Snacks and Bladders is a wonderful exploration of the human body and the food we eat to fuel it. Correctly identify body parts and make wise food choices to stay ahead of your opponents as you travel through the digestive system. An entertaining way to learn about this fascinating subject.

This one has all the stuff in it that kids love- poos, wees and vomit! Seriously, it's a fabulous romp through digestion and food, and another great collaboration with Romina Marinkovich of Moa Hunt fame.We were involved in the early play-testing and made various suggestions which I think really helped in terms of game flow. Originally it was a single board before I suggested that two boards would really allow Bek and Romina's fantastic illustration of the digestive system room to breathe (ahem). The body board ended up as 3 jigsaw pieces in lovely thick card, and the track is a separate board. The production values on this one really shine!

Aside from the board, Bek added lots of other beautiful graphic touches- the playing pieces as kitchen utensils are delightful.

I'd also worked hard to keep the heart of the game while reigning in some of the more complex original rules. Often good game design is about distilling something to its essence, and making it work logically- this is known as 'removing chrome'. I was especially pleased with the final implementation of the food cards- the game-play mechanic reflects what sort of food you should have and in what quantities.

All that effort lead to a co-designer credit, which I'm quite excited about!

If you've got any questions about the game drop us a line or leave a comment below- we love feedback!

It’s a race to post the most and discover New Zealand along the way!

Frogmail keeps hands and minds on the hop...

*     Choose a native frog stamp
*     Find towns and landmarks on a NZ map
*     Affix stamps to postcards and post them in the box
*     Look through a magic eyeglass and decipher number codes
*     Challenge players to ‘Sink or Swim’
*     Discover NZ’s native frogs and read fun poems about the frogs’ travels

And the mailbox can double as a bedroom door accessory for real mail!
There’s so much to do… so get hopping!!

Some very interesting challenges to sort out in this one! The game box had to function as a mailbox- that's a real slot in the front with a magnetic clasp to hold the front panel closed, and the box is quite sturdy and thick to allow it to stand upright easily. There are reusable stickers for the postcards, and a magic eye that you can look through to see concealed answers on each postcard.

Bek came up with the idea of enhancing the original posting game by theming it around frogs, and thus the title came about. She found a local expert to ensure that the four native frogs are accurately illustrated and described.

With a few games under my belt, I'm feeling fairly confident that I've got an instructional style for rule books that presents information in a clear, logical and concise manner. Rule writing, much like writing software manuals, is a deep black art of knowing what to say when, and how!

No matter what your thinking style, Cognition is a game that is guaranteed to test your mental stamina and tickle your funny bone in equal measure!  Designed by talented (and slightly twisted) Kiwi brothers David & Andrew Akers, Cognition is the perfect game to bring out after Christmas lunch when you have run out of things to say to your family!

Bek's job here was to take a great but definitely home-brewed game to a professional print stage, and she's done that with a clean, consistent style throughout. My part was to convert the questions and answers from 800 cards laid up in Corel for printing out on a home printer back-to-front to the format that a serious print-shop needs- and believe me, that's a fair bit different! But with a bit of data-massaging with Director and then pulling the results into InDesign and using its dynamic data feature, we got it sorted.

It's night time at the zoo. All the visitors have come and gone, and the zookeepers have headed home. Amongst the packing crates scattered around their enclosure, the monkeys gather for their regular competition!

Each Sunday night, the monkeys race to push the crates together to build a tall tower. Choose your monkey and by matching food tokens to the colors on the packing crates, climb to the top first. Watch out for the other monkeys who may try and scare you away or block your moves. Make the most of each monkey’s special abilities to help you climb higher. The first one to clamber high enough to leap into a nearby tree, spends a night on the town!

Monkey Mayhem is a classic Euro game from Frederic Moyerson of Saboteur and Nuns On The Run fame.

The game as originally devised was a competition between dock workers to stack crates and climb to the top. That seemed far too dry, so we came up with the Monkey Mayhem theme. Bek's illustrations and graphics really shine here, and we made sure to match the special powers to the appropriate monkey or ape: the Patas Monkey is the speedster, the Chimpanzee is manipulative, the Spider Monkey is a smarty, and the Gorilla is mighty!

For my part, I'm really proud of the quality of the components and the clarity of the rulebook. The example diagrams are clear and concise, and each player gets a player aid that makes it quick to get started. The card for the tree and board is nice and thick. The box liner works very well to contain and protect the parts.

Riding on the success of The Amazing Moa Hunt and The Great Goanna Hunt, we turned our attention to world geography.

For The Amazing Mammoth Hunt there were a host of key changes that make it, to me, the best of the three 'Hunt' games.

Firstly, we went to a huge, gorgeous 3-fold board to properly display the globe and we moved to a maximum of 6 players.

For the first time I really got to sink my teeth into the original rules and add some elements that increase both the excitement and the playability of the game.

I introduced Mammoth money which allowed players to buy clues from a clue sheet that would help narrow down where countries were located. By different amounts of Mammoth money to players at the start of the game, you can balance it when playing with people of varying geographic knowledge- great when playing with kids, or if the adults are (ahem) clueless!

The ability to steal tokens now became a challenge, allowing the potential victim a chance to avoid the loss. That became even more important with the addition of a Mammoth token which was worth 3 big points at the end of the game.

There were a raft of other small refinements that allowed the game to play even more smoothly. There's even a fun constructible dice tower to stop dice scattering across the table!

Bek's graphic work was again fantastic, but we also both feel that her idea of using native animals as the icons of each country worked incredibly well. Kids especially grasp the idea of the panda representing China, the kangaroo for Australia or the tiger for India. Even if their geography was tenuous, these animals helped them build a framework for learning about the world.

I've played the game with a range of adults and kids and it's fabulous seeing them realise that they should keep the tokens they've won face down to protect the higher point ones, or glomming to the idea of watching someone else reveal the wrong country and then trying to land on it to claim it. One of my favourite sessions was with a group of at-risk secondary kids- it turned out their teacher's speciality was geography, and he'd never seen them so excited about the subject!

Amazing Mammoth Hunt awards

There's more on The Amazing Mammoth Hunt at IQ Ideas.

This is the game that started our involvement with boardgames (although Minty had certainly played enough of them in his time!)

Romina Marinkovich had created a pencil-sketched geography game to help home-school her kids. She asked Bek if she'd bring the graphics up to the point where it might attract a publisher, and with a bit of polish it did: IQ Ideas took it on. They figured that Bek had got it this far, so she might as well finish all the elements, and I think she did a gorgeous job.

The final result was The Amazing Moa Hunt, which has been a New Zealand best-seller. There's now an expansion called Off The Beaten Track, which features some of the lesser know New Zealand locations, as well as The Great Goanna Hunt (Australian geography) and The Amazing Mammoth Hunt (world geography).

You can find Moa Hunt at Whitcoulls, Paper Plus and many other stores, as well as online at IQ Ideas.