Two of the new FoxMind titles are new takes on classic games. Paradisio takes after the Italian game Sedici, in which players vie to fill in a 4×4 grid with black-and-white tiles, matching colors on all sides. In Paradisio, the tiles are islands in the midst of water. Your goal is to make it impossible for your opponent to fit any of their tiles into the expanding map.

A game of Paradisio in progress.

Taiga is a memory game based on the German game Findevier, in which players search for taiga animals hidden inside the forest. As players search for the elusive creature that matches the card revealed in each round, they will incidentally flip over other animal tokens, showing everyone their location for future rounds – if the players can remember!

Taiga

The third new game from FoxMind is a game of bluffing and deception set in the school halls. In Rise or Fall, eight different cliques compete for dominance, gaining and losing popularity through secret actions. Using your hand of action cards, decide every turn whether to attack another clique, defend your own, or attempt a boast – but you won’t know how your move turns out until every other player reveals their card too!

Rise or Fall

Finally, Fauna is a beautifully designed educational game concerning animals of the world. As with all the best-designed learning games, the key to winning isn’t trivia or dull recitation of facts on the cards, but rather each player’s own native wits and instincts. Each turn, a new animal card will be revealed, and players will have to make educated guesses about its size, weight, and where it lives. Think carefully – only correct guesses and near misses will score points – but you’ve also got to be quick, because once a player has chosen an answer, no other player can make the same guess! Fauna is fast-paced, packed with new challenges – 360 different animals! – and best of all, sneaks a lot of knowledge into the gameplay without hitting kids over the head with it.

Fauna

Martin Gardner beside a statue of Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter in Central Park, NY

Since 1993, puzzlers across the country have been holding “Gatherings for Gardner” to honor the man’s contributions to the leisure of the mind. With Gardner’s death in 2010, these events have transformed into the “Celebration of the Mind,” where his puzzles – and the puzzles of those he has inspired – are shared, mused over and occasionally solved. With dozens of simultaneous celebrations all over the world, these new Gatherings for Gardner range from small meetings of enthusiasts to series of lectures and seminars in major universities.

This year there will be over 40 Celebration of the Mind events on all seven continents. (Yes, including Antarctica.) And Eureka will be participating in Boston’s, which will be held at the Brookline Senior Center from 6:30 to 9:00, on Friday, October 21st, in honor of Gardner’s birthday. This will be a casual event with puzzle enthusiasts from across Boston. Join us as we share the wide variety of Martin Gardner puzzles and books we keep in the store – or stop by the store anytime to check out this singular intellect’s many ingenious creations.

An ivory "Rukh" piece found in the Central Asian Ferghana Valley, dated to the 8th century CE. The "rook" that became the Western castle was in Indian and Persian variants a giant bird.

What our customers may not know is just how fascinatingly different many modern chess variants are from the classic tactical game we grew up with. At the same time Chaturanga and its descendants were traveling westward into the Middle East and Europe, Buddhist monks and merchants along the Silk Road were carrying these games eastward into China and the Far East, where they evolved over hundreds of years in isolation from their Western counterparts. Today, several chess variants thrive on the other side of the world, with rules and dynamics that utterly change the game’s strategy.

Here at Eureka, we’ve recently brought in two of the most popular of these games, along with books on their rules and strategy. Customers familiar with these games, or chess players looking to branch out and explore the ingenious modern counterparts to chess, will want to check out xiangqi (sometimes known as Chinese chess) and shogi (or Japanese chess). For the curious, here’s a brief overview of the most radical differences.

A model xiangqi board, as it's set up at the beginning of the game.

In xiangqi, pieces move along the intersections on the grid rather than the squares, as in the brilliant traditional Chinese game go. The board is therefore functionally 9×10 rather than 8×8, and the 16 pieces are distributed not only along the back two rows but throughout each player’s side of the board. The board also features two major terrain elements, a concept alien to Western chess. Each player has a fortress, a 3×3 grid that the general (equivalent to the king) and his two attendants (somewhat similar to bishops) may not leave. Across the center of the board runs the river. Soldiers (pawns, without the diagonal capture) that cross the river gain the ability to move horizontally, while elephants (no close equivalent) cannot pass the river.

Eureka's xiangqi set, from WorldWise Imports, with a beautifully decorated wooden board and reversible pieces featuring both traditional Chinese characters and easy-to-understand icons for non-native players.

Xiangqi‘s strategy is greatly influenced by the more limited movement of the pieces, who must contend with terrain features and greater restrictions on the distance they can move in one turn. Only the hugely valuable chariot, which moves just like a Western rook, captures with the speed characteristic of Western chess, while the cannons move like chariots, but can only capture by vaulting over a piece (whether friend or foe) between themselves and their target. Nevertheless, the pace of xiangqi is very fast, with the distribution of pieces encouraging early confrontation and the limited range of the generals resulting in a shorter endgame. All this may sound very peculiar to Western chess players – but perhaps not so peculiar as shogi…

A model shogi board, as it's set up at the beginning of the game.

At first glance shogi may look more similar to Western chess. True, the grid is 9×9 and the 20 pieces are distributed a bit differently, but there is no river or fortress and the pieces are move across the squares rather than the intersections. By and large, the movements are more similar to chess as well: the jeweled general (just like our king) is free to roam the board one space at a time in any direction, the horses (knights) leap over pieces in their characteristic L-shape (although only by moving two spaces directly forward and then one space to either side), and each player has a single dragon and flying chariot, which move just like bishops and rooks in Western chess. The lances keep up the game’s dynamic pace, moving as far as they like straight ahead, and while the soldiers (pawns) are unable to capture diagonally, the gold and silver generals fill some of the role of Western pawns with their slow but versatile advance. Yet two qualities of shogi set it strangely apart from Western chess. The first is the concept of promotion. Pieces that reach the promotion zone (the three rows where the opponent’s pieces begin the game) may be promoted. The pieces are flipped over to indicate their transformation, and generally gain increased mobility – although for strategic reasons players may choose not to promote pieces when their initial movement options are more advantageous.

One of Eureka's shogi sets, a miniature wooden table with carved wooden pieces and drawers for storage.

The second, more radical difference between shogi and Western chess has to do with capturing. Astute observers may have noticed that the players’ colors are not differentiated; rather, the orientation of the pieces denotes who controls which. This is because capturing is taken more literally in shogi: when an opponent’s piece is captured, a player keeps it on hand, and may use a later turn to redeploy it on any empty space (with a few restrictions for the placement of soldiers). Players can even achieve immediate checkmate with a redeployed piece, so care must be taken to defend the jeweled general even from one’s own captured pieces. Naturally, sacrificing pieces in shogi is not taken lightly.

Eureka has all the equipment for beginners and advanced players alike to play xiangqi and shogi at home – if this article has piqued your interest, stop by the store and ask us all about these exciting members of the chess family that enjoy huge popularity in their native countries.

In Dixit, each player has a hand of six cards. When it’s your turn to be the storyteller, you choose a card, and make up a sentence, phrase, word, sound, song, or whatever you like to describe it. Then you play your card face-down, and all the other players choose cards from their hands to match your description. Finally, all the cards are revealed, and players try to guess which is really the storyteller’s card.

The twist is this: the storyteller gets points for every correct guess, but if every player chose the right card, the storyteller gets no points. The storyteller must therefore be careful to hint toward their card without giving it away. This leads to some ingenious clues: “I can’t wait to grow up.” “We may be left behind.” “Excess.” This aspect of Dixit really makes it stand out from other storytelling, bluffing and voting games.

But the major selling point of Dixit was the gorgeous, surreal and endlessly fascinating illustrations of painter Marie Cardouat featured on the cards.

Simply browsing the deck is a genuine creative joy, inviting meditation and speculation. Playing the game with them allows players to exercise their imaginative subconscious, making surprising connections between image and concept.

Now, Asmodee has released Dixit Odyssey, the first full-sized follow-up to Dixit. Odyssey can be fully combined with Dixit (and the earlier expansion Dixit 2), or played completely independently. In addition to 84 new images, now illustrated by artist Pieroin the distinctive Dixit style, Dixit Odyssey provides enough material for 12 players (originally Dixit accommodated 6) and simplified scoreboards and voting mechanisms.

And, of course, the cards are still beautiful.

Our ever popular line of MOVA globes continues to attract attention in our store window, drawing passers by inside to ask, “How does that work?” The answer is that the MOVA series runs entirely on solar power and the earth’s own magnetic field, as sunlight penetrates the interior globe and powers a small photovoltaic motor. As long as these high-end, exquisitely rendered globes have access to just a small amount of direct light, they will continue to rotate at a constant pace. At Eureka, we’ve just brought in an exciting addition to the series: a starmap globe, showing the positions of various constellations relative to the Earth’s surface.

The MOVA Starmap Globe

We’ve also recently added a line of globes from the George F. Cram Company, an educational company who have been publishing maps since 1867. These finely detailed, beautifully designed globes come in a variety of sizes and styles to suit any taste and budget, including a few with internal illumination to aid reference.

The "Huntington" Style 12" Antique Globe from George F. Cram Co.

Finally, the IQ series of globes from Stellanova put an educational spin (apologies for the pun) on the world. This series comes in four varieties – an antique style, a contemporary political map, a satellite map and a starmap – each with its own unique set of quiz cards, asking themed questions about history, human geography, natural geography, exploration, politics and the constellations. Small, attractive and loaded with information, the IQ globes make excellent gifts for children just learning about their place in the world.

The Political IQ Globe with Question Cards

I haven’t played Risk or Axis & Allies since, because I’ve been too busy playing Smallworld.

Get excited.

With its colorful fantasy world, its generous sense of humor, and especially its fast-paced, dynamic gameplay, Smallworld revitalizes the notion of the conquest game, shifting alliances and advantages repeatedly in its (relatively short) playing time and providing a dramatically different experience each time you play. A few of its distinguishing features:

• Your troops consist of 14 races and 20 special powers, each conferring a distinct advantage in-game, and all randomly shuffled together to create novel combinations that open up new possibilities with every game. Over the course of the game you will have an opportunity to unleash several of these patchwork soldiers on the beleaguered map.
• Rather than constantly generating (and counting out) new troops, you bid on the random combinations that appear, and make do with the limited number of soldiers you get. This adds two exciting elements to the gameplay: first, the delight of stealing a coveted creation from under your opponents’ noses; and second, the difficult strategic decision of whether to push on with a civilization declining in power and resources, or to sacrifice a turn in abandoning an old race and purchasing another.
• The game does not encourage holding onto a chosen area and pushing back and forth against a few borders, as most conquest games do; instead, armies sweep dramatically across the board, abandoning some regions and invading others, before making way for a new army to try its luck on a different section of the map altogether.
• There are almost no dice, which raises the pace and makes Smallworld a game of strategy much more than chance.

Days of Wonder has periodically released minor expansions to Smallworld, most of which introduce additional races and special powers. (Eureka carries the expansions Cursed!, Grand Dames, Be Not Afraid and Tales & Legends.) But this month saw the introduction of the first full-fledged spin-off, Smallworld Underground, with a large new cast of characters, new maps and a cunning twist on the rules.

Can you dig it?

Smallworld Underground is a fully independent game, so a new player can begin with Underground alone, but is also fully compatible with the original. It also adds the game-changing element of Places of Power and Righteous Relics – secret bonuses scattered across the board that confer major advantages to the players who can hold onto them. This added tactical component is a considerable and devious change for veteran Smallworld players, without being unduly complicated for those trying the game for the first time.

Smallworld is a superb find for those who like shorter (roughly an hour and a half) strategy games, conquest games in general, or fans of fantasy games like Dungeons & Dragons or Magic the Gathering. Stop by Eureka to check out the brand-new Smallworld Underground, the classic Smallworld, or any of the various Smallworld expansions.

Eureka has just received the latest line-up from Blue Orange and Smart Games (two of the four big publishers of these games), and we’ll be highlighting three of our favorite new games from this slate of releases here on the blog.

For younger kids, Blue Orange has just come out with Pixy Cubes. The unique dice in Pixy Cubes have unique arrangements of shape and color on every side, and players combine these to create intricate designs. The simplest variant of the game has players match designs printed on cards. From there, the game includes several alternative ways of playing. Freeform design using the Pixy Cubes lets kids use their creativity, while two multiplayer games – a speed version and a memory game – expand Pixy Cubes beyond the one-played graduated puzzle format.

Pixy Cubes

For older kids, Cannibal Monsters by Smart Games presents a unique mathematical challenge. The adorable monster characters hop across the board to eat each other (the monsters stack as they swallow their compatriots), and the goal is to be left with only a single, giant monster. They come in three colors – blue, red and green – and because of the design of the monsters’ grooves, they have a rock-paper-scissors relationship: blue can eat green, green can eat red and red can eat blue. Players must therefore choose a careful order in which to unleash the monsters upon one another to insure that every one gets eaten.

Cannibal Monsters

And for kids – or adults! – looking for a real challenge, Troy is a sinister and addicting game of spacial reasoning. In Troy, your goal is to protect all the blue soldiers by completely enclosing them in walls, while ensuring that no red soldiers are allowed inside the gates. With only four wall wall pieces to work with, three of them very inconveniently shaped, Troy thoroughly tests your powers of deduction as the soldiers are endlessly reshuffled in maddening formations. From my experience playing our store copy, I can attest that whenever it seems that a piece must go here, it belongs somewhere else entirely. Troy is one of Smart Games’s most satisfying titles, and belongs in the home of every child who has worked their way through the likes of Rush H0ur, Tipover, Anti-Virus and Alcatraz.

Troy

Carcassonne, winner of the prestigious Spiel des Jahres prize in 2001, is our favorite introduction to the world of adult strategy games. With rules simple enough for kids as young as seven, and enough cutthroat, strategic thinking to appeal to the most competitive of gamers, Carcassonne’s unique premise of building the board as you play appeals to players of all stripes. It also boasts the most dazzling array of expansions in the gaming world, from the miniature King expansion to the enormous Wheel of Fortune, from the shrewd economic management of Traders and Builders to the freewheeling dexterity of The Catapault – and perhaps half a dozen more for all levels and styles of play.

For its tenth anniversary, Rio Grande Games has released a deluxe Festival edition of the original game. This edition comes with ten unique bonus tiles, transparent plastic figures, and, adorably, a scoring track in the iconic shape of a giant Carcassonne meeple. If you’ve never played Carcassonne before, now is the time to start!

The 10th Anniversary Edition of Carcassonne

And for those of you who have the original Carcassonne with wooden meeples, there’s also an ingenious little expansion that incorporates the new clear plastic design, called The Phantom. In this expansion, each player receives a single phantom, who may be placed on the same turn as another meeple, on the same tile, on a different terrain feature. Those who already play the game will appreciate the elegance of this small change.

The Settlers of Catan, which won the Spiel des Jahres in 1995, can claim more than any other game to be the impetus for the recent renaissance in the world of strategy board games. With its intuitive gameplay, modular board, fierce but non-aggressive competition, extensive player interaction and endless replay value, Catan set the pattern for dozens if not hundreds of games to follow. Over fifteen years later, it remains the only game to so successfully integrate the diverse strategic elements of network-building, negotiation, resource management and set collection in one game that typically takes under an hour to play.

In addition to several well-received expansions and variations, Mayfair Games has released numerous card game versions of Catan over the years, and the latest, The Struggle for Catan, has just hit the shelves. The Struggle for Catan retains the resource costs and victory point values of the original in building a winning combination of roads, settlements and cities, but introduces a novel system of stealing knights and roads from opponents, a dynamic feature that compensates in terms of player interaction for the loss of the board. It also incorporates the city expansions from the beloved Cities and Knights expansion, granting players special abilities as they upgrade their cities. The game uses the cards to great effect, incorporating alternate advantages on opposite sides of the same card.

The Struggle for Catan

Finally, Dominion was the 2009 winner of Spiel des Jahres, and the first in a string of card games (the next most popular is Ascension) to incorporate deck building as part of the gameplay. Collectible card games like Magic the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh have long depended as much on building a good deck as on playing the game well; it was Dominion’s innovation to make this an integral aspect of play. Players begin with treasure cards and victory cards, and use their treasure cards to buy more cards – more treasure, more victory cards that give the player points, and the action cards that form the real meat of the game. Since each game of Dominion uses only a set of ten action cards to choose from, and the original game included twenty-five, this format allows for considerable variation in strategies and combinations from game to game. The structure of the game also leaves ample room for expansions, and the fifth, Cornucopia, was released in May.

Cornucopia’s theme is diversity, encouraging players to use a wide variety of action cards as they build their decks rather than sticking to a few reliable ones. Thus, Harvest has the player reveal the top four cards of their deck, and gain one coin for each different card shown; Menagerie gives a player extra cards if they have no duplicates in hand; and Fairgrounds is a new victory card worth two points for every five different cards in a player’s deck at the end of the game. Most unique to Cornucopia are the prize cards, highly powerful cards, with a single copy of each, that can only be obtained by playing a Tournament and sacrificing a Province. (Experienced players will appreciate how strong these cards must be to justify the expense.)

Dominion Cornucopia

If you play any of these games – and chances are, if you’re involved in the world of Euro strategy games, you play all of them – now is a terrific time to head over to Eureka and add some more depth to your collection. And if you don’t play these games yet, the 10th anniversary edition of Carcassonne is the ideal place to start!

Our mechanical puzzles span the range from the small Hanayama cast puzzles to intricate wooden burr puzzles. Grinan’s coin cut puzzles are jigsaws made from quarters, half-dollars and silver dollars – available in the Massachusetts state quarter, among others. The tavern puzzles, created by blacksmith Dennis Sucilsky, are designed to mimic horseshoe-and-ring puzzles displayed in country inns for centuries, and include both reproductions of antique puzzles and novel inventions to challenge the most veteran tinkerer. Or why not get Dad a nice bottle of wine and strap it into one of our Don’t Break the Bottle puzzles, available in metal or cork, to test his mettle before giving him his reward.

The metal edition of Don't Break the Bottle

If you’re looking to adorn Dad’s desk, try a classic Newton’s Cradle, or the Romp, a magnetic pendulum that swings erratically through a field of magnets. We also have a wide array of globes, including the Levitron, which hovers over an electromagnet, and the beautifully crafted and ingenious MOVA Globes. The MOVA Gloves, available in a variety of art styles, run entirely on solar power and the Earth’s own magnetic field, and will rotate at a constant, steady rate as long as they have sunlight.

The "Antique-style" MOVA Globe

Or perhaps you’re looking for a great project for Dad and the kids to work on together. In that case you’ll want to look through Eureka’s new greatly-expanded science section. Build a solar-powered robot or a digital recording studio; peer at sample slides through a home microscope, and project the images onto the TV with the Premiere Digital Microscope Eyepiece; or grow crystals with one of our many Space Age Crystal kits.

The Educational Insights Digital Recording Lab

Whatever Dad’s hobbies, follies and obsessions, Eureka is sure to have something to fascinate and excite him. Drop in before Father’s Day catches you off guard!

Today we’re thinking about adjectives. In 1908, logicians Kurt Grelling and Leonard Nelson attempted to sort all adjectives into two categories. Words that described themselves were termed “autological,” and words that did not describe themselves were termed “heterological.” On this basis, the word “short” would be autological, because it is itself short. Other autological words include “readable,” “sibilant,” “unhyphenated” and “sesquipedalian” (a marvelous word meaning “having many syllables” or “given to the use of long words”).

By contrast, the word “long” would be heterological, because it is not itself long. Other heterological words include “Spanish,” “incomprehensible” and “monosyllabic.” For that matter, words like “orange” and “tentacled” would also be heterological, as they don’t really apply to words at all.

Using these definitions, the word “autological” is of course autological, because it does describe itself. Now, ask yourself whether the word “heterological” is autological or heterological.

If it’s autological, it must be heterological in order to describe itself, which means it must not describe itself, which means it must not be autological, which means it does not describe itself, which means it is not heterological…

If it’s heterological, it is not autological, so it cannot describe itself, so it cannot be heterological, so it must be autological, and must describe itself, which makes it heterological, which means…

Think about it.