The Hip Hop Chess Federation is “dedicated to providing an inclusive setting for individuals to interact, play and develop life strategy skills with people they perceive as mentors.”

To this end, they link Hip Hop music, martial arts, and chess play as a trinity of activities intended to take up the slack from failing school systems. Rap artists lend their cred to the activities.

You can see some rap lyrics created to support the federation in this New York Times article, e.g.:

Poppa raised me to chess moves

And though you’re gone I’m not bitter you left me prepared

We got divided by the years, but I got it from here

Don’t sweat that, sounds bump from Marcy to Lefrak

To that pocket in DC where my man caught his death at

Over my years I’ve seen Rooks get tooken by the Knight

Lose they Crown by tryna defend a Queen

Checkmate, in 4 moves the Bobby Fischer of rap

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Lost Cities, a popular two-player card game among Eurogamer cognoscenti, heads to the XBox today.

Given the popularity of Settlers and Carcassonne, it’s likely to be another big hit. Which leaves you to wonder:

People go on the XBox are finally being turned on to great Eurogames, and they’re playing them socially, too. Isn’t it time they start playing them around tabletops with real live people in the same room?

(hat tip)

Update: As a followup to this story, Team XBox reviews the game, loves it, and indicates that, unlike the original game, this game is for up to four players.

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The upcoming Monopoly: World Edition will jettison the old Water Works and Electric Company spaces in favor of spaces featuring wind and solar energy.

So you can now “own” solar or wind energy? Doesn’t that defeat the ecological point? Considering that nobody buys either of these spaces, I don’t see how this matters, but there you go.

(source)

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NYC24 reports on a surge in popularity of board games, quizzes, and trivia nights in NYC barrooms, where people are searching for organized social face-to-face experiences.

Michael Evanchik, one of the organizers of the popular debate night at Lolita Bar on the Lower East Side said people like to be challenged, even while hanging out with friends. “We were sick of having inane conversations in bars,” he said, explaining how debate night got off the ground, “so we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to go out and actually talk about interesting things?’”

(source, hat tip)

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icWales reports on the growing popularity of poker, instead of Bingo and previous trivial pursuits, among middle age and older women in Wales. It’s apparently becoming popular in the old nursing homes.

One player is quoted as saying that women have a natural advantage in the game when playing against men because men never really know what women are thinking.

Local casinos are cashing in on the trend.

(source)

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Palatka, FL: Man discovers three others killed at an all-night poker game. This is the second card game  shooting incidence in Putnam County in the last month. (source)

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On slow news days, the mass media sometimes trots out articles pimping old board or card games. Here are some for Strat-o-Matic baseball and Canasta.

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Sri Lankan disaster management experts are attempting to use the game Snakes and Ladders as a tool for teaching disaster awareness.

Other than teaching one to avoid snakes and board games that offer no decision-making skills, I’m not sure how they plan to use the game to do this.

(source)

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A number of 3,000 year old board-games carved into rocks have been discovered on the Iranian island of Kharg.

Some of them may be Backgammon prototypes.

(source, source)

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Crystal Caste, makers of funny shaped RPG dice that look something like geological rocks, won a patent dispute against Hasbro who used dice with the same design for their Monopoly Millennium edition without permission.

And this even after admitting that they saw the dice at a convention and made a feeble attempt to license the design after producing them. Cost to Hasbro: $446,182 in royalties.

For myself, it’s the money in Monopoly Millennium that sucks most; it looks like oil-stained regular Monopoly money.

(source)

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