Games

Think you know your friends and family well? GiftTRAP sets out to challenge that assumption with its game of giving and receiving. When you have a choice of giving a roadside emergency kit, learn to be a graffiti artist (obviously a course), space age purse or a space hopper (???) — gift-giving turns into an adventure.

At first glance, it looks like a game promoting materialism and the gimmes, but instead the game is about great conversations, laughs and getting to know each other better. After all, it’s not as if you would actually get a flagpole, whale watching trip, or a public speaking course for family and friends.

The creative packaging looks like a gift box. Open the lid to reveal the folded game board. Move that and find the eight brightly colored gift bags sitting in a tray filled with game pieces. Remove the tray to find the game cards with the gift ideas from absurd and weird to practical and cool.

Place the gift cards on the board so players decide on who gets what while ranking the available gives from “Great” to “No way!” Players receive points for giving others gifts they like and lose points for giving a gift that gets a “No way!” The same concept applies for receiving gifts: Score points for the right ones and lose ‘em for getting the “I’ll be returning that one to the store” gifts. To win the game, a player needs to get both Give and Get markers in the GIFTED zone.

Imagine how hilarious it was to hear another player admit to wanting laser hair removal treatment. Not exactly something to give as a gift, but it loosened up everyone in the room within seconds.

The games business sees a disappointing trend. Manufacturers reissue older and classic games with cheap quality game pieces. But GiftTRAP doesn’t fall into this trap with its lovely gift bags and good quality game pieces and markers. The box contains colorful photos, as do the gift cards.

Side note: Something interesting lurks in the game instructions: a Creative Commons license! This is the first I’ve seen in a game, heck anything outside of the Internet.

Also the folks behind the game have a few fun contests happening. They’re accepting photos for use in the next edition of the game. Got my camera ready and hunting for odd gifts.

P.S. Anyone know what a space hopper is?

Included in GiftTRAP:

* 1 full size game board

* 640 Gift Ideas

* 1 Rules booklet [Read the rules online and see exactly how to play GiftTRAP]

* 8 Organza Gift Bags with each having:

* 2 scoring markers

* 9 gift tokens

* 4 choice tokens

* 3 advanced strategy cards

Players: 3 to 8
Age: 8+
Price: $39.99
Game play: One hour

Bridge Is Cool teaches you how to play mini bridge and regular bridge. Paul and I learned to play bridge with our parents when we were first married and had more time on our hands. Since then, we’ve gotten busy with out children and other things plus our friends don’t know anything about playing bridge. I hope Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s foundation will help bridge get back into action again.

Mattel has instruction sheets for its games and other toys.

EveryRule.com is a difficult to use site and I couldn’t find the instructions I needed. The site also has rules for sports, TV game shows, and party games.

The House of Cards features traditional and family card games, rules, software downloads, and online card games. You can also learn a bit about playing cards and their history.

Monopoly Money – print money when you lose some. Just add pastel paper if you want to match the real thing (the game’s money, not the bucks that buys things). This page also has a guide.

Hasbro games and toy instructions.

BoardGameGeek is a board gaming resource and community.

When I first met Sudoku last June, it was Writer-On-Line.com’s puzzle for the month. It took me time to figure out how the game worked. Since then, the puzzle has appeared in more and more places.

Here’s a daily puzzle from Sudogo and Astraware.

The Dallas Morning News publishes one every day (it’s rated one to five stars with one being easy and five is challenging) and that’s the last thing I do before I get to work. Thankfully, the challenging ones appear on the weekend otherwise I’d get little work done. Yesterday was the first time I correctly completed a five-star puzzle. I took my time and I was determine to beat it.

Wikipedia definition.

American Scientist on Sudoku.

Sudoku enumeration problems says there are 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 possible solutions.

Wall Street Journal article on the puzzle.

Variety Sudoku brochure [pdf file] from 1st World Sudoku Championship.

Javascript Sudoku Puzzle Solver – for Web geeks who want to take their Sudoku obsession a little further with JavaScript.

Sudoku Tips

marckillian.com has two tips.

Before, I used to put a little number in the corners of the boxes to help me stay on track. Thanks to a tip from The Dallas Morning News — I look at each box like phone’s buttons. A dot in the upper right-hand corner to represents ’1′. A dot in the middle is ’5′ and lower left-hand corner is ’9.’ Less messy!

Sudokulist – resources on the game including links, hints, competition, and a helper.

Solve Sudoku without Thinking provides details on how to solve the most challenging puzzles. Rather than entering numbers in every box, save time by not entering numbers of items appearing within the quadrant, row, and column. I suggest completing the square instead of circling to indicate you’ve checked the number. Also, use the aforementioned phone number suggestion instead of writing numbers.

Solving Sudoku tips

Solving Sudoku Puzzles

Sudoku tutorial

Here are several places where you can download an Excel-based Sudoku helper or solver.

* oceane.co.uk

* Su Doku Solver

* Sudoku-Help

* Microsoft’s Sudoku Solver for Excel

Sudoku Solver

Su Doku Solver

Sudoku Variations

Info on Sumdoku – killer Sudoku for sadistic Sudoku lovers. Sudoku variations, Killer Sudoku, aand Killer Samurai Sudoku.

BlogOn Sudoku: Sudoku with pictures.

Want to *really* make yourself crazy? Try Kakuro, Sudoku on steroids.

Daily Sudoku posts a puzzle every day, has archives going back to January 2005, and has a daily puzzle for kids.

EdHelper has an easier version for kids plus smaller variations (4×4, 6×6).

Now TV Guide has joined the craze. Except, it doesn’t use numbers. It uses nine letters with most, if not all, of the letters spelling a TV show. The first one was NUMBERS with the extra letters AT. Already, Amazon has a load of products. My dad likes to get everyone a desk calendar every year. I hope I don’t get a Sudoku calendar otherwise I’ll be in trouble in 2006.

Cell phone Sudoku – Can’t run away from it either.

Sudoku for kids

Hamsters

Online Sudoku

Sudogo provided the above puzzle and also has one online for you to play.

SudokuPuzzlesOnline.com offers Sudoku puzzles in varying degrees of difficulty as well as a community page where players can post their own Sudoku puzzles.

Number Logic has plenty of Sudoku and plans to add multi-player online gaming, member scores: Harder puzzles earn more points, and real-time scores and times of top players. It also has a two player game.

Web Sudoku – lots of puzzles you can do online.

The online Sudoku speed challenge

Guardian Unlimited archive of puzzles, published six days a week.

USA Today

Sudoku San – “Proudly destroying productivity since 2005″ indeed!

Sudoku.org.uk

Games for the Brain includes Sudoku and other brain exercises.

Sudoku Savior provides hints and lets you enter a puzzle. And it’s a site built without tables to boot!

Sudoku for Devices, Handhelds, and PCs

My dad gave my mom a Nintendo DS for Mother’s Day. We gave her Brain Age and pre-ordered Big Brain Academy. Sudoku is included. Man, it’s a good thing I sent it home before Mother’s Day instead of have her open it here. Then my son or I might’ve stolen it from her.

I also bought my first extra for my Sidekick II because I kept going somewhere without my PDA or a book when I needed to pass time. Guess which game. Sudoku indeed.

Dr. Sudoku and Sudoku Fever for Gameboy Advance. Sudoku Gridmaster (not one of the better versions) and Sudoku Mania for Nintendo DS.

Astraware also has Sudoku for handhelds. Of course, I got it as soon as it was on sale. I will NOT be buying it for my computer otherwise bye bye work. Mike Miller has a nice version known as SuperDoku.

As judge for Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine Best Software Awards 2006, I discovered too many versions of Sudoku. Luckily, I had a deadline to prevent me from spending too much time on the games. And these are just the nominees for Windows Mobile devices.

* Astraware Sudoku from Astraware Limited

* Fast Sudoku from PPCLink Mobile Software

* Mastersoft SuDoku V2 from Mastersoft Mobile Solutions

* Pocket Sudoku from DKM Software

* Resco Sudoku from Resco, Ltd.

* Sensible Sudoku from Ludimate

* Sudoku Master from Real Dice

* Sudoku Pack from Filao

* Sudoku Rules Extreme! from Spiral Mile

* The Sudoku Collection from Pocket Adventures.com

I find the best electronic Sudoku games have the following traits:

* ability to pencil in numbers
* option to delete pencil numbers when you enter a number
* ability to switch between pencil and writing in the number with ease
* different skins
* non-numeral versions
* no distracting animation
* readable interface (some were hard to see)
* option of installing help file (on handhelds, this should be a standard to save space – some are huge)
* offer a free trial (believe it or not, one didn’t)
* minimize toggling

Free Sudoku game for Windows

[Links: C|Net Science Blog and Steve Bass ]

Updated: September 26, 2006

Zork. Remember it? I think I hear a mixture of, “What the hey?” and “Oh, yeah! Wow, that brings back memories.” For the former group, Zork was a text-based adventure game from INFOCOM — one of the the first interactive computer games. It resembles the Choose Your Own Adventure books only instead of flipping pages, you enter the command and the story continues.

Play interactive fiction again (or try it out) with the series from Malinche Entertainment. After a glitch — five times over — I got the game working. It was the luck of the draw as I had a bad CD and then instructions that could be read several ways. No one’s fault except for CD problem. The First Mile is available in several versions: PC ($19.95 by download) and iPod ($9.95).

In the PC version, you enter the commands and tell the game what you want to do in the story while the iPod / cell phone version provides you with a few choices and you select what you want to do.

Want to see what it’s like to get involved with the story? Malinche offers a training academy — beware the side effect of training the academy… addiction.

The First Mile is horror fiction, perhaps something torn out of Stephen King’s notebook. As soon as the game begins, my heart thumps harder with each move I make as I encounter a body, hear a hellhound growling, and see many empty buildings and homes. Am I the only person in Dead Rock? Could this be Twilight Zone?

I try to calm my nerves by playing music while living the game, which is possible to do on the iPod and PC. Not even music or a baseball field brings comfort. I shall stop here as it’s all I can take for the time being. At least, I did this much — me who has never read Stephen King nor have I watched horror films at the slumber parties I attended as a teen.

If you can’t get your teen to read a book and she constantly plays video games, sneak this into her computer, iPod, or Smartphone and she’ll convert and read without hesitance. Good news. When she finishes the game, there are more available from Malinche Entertainment. Heck, this works on spouses, friends, and family, too.

Tips:

* The First Mile is a large story. To start back at the beginning, hold down [Menu] and the center click button at the same time — keep holding till you see the screen blink to the Apple logo, then you can let go. It takes at least six seconds for the logo to appear.

* There isn’t any way to quit and pick up where you left off due to the limitations of the current iPod software. Watch this Web site for updates. Malinche Entertainment has asked Apple to consider adding a “Bookmark” feature.