Blokus moves
The Blokus line of games are now distributed by Mattel. How does this effect you?… from what I hear, at least for the near future, nothing. Read on for the details.
Near the end of last year there was word and rumblings that Blokus would be published by Mattel. Being a Blokus fan I followed the stories. Unfortunately there was not alot of information around. There were still questions on which Blokus titles would move to Mattel from Educational Insights and when. I looked into it a little more earlier this month and contacted a couple people at Mattel and Educational Insights.
The short answer, or at least what I was told, is that as of January 2009 Mattel has licensed the distribution rights here for Blokus, Blokus Trigon, Blokus Travel, Blokus Giant size and the new Blokus 3D. Educational Insights still distributes Rumis, basically the predecessor to Blokus 3D. I was told that things would not change and the games would stay the same. The only thing changing would be the distributor. Looking at Mattel’s website I still don’t see the Blokus line there, though at Educational Insight’s website the Blokus line has left. Understandably, at online outlets like Amazon has Mattel and Educational Insights listed in the Blokus pages. It’ll take a little bit for places to change everything over.
The Blokus line of games are top sellers in retail outlets as well as online so this is a big thing for Blokus and Mattel. Educational Insights has many other games if you liked Blokus and had been helpful with providing copies of games for game nights last year and those I spoke with were all nice and into games. I remember Heidi, over at Educational Insights, recommended also trying Pixel… so maybe I’ll do that.
And you thought it was over?!
“Toy maker Mattel Inc. said Friday (January 16th) it bought Sekkoia SAS, which makes board game Blokus, for undisclosed financial terms.” -Herald Tribune
So… looks like Mattel wanted more than the rights to distribute the Blokus line of games. We shall see if this changes the Blokus line at all. Until then, crack open a copy of Blokus (whichever distributor name is on the box) and have fun.
Thanks to Board Game News for pointing me too the January 16th news.
I am a common visiter to the online game. the url is http://www.blokus.com/online-game/
the whole community, myself included, is very dissatisfied with the way Mattel is handling the site. While, there is a mostly positive reaction to the abolition of guest’s chat (it doesn’t take much to register), they received total disapproval when they robbed users under 18 of chat…..several expert players are children and expert players need to talk to other expert players to improve. This is just the strongest point of the community’s argument against this action….there is a barrage however. Another extremely unpopular ‘improvement’ is the censorship of words in seventeen languages–regardless of which language you speak or what is before or after this word. for example, fantastic would appear as ‘***tastic”. Contest, concert, conference, etc. would appear as ***test, ***cert, ***ference. An excellent French player, by the screenname of ‘kuk’, was banned from the site because apparently kuk is a dirty word in Swedish (I can name about 2 Swedish players on the site). Additionally, Mattel does a very poor job dealing with the site’s REAL problems: disconnections, bugs, and the like. Their forum posts inform players of when they send them a message or promote an iPhone app (on multiple posts), rather than problems such as inability to completely read things on the site due to cut-offs, or valid suggestions to the game’s improvement (like magnetic boards and pieces)