After hours upon hours of figural items, hitting the huge gaming section was something of a refreshing change of pace. An enormous array of puzzles, interactive challenges and competitive games were set up to try. Here's the part where I try to match up this stack of business cards to the photos and attempt to give credit where credit is due for all of these items as everything blurs together. At this point in the second day, I'm bruised and my body is no longer receiving messages from my nervous system to indicate that I need to eat, surviving on Pop Tart crumbs consumed on the train. I have a band-aid on my knee from the large, shiny sore that had appeared on my knee after the first day of the Fair, and one shoulder has a stinging gash on it from a niece who came up behind me and decided to claw into it, yelling, 'I'm CATWOMAN!', which I suppose that I ultimately brought upon myself.

Ah, that image linked to above belongs to eLogIQ. It seems to be a complex variation on the Rubiks Cube, one of the many banes of my existence, alongside parking at the local bank and shaving my neck and pickled cauliflower. Using a series of internal gears, one plays the traditional color aligning game, losing sleep and coherence along the way, realizing the futility of life. There IS a solution. There's always a solution... you're just not smart enough to find it.

The gaming section was the part of the fair that was screaming TOUCH ME! The visual assault became moderated by tactile experiences, and we hung out and a number of booths and just got to play.

Without contest, the most insane encounter of the fair happened with a Mr. Zoran Pavlovic, a wheeler and dealer to the core, who expounded the virtues of his game Zoki with a pronounced Russian accent. Before the next five minutes were up, he'd have offered us 500 dollars and / or a laptop computer if we could bring him a game that was better than his Zoki and then debate him to a standstill. We were smart, though - we knew that there was no hope in winning a debate with a creature born with an extra set of lungs and nictating windpipes reserved for the sole purpose of contradicting you, as Russians are. Dan was also offered the same cash / computer prize for beating him at his own game, or completing a different puzzle game, or doing 15 push-ups. I know I say a lot of sarcastic things, but Mr. Pavlovic actually took out his wallet and threw 500 dollars on the table, in front of my face, if Dan would do 15 push-ups, but it was pretty obvious that Mr. Pavlovic would find some way to use semantics or distraction to prevent any quantity of push-ups from happening.

Dan proposed that I grab the money and run, to which Zoran replied, "I am faster than you! I will catch you!" The man threw superlatives around about himself like there was some kind of superlative sale on Amazon and he had no room to keep all of the superlatives that he'd bought. "I will beat you at anything!"

We didn't have the time to stick around and play a full game of one of the many variations of Zoki, even against his lovely assistant, who would beat us even though she was "only a woman!" As Dan and Zoran played a few rounds of a line matching game, Zoran would repeatedly exclaim, "Oh man, you're killing me! Look at that! You're keeling me, man!" Zoki itself is simply a collection of 34 plastic, square tiles with colored lines on them, with which a purported 500 games can be played. He wanted to sell us a copy for 30 dollars, which seemed steep for simple tiles and a rulebook, but the game itself looked to be a lot of fun, in an incredibly basic way. Between this and the other puzzle game that he had on display, which was made of 7 hexagonal tiles (out of a collection of many more) which could always, no matter which 7 tiles you chose, match up and fit into a larger hexagon. This was due to some complex algorithm that he had worked on, presumably, for 2 years. It's a solo game that I'd enjoyably spend hours fiddling with.

He was undoubtedly a very intelligent man, but I'd never buy a car from him. I have a suspicion that he'd sell flat tires as benefiting from 'the possibility of expansion!' and a broken headlight as 'a saucy wink on your car's face!'

He handed us a few cardboard samples to we ran.

Similar to Zoki in the whole 'game which is really a million games' genre was Trillon by Gamepeace. Very simply, a grid of moveable wooden blocks that have six differently colored sides, some dice, some tokens, and a rulebook suggesting ways to use all of these parts. An ever-changing board, with changing rules and an attractive package makes for a lot of possibilities. Sound vague enough?

Past that, Dan and I shared a few rounds of Tumblin' Dice, which has all of the pleasures of sliding dice and all of the pleasures of... sliding dice, all wrapped into one delightful package. Dice was a smooth, classy wooden board consisting of multiple levels of elevation, across which one slides your chosen die, hoping to land it in a particular section which will multiply the resulting face into a higher score than your opponent. Once you've slid your first die, your opponent can slide for their own score, or attempt to knock your dice off the board and into the scoreless void. We played a round, and it was a lot more fun than it probably sounds, and it left me with an appetite for more Tumblin'. We asked if they'd tried using geekier dice, like the fabled d20, but we were told that those dice rolled a bit too much to stay on the board.

Tri-Check, a clever variation on chess that takes place in three dimensions, was demonstrated for us. An intellectual strata akin to the idea of Star Trek's 3-D chess, and a perfect entry point into that more complex universe, which I cannot even begin to grasp even on my brainiest days. Tri-Check invites you to think in more complicated directions, in a pretty self explanatory arrangement of pieces.

I missed getting any pictures of Deflexion, which I believe made me exclaim, "Holy Jesus, that's awesome!" loudly. Imagine a game of chess played with triangular mirrors and lazers. Your pawns inch across a grid, looking to reflect a lazer beam from the origin point at the corner of the recessed board all the way across the board to illuminate your opponent's translucent pieces and obliterate them. The Egyptian looking aesthetic only lent itself to that mysterious aura of lost, wild science. We didn't have the opportunity to play, but I'll be looking to get a copy of this for myself. Expansion materials are also planned.

Somehow, in the middle of all of these games, were Hexabits, another building toy made of a durable, flexible rubber, covered with various holes and nubbins with which to attach to other pieces, to make any variety of things. The durability was demonstrated by the fact that the floor of the booth was actually made of the product itself.

As you can see, the construction of a shark is possible. Is the construction of a convincing squid as possible? Well, if things go my way, we'll have an all out ANR Battle Royale so see which construction toy can make the best squid.

Clics will be among these toys, though their inherent blocky limitations might prove to be a serious challenge. Nonetheless, they gave us a sample pack of 13 pieces with which to make a really, really chunky parakeet, with some rather entertaining and general ineptitude.

Somewhere in this row, we encountered a pair of salty pirates. I didn't know what they were trying to sell, but they were dressed like pirates, and that was more than enough to draw me in. Alas, they were pirates confined to their own small booth, as they didn't want to shell out the 2500 dollar fee that was required to walk around the con as an approved Costumed Character. When we started talking to the pirates, who we talked to because they were pirates I must reiterate, we came to a surprising revelation. It went like this :

Pirate : Hey, where are you guys from?
Me : All Nerd Review. We're a pop subculture [choose one : website / e-zine / webzine / blog / review site].
Pirate : Where are you based out of? Wait a second - no way....
Me : What?
Pirate : Putnam Valley! You know where [x] street is?
Me : Totally, sure. That's just up the road from me.
Pirate : That's where I live!

Little did I know, my tiny, rural town contained pirates. Sure, I knew that we had some kind of Revolutionary War significance, and Babe Ruth hit a few balls in our town park, and Lou Reed has a house here, and that we once were the proud manufacturers of toothpicks.... but I did not know that we had pirates. Pirates who run Treasure Hunt Adventures, a service which provides a kind of clue scavenger hunt constructed around any location that you choose. To promote this fun service, they provided booth visitors with a copy of The Great Central Park Treasure Hunt - a laminated, folded map with 15 clues on it. Using a compass and map reading skills, you find these 15 points over about 4 hours, fill in the blanks and ultimately, win a prize for your efforts once you enter the secret code on their website.

This kind of city scavenger hunt filled a deep void within me. During the autumn of the previous year, Dan and I had actually ventured to the city to attend a gathering of puzzle freaks. Clues were to be scattered throughout the city, and we were going to scramble around, find them, and win a valuable prize. As it turned out, on that fateful day, it was slightly rainy, and the geek consensus was that the drizzle was far too threatening to go out in. In addition to that, in all of the genius of the master puzzle makers, the scattered clues were not laminated, and had probably smudged a bit in the weather. We were all reduced to playing a long, boring series of board games instead, which I sat out of, and the day served as a reminder that while I AM a nerd, they're not very great to be around in large quantities. I even made a mini-documentary about the day.

Again, plans for future ANR articles begin to swirl and formulate, and perhaps I'll find a day to spend in Central Park, once those awful Gates are down, and Jean Claude shuts her senile old mouth, and maybe I'll even bring a girl along as a hot, geeky date, and we'll solve the mystery of the Treasure Hunt together. And I'll tell you all about it.

Then, there was The Touch Game. You remember, perhaps, the Mystery Box that we all were subjected to in Kindergarten under the pretense of fun, but was truly a secret measurement of how many lead pipes we'd been licking. The Mystery Box was a large cardboard box which a teacher put a mystery item into. Using only our sense of touch, we had to reach into the box without looking and identify what item was inside. In my case, the more difficult aspect of this was conquering an irrational paranoia that the teacher had filled the box with a new breed of silent bees or a bear trap, lying in wait for my tender young arm. Fortunately, the contents of the box were usually something like a feather or an orange or a chalkboard eraser and not the disembodied arm of a serial killer, back for revenge.

The premise of the game is something like the Mystery Box. Reach into a closed dome and identify what it is that you're groping. Feel around until you find what's indicated on your game card within the time limit. While this sounds simplistic, and you may scoff at how easy accomplish these goals may seem from there, but distinguishing a small rhinoceros from a small hippo by touch along is a difficult task. It's not as if they're full-sized and you can tell them apart in a dark room by their unique lovemaking styles, which is the usual scientific means for such things. Fun for the whole family.

Then came Cogno. Cogno, aside from being a huge, bodiless cyclops, is the main character in a scientific board game called The Alien Adventure. In this game, one ventures around a board, answering scientific questions. Intelligently, though, these questions are not trivia. Instead, they're conceptual, physical questions that require thought and understanding of science, rather than a knowledge of factoids. The sample question we were given :

"If you and an elephant were in outer space, and you pushed off of the elephant, who would move faster?" I'd originally typed up this sample question as 'further' instead of 'faster', and while I did take AP Physics in High School, it did more to damage my brain than enhance it. Thanks to the Cogno crew for pointing out my error!

Shoving space elephants? I was sold. We were given a paperback intended for a young adult audience, featuring the adventures of Cogno and his spacefaring crew, and we got to take our picture with the giant eyeball. I cracked open the book, 'Cogno, The Alien Legends : Synapse' on the train ride home and got through a small bit of it. I didn't expect much from it, since it centered around zany aliens, but it's written with a significant amount of intelligence and style, bringing back those old days when I'd read Star Trek novels obsessively. The book is littered with science fact and science fiction, each detail accompanied by an appendix which lets the reader know what is currently possible and what is not, and how advanced we are along the way to achieving these things.

Then, to top off the whole gaming experience with anagrams. We were approached by a booth who tried to sell us on the virtues of a pastel-colored game intended for much younger kids and with little geek appeal. When we related where we were from and our target audience, those above the 5-year old bracket and could understand why I mention nipples so often, he pointed us over to the other half of the booth. Anagrams.

Anagrams make me salivate with delight. Letters in a word... switched around to mae other words! An impossible palate of 26 beautiful players, interweaving into something completely new and sometimes, ironic. And unto these ends, Anagramania. A Trivial Pursuit type of game in which players must race through clues which involve certain combinations of words which lead the inquisitor to rearrange these letters into the answer. Dan and I breezed through the sample questions and were goaded into trying the advanced questions plastered on the large placard behind the booth.

"Indomitable!" said Dan.
"Chicanery!" I proclaimed.
"Wow... that was really good!" said the cute woman behind the table.

It was clear that we took our anagrams seriously. We didn't just theorize about our love of anagrams, like astronomers waxing poetic over stars impossibly distant... we made these anagrams our bitches, and we got a copy of the game to take home as a result. One can easily presume that given the limited amount of clues provided, the game would have a relatively small replay value among the same players. This is why expansion packs for the varying difficulty levels are being planned and released, to add a continually new challenge to wordgamers.

This is pretty much the summation of the whole game alley experience, with plenty of other bundles of fun that I'm probably leaving out in the interest of brevity and maintaining a certain level of dignity. We'd blanketed this level of the Javitz center in about 6 hours, and there was only one day left to go, and that day would be ToyBiz.