July Board and Card Game Patents

1. The Word by Word board game's "ornamental design".

A patent for an ornamental design? I thought that's what copyrights were for. Yet here is another patent for the Swoggle game's "ornamental design", although I think this is referring to a new board game version of Swoggle.

And yet another claims the ornamental design of some unnamed game that I can't make out in Firefox.

And another.

2. A betting game using two d6, one numbered 1 to 6, and the other numbered 10 to 60.

3. An electronic Mexican Train dominoes board game, where the dominoes represent train pieces.

4. From what I can understand, this patent claims any matrix style game where captures are made by placing two of your pieces at either ends of a line of opponent's pieces. But, the game also must include some form of wagering, and certain optional extra turns, replacement moves, and delaying moves. It's a pretty convoluted patent.

It's main intention appears to be a casino game, but it looks pretty broad.

5. A hexagon based war game, where individual pieces combine to make larger pieces. The large piece must be able to do something that the smaller pieces cannot do individually.

6. A computer game feature that allows you to trade advantages. It lists a gazillion references, so I imagine that there must be something unique and specific about it that prompted the patent (and it was probably obvious).

7. A casino game that combines surveys with chance games.

8. An "educational" game, where one player describes how to handle some real-world event, and the other players assign him a score.

9. A game system that lets you save the game state into a portable device so you can continue playing the game on another system. In particular, it refers to "raising" type games (sims, I think this means).

10. A card shuffler that deals the cards.

Yehuda