Toy Fair usually begins for me on Saturday morning, with the annual parade of Hasbro toys. Today was no exception. After a cup of coffee and a cupcake for Mr. Potato Head’s 60th Birthday, I got a look at what’s new. One thing that really caught my eye is the way that Hasbro is using apps to enhance their existing product line, and create new things as well. There’s an upcoming Battleship app that will work with Battleship toys, and a Lazer Tag gun ”blaster” that you can slip your iPhone into and really look like you’re shooting lasers at your friends/opponents.
Hasbro is calling the integration of apps into its board games “zAPPed Gaming”. See what they did there? In addition to Battleship, The Game of Life and Monopoly are getting zapped. I received The Game of Life zAPPed
The first thing I noticed is that setup is WAY easier. Plop your iPad into the middle of the board, fire up the app, give each player ten grand, and you’re good to go. No more piles and piles of cards to sort out. You choose a car and peg for the board, and then you can customize your peg in the app, giving it a bit of personality. The spinner is in the app, and anytime you land on one of the special spaces (stop, payday, Life spaces, etc.) the app walks you through it. It’s easy, and it generally feels like a faster game than the classic board game.
One of the strangest choices they made for this game, though, is filling the app with grainy home movie clips presumably culled from You Tube. Graduate from college and you might see some dude doing backflips to get his diploma. Land on a Life space and you might get someone in a bear suit scaring someone else in a warehouse. What? So strange. The clips generally made Olive giggle, but I would have preferred they stick to the peg animations with the kind of text that would have been on the board spaces.
Speaking of the peg animations, the personalization of your pegs is a great addition. They may be faceless, but you can start to imagine little personalities for them. The jobs have changed to, ranging from web tycoon to fashion designer to mad scientist. You can choose the kind of wedding that you have, and even the gender of your children.
When we play the classic board game, house rules dictate that you can start off as any gender you want and you can marry a peg of any gender as well. I was so curious to see if the app would support this play pattern, and it does! I totally got gay married today! Here’s me (the Extreme Explorer), my lovely wife, our eldest daughter, and the triplets. Rock on, Hasbro. This is awesome.
After playing through a couple games, the fam is feeling like we like this better than the classic board game. And it takes up about half the shelf space, which is pleases me and our apartment greatly.
The Game of Life is available now, with a retail price of $24.99 plus, you know, the cost of an iPad. The app is free though! Monopoly will come out in the summer and Battleship in the fall. Look for Lazer Tag in August.
Stay tuned. I’ll have lots more on Hasbro, as well as the rest of the Toy Fair goodies I’ll be seeing. In case you missed it, here’s a bit of Skylanders news. And you can check out my ongoing photo album of Toy Fair 2012 on Facebook.
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