# Home# New topics:# November 2008o


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o The homepage sports a group of cheery teddybears with our annual holiday messages and a couple of playful surprises.

Our little Christmas trees also provide secret shortcuts...

Hottest News!  We're still dizzy with delight that four of our new games have been selected for Games Magazine's list of the 100 best traditional games for 2009—the Games 100— in the December 2008 issue. We developed all four in collaboration with talented inventors, each set unique and distinctive and made with great care:

 
Doris in warm colors--click for full descriptionDoris was unveiled at the 8th Gathering for Gardner in Atlanta the end of March, with great presentations by its inventor, Zdravko Zivkovic, and our co-explorer, Toby Gottfried, whose computer program and ingenuity tracked down the most unusual solutions and their sometimes unbelievable numbers of solutions. The theme of the Gathering was the number 8, and Doris's octagonal tiles were right on that wavelength. Zdravko, Toby and Kate had spent a couple of feverish months emailing ideas, questions and discoveries back and forth from Serbia to Florida to California. It all peaked when the guys got on their planes for Atlanta and Kate drove up from Miami. The private world premiere edition of 10 sets with their lavish full-color books sold out in a day, and we now offer Doris to the world, with the full-color book on DVD. More....

Intarsia--click for full description Intarsia came from the fertile mind of Sweden's Henrik Morast while he was trying to design modular tables. The reversible trapezoidal tiles inspired him to create 5 delightful strategy games while Kate dove into the limitless puzzle possibilities. The unique triple-decker construction of the tiles adds a "bas relief" look to each artistic composition. The solution shown is only an illusion of the shapes of the tiles. Each trapezoid you see is made of at least two different tiles. Many kinds of symmetry entice the creative solver, while games challenge the strategist. Simply beautiful, a true playable art piece, astounding and challenging. More....

One side of Pearl Fisher board--click for full descriptionPearl Fisher is the brainchild of Ferenc Palinkas, a profusely creative Hungarian IT engineer. Thanks to email, brainstorming around the planet between Budapest and Miami could proceed 24/7. We are very proud to present this uniquely challenging strategy game. Ferenc and his associates have also worked up an online version that lets you take on the computer at various levels of difficulty. Our handcrafted, two-sided, laser-engraved wood board invites play by two humans. This is a game you'll want to play many, many times. Move pearls and shells on the board, uncover the right pearls to score (if you can remember where they are!). More....

Dazzle--click for full descriptiono It could only be called Dazzle. For almost ten years, this dazzling design was in the incubator, while inventor Charles Butler cooked up more hot ideas for it, and his co-inventor, Kent Forrester, pursued the patent and trademark registrations. Kate, too, did intermittent research and fretted over the fact that it seemed rather hard to solve. Now, at last, in 2008, we are excited to release this unique and beautiful set. A rare treat—because it has 30 tiles, Dazzle can accommodate even 5, 6 and 7 players. Its large, mosaic-like dodecagons are hand-inlaid with three frosted colors, their glistening sheen a feast for the eyes. And those game strategies will really spark your imagination. More...


Other News:

Monty Python Fluxxo We have them! Looney Labs' greatest coup, Monty Python Fluxx. One of the most hilarious games on the planet just got even funnier. Super size — 100 cards! Order yours now. You don't have to dress in costume to play, but you might like to, anyway.

o The 2008 International Puzzle Party was held in Prague, the Czech Republic. We've just uploaded pictures and stories about our Prague Summer. Here's a page about the Prague Czecherboard puzzle Kate had designed for the occasion. It has an open challenge and a prize for solvers.

o This year's 25-year retrospective covers 1983, a sparse year for new products but a great year for Kadon's consolidation and learning curve. See 1983: The lesson of quality for historical notes and the making of Memory Bank. It's also the year we discovered lasercut acrylic, which gave Roundominoes a whole new life and opened the door for our entire product line. More...

Tulips--click for full descriptiono A further find from G4G8 was the permission we received from Daniel Erdely, another Hungarian designer, to make and offer his wondrous Tulips tiling through our website. We had made up some special sets for Daniel to use in an exhibition, and they were so beautiful that they simply belonged in our playable art and Tactile Graphics section. See for yourself why it took our breath away. This is not an easy puzzle. If you acquire it, be prepared for a fine campaign to reassemble the 210 tiles. We offer custom color choices. More...

o A fourth design has joined our guest showcase featuring innovative polyform sets by French puzzle explorer, Jacques Ferroul. We make all four of these puzzles by special order for his visitors as well as for our own. Jacques' website provides all the puzzle challenges for these sets, free to download, so we supply only brief leaflets with them.

  • His Poly-SpidronsTM is an intricate set of 54 shapes made of combinations of triangles and spirals, based on the SpidronTM concept of Daniel Erdely, and Jacques' webpage for these shows a wealth of beautiful and difficult, though solvable, designs.

  • Tetrapentos - click to go to its pageJacques' second design, Tetrapentos, has the tetriamonds and pentiamonds (brothers to our own Mini-Iamond Ring) filling a hexagon with 5 spare triangles. Jacques has worked out a large collection of delightful and stylish designs for these and presents them on his website. We offer Tetrapentos in a tray and as a pocket edition.

  • Stelo - click to go to its pageJacques' other neat little puzzle design, Stelo (Esperanto for "star"), forms a star and dozens of other beautiful designs with 12 of the simpler pieces from Poly-Spidrons. Interestingly, doubled-size models of the Stelo figures can be solved with the full Poly-Spidrons set. Jacques has dedicated Stelo as a memorial for his grand-niece Maïlou.

  • La Ora Stelo - click to go to its pageJacques' newest creation is a polyform puzzle based on golden triangles—La Ora Stelo (Esperanto for "the golden star") contains 32 tiles and has boundless possibilities for forming amazing designs. Its pentagonal tray provides 9 nested rings for exploring ascending sizes of shapes showing the inflation of the golden ratio. Jacques has dedicated La Ora Stelo as a memorial for his friend Jean-Pierre Puisais-Hée. More...

Old but still good news:

o We now own four additional, very cool domain aliases. Each is just a title page and links to the respective major sections of the official gamepuzzles website:

Four little yellow logos on the Index page link directly to the splash pages of those four domains. Take a look, they're jazzy.
 
o If you would like to receive copies of our very rarely issued bulletins or newsletters, please send us your email address and we'll add you to our confidential mailing list. We never give out our list; your privacy is safe with us. You can also subscribe and advise us of any address changes through the Contact Us page.

o Here's a recap of all the gamepuzzles added to our website recently and in the past year, in case you missed their first announcement.   Fox Blox .... Gemstones .... Manoover .... Diamond Star .... Doris .... Pearl Fisher .... Tulips .... Dazzle .... La Ora Stelo .... Intarsia ....

o Blooper Bounty — This is a standing offer:  we'll send a small prize to the first person who advises us of a mistake in this website, whether a typo, broken link or other goof. Each blooper gets a separate prize. Email us and provide your ground address, so we can mail you your prize. And thanks!

o Our hot-link icons are listed, along with some surprises and hidden prizes, for those of you who care to read directions for finding your way around this place. For the others, there's always logic, intuition and serendipity.

This update page is overhauled monthly and updated momentarily.



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