and pen-and-paper puzzles. We met designers, constructors, and creative types of all kinds. We cracked brain teasers and tackled mind-bending riddles.

We explored the different roles puzzles have played throughout history, from codebreaking during the American Revolution and the Civil War to Galileo’s anagrams and a Pope who crafted puzzles for the local paper.

We celebrated International TableTop Day, Star Wars Day, the 40th anniversary of the Rubik’s Cube, the 30th anniversary of Tetris, and the 75th anniversary of Batman, and we were happy to share so many remarkable puzzly landmark moments with you.

We spread the word about numerous worthwhile Kickstarters and Indiegogo campaigns, and along the way, we supported some fantastic causes, like saving a puzzle/game shop in Washington and donating to a campaign to adapt games for colorblind and visually-impaired puzzle/game fans.

And that’s just the blog. PuzzleNation’s good fortune and accomplishments in 2014 went well beyond that.

In February, we launched the Penny/Dell Jumbo Crossword App, our most successful puzzle app to date. In March, we launched Classic Sudoku for the iPad, and in May, we added Classic Word Search for the iPad.

With numerous new puzzle sets (including two launched in December!), we have proudly maintained a steady stream of topnotch puzzle content for our solvers, and we’ve got plenty more on the way in 2015.

Not only that, but in September we relaunched our website, gearing it entirely to providing you with the best mobile puzzle gaming experience around.

And your response has been terrific! We also amassed over a thousand followers for the blog and over 1600 followers of the PuzzleNation Facebook page in 2014, numbers that are both humbling and encouraging.

2014 was our most productive, most exciting, and most creatively fulfilling year to date, and 2015 promises to be even brighter.

Thank you for your enthusiasm, your support, and your feedback, PuzzleNationers. Have a fantastic New Year. We’ll see you in 2015!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Library Gaming edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, I’d like to return to the subject of puzzle-game holidays!

[Once again, a board game brings a family together…]

In the past I’ve written plenty about International TableTop Day, the holiday dedicated to social gaming and puzzling. But did you know that in less than two weeks, another puzzle-game holiday arrives?

That’s right, November 15 is International Games Day, an event organized by the American Library Association “to celebrate the mutually-reinforcing power of play and learning.”

From the I Love Libraries website:

Libraries are about sharing culture and information, and games are a form of culture that you often have to share – you often can’t experience them without another player!

They’re also good for brain health, and foster important life skills like socialization, theory of mind and systems literacy. Plus, they’re fun!

Whether video games, tabletop games, social games or other kinds of games, they’re all a part of culture whose importance is only becoming clearer with time. And that means we need to foster the kind of smart engagement that libraries support, for games as well as books.

And while International TableTop Day is synonymous with board games, card games, and roleplaying games, International Games Day encompasses all of the above and more, including online videogames, trivia games, and any other games you can think of.

It’s a terrific opportunity to come out to support both games and your local library, and maybe make a few new friends along the way!

Let us know if you’ll be participating in International Games Day, PuzzleNationers! We’d love to see pictures and hear all about it!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Jenga Edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

Today, I’d like to revisit our TableTop Day event and ponder the possibilities…

One of the games that received a lot of attention on TableTop Day was Jenga. That’s not surprising, since it’s a classic game, one that’s quick to set up and play.

And I did quite poorly. I lost five out of six games that day. (Though, to be fair, Corin the Puzzle Bear didn’t fare so well, either…)

In the wake of my dismal Jenga performance, one of my fellow puzzlers sent me the following YouTube clip, featuring quite possibly the largest Jenga game ever played:

I must say, that makes me wonder if my Jenga playing might improve if I used a proxy. Not one of these behemoth construction machines, of course, but maybe one of those little robot arms from Radio Shack (like the one pictured at the top of today’s post) could do the job!

Either that or I could bust out one of my old LEGO Technic kits and build my own.

[Picture from Technicopedia.com]

Okay, that’ll be the plan. Next TableTop Day, I’m bringing a robot arm and a desire for redemption!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

It’s Follow-Up Friday (in color!)

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

And today, I thought I’d mention a curious and clever board game development I stumbled across recently.

One of the most popular games from our recent TableTop Day event was Qwirkle.

A wonderful tile game featuring different colors and symbols, Qwirkle follows in the strategy and pattern-matching tradition of Uno and Mexican Train dominoes.

Unfortunately, my fellow puzzlers and I quickly discovered that the colors chosen for the game are difficult for colorblind players to tell apart. And in a game where you don’t want to show other players your tiles before you play them, it becomes much harder to tell the different between red and orange tiles, which is a crucial distinction during gameplay.

Thankfully, a software developer and board game fan named Joe Michael McDonald took it upon himself to design a colorblind-friendly color palette for Qwirkle.

qwirklecolorblind

[On the left is the standard Qwirkle color options. On the right is McDonald’s colorblind-friendly variant.]

It’s a terrific example of player ingenuity solving an unforeseen problem and opening up the game to a whole new audience.

Kudos to you, sir. Here’s hoping more games offer a colorblind-friendly variant very soon.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: TableTop Day Edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

And today, I’m following up on all the International TableTop Day goodness we got up to this week.

The PuzzleNation offices weren’t open on April 5 for the actual TableTop Day, so we celebrated a few days late with an event on Tuesday, and we invited our pals from Penny/Dell Puzzles to join us in all the puzzly game activities we had planned.

Here’s the table of available games for play that day! Everything from one-player brain teasers from ThinkFun (like Rush Hour and the Sudoku-inspired Chocolate Fix) to bigger group games like Apples to Apples and Scattergories, and everything in between! (Including previously reviewed games like Castellan, Pink Hijinks, ROFL!, Fluxx: The Board Game, and Loonacy!)

Here, fellow puzzlers partake in a spirited round of Apples to Apples, the perfect way to blow off a little steam at work after a long morning of puzzlesmithing.

Furiously contested games of Bananagrams and Qwirkle were conducted at either end of our play area, and both were big hits with attendees.

I even had the opportunity to test my mettle against Penny/Dell’s well-traveled Corin the Puzzle Bear in a few rounds of Jenga.

While he beat me handily in two straight games, the tide soon turned against him in round three.

We had a pretty decent turnout overall, and everyone who attended had fun. What more can you ask for, really? (Other than more excuses to play games during work, that is…)

I hope your International TableTop Day was just as enjoyable. As Wil Wheaton says on his YouTube show TableTop, play more games!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!