Hasta La Gadget!

That’s right folks, after conquering social networks and mobile devices, Zynga has wrenched open a portal to the physical realm. Midgard. Middle Earth. Or just plain Earth. The company partnered with Hasbro to release board game versions of their video games that were based on board games in the first place.

Yes, that is a thing that exists: Words with Friends, the board game. In fact it comes in three editions, all of which have 104 tiles and a 15 x 15 board. Clearly a massive difference from Scrabble, which only has 100 tiles. The scoring and bonuses are the same as the one in the online game, except this time it has an offline single player mode.

Then there’s the Draw Something board game, which to its credit is slightly distinguishable from Pictionary. The Draw Something board game has players guessing each other drawings to get coins; first to 15 get coins wins. Note that Hasbro also holds the rights to Pictionary and to Scrabble (at least in U.S. and Canada, Mattel has it trademarked for the rest of the world). So call them weird – which they are! – but they’re not stepping on anyone’s toes here.

You can order these games either from Amazon or from Hasbro’s online shop for $15-$40 (USD) depending on the game. There’s also a FarmVille board game, but it’s a clone of Hungry Hungry Hippos. That’s just lazy. The Words with Friends board games on the other hand? I don’t care what the world’s craziest indie developer can come up with. These are hands-down 2012′s weirdest board games for me.

[via Happy Place]

We’ve featured lots of cool and geeky chess sets over the years, but never one that’s quite as badass as this one, made from bullets and steel. Yeah! This chess set will chew you up and spit you out like an Expendables movie.

Every individual piece in this chess set is meticulously crafted by Olde World Collectibles and Creations. They take empty .223 caliber bullet casings and cut and bend them into various shapes – then mount them each on a hardwood base. Each one conveys the different chess pieces well, and I especially like the way he made the rooks look like little castles, and the king is just an undisturbed bullet, complete with tip (but hopefully no gunpowder inside.)

Not only are the pieces cool but the board underneath is a work of art, made from cut pieces of hot-rolled steel, welded together onto a sturdy frame. You could probably drive a truck on this thing without damaging it (but don’t.) Shipping weight for the set, including board and pieces is a whopping 23 pounds. Heck, yeah!

The Steel and Bullet Chess Set is available over on Etsy for $550(USD), and each one is made custom to order, so it’ll take 2 to 4 weeks for completion. If you can’t afford one don’t try and make your own using live ammo.

A labor of love 7 years in the making, this heavily customized, Nintendo-themed variant of Risk was made by – drum roll please – redditor NintendoRisk. Instead of our countries and continents, the territories are places from various classic Nintendo games, including the Kanto region, Hyrule, Eagleland, Dinosaur Island and more. It also has aerial territories such as Zebes and the Great Fox ship.

The art looks really good, not just the stuff on the board, but on the cards – there are 100 Hero and 42 Territory cards – as well. NintendoRisk said that all of the artwork is in high resolution. The board for example is about 20,000 pixels wide and its digital copy is about 700MB.

My only suggestion would be to add a border graphic of some sort on the board. I’m sure NintendoRisk can fill it up with Nintendo’s vast cache of characters and icons.

[via Imgur via Reddit]

How do you make an already-geeky game even geekier? By making it out of electronic components, of course. MAKE magazine is showing off this super-nerdy game of chess, where resistors become pawns, LEDs stand in as bishops and the king and queen are represented by electrolytic capacitors. More »

All right, hotshot — sure, you can trounce your five-year-old niece in a round of Connect Four, but are you ready to do battle with a machine? Łukasz Kaiser of Paris Diderot University in France has detailed a method for teaching computers how to learn relatively simple games like Tic-Tac-Toe, Breakthrough and the aforementioned eternal vertical struggle between checker pieces, using quick videos generally under two minutes in length. “The presented algorithm requires only a few demonstrations and minimal background knowledge,” Kaiser explains, in his paper Learning Games from Videos Guided by Descriptive Complexity, “and, having learned the rules, automatically derives position evaluation functions and can play the learned games competitively.” Kaiser adds, having taken on the world of Tic-Tac-Toe and other relatively simple games that, “there is strong theoretical evidence that it will generalize to other problems.” Now if only we can sum up the world’s issues Connect Four-style, we should be covered.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Researcher details method for teaching computers to win at board games through short training videos originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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