February 18, 2017: New York Toy Fair

The 2017 New York Toy Fair starts today. Our team flew to NYC Thursday to prepare for the event, and are ready to go. As always, our official home at this trade show is the PSI booth, where we'll spend many hours in discussions with retailers, distributors, marketers, and many others involved in the creation and sales of games. This show is always a spectacular bit of fun, and this year should be as exciting as ever as we show off some of our upcoming titles. Our new Munchkin Shakespeare game (now on Kickstarter!) is certain to grab attention during our sales meetings, but it is our completely new games – like Ghosts Love Candy – that will get most of our time outside of the closed rooms.

New York Toy Fair is also a fabulous opportunity to give some older games a chance to shine. You can be certain that last year's new games – Batman: The Animated Series Dice Game, Simon's Cat Card Game, I Hate Zombies, and Ogre: Objective 218, to name just a few – will be front and center in our display case in the show lobby, as well as at the PSI booth. Most of last year's new releases missed their chance to get in front of a larger audience at the 2016 show, which means the games will be seen as "new" in some of our meetings. A second chance at all the "What's New" lists? Awesome!

On a personal note, New York Toy Fair continues to be one of my favorite shows for one reason: New York City! This year, I'm staying at the Citizen M, and I am blocking out time for a visit to Toy Tokyo, since it has now been over a year since I last visited the store. Even just walking the NYC sidewalks is a joy, so any opportunity I can get to visit the city is one I'll snatch eagerly.

-- Phil Reed