Don Charlton and Ebony Miles launched U.S. publisher Wild Guess Games in 2024 with the eponymous card game Wild Guess!
Wild Guess! is a shedding game of sorts in that each player has a deck of cards, and you want to get ride of your deck first. Each turn, you which word is on top of your discard pile — suit or color — then you call out a specific card suit or color as appropriate, then you flip your top card. If your guess was correct, you pass cards from your discard pile equal to the number showing on the just flipped card to your left-hand opponent. If they have a "Block!" card matching that suit, those cards are removed from the game; otherwise, they add them to their discard pile.
If you get through your deck, flip your discard pile over to form your new deck — and in theory you know all the cards in order, which means you're no longer guessing, but instead just shoveling cards out of the game. In theory...
A future Wild Guess Games release is Summer, which is a Spades-style trick-taking game played with two teams of two. Cards come in four seasonal suits, and summer is always the trump suit. At the start of a trick, the lead plays a card and says "High" or "Low"; everyone must follow suit, if possible, then the highest/lowest card of the led suit wins...unless trump is thrown off, in which case the highest/lowest trump wins.
Crazy 8 Ball is a two-player game in which you're trying to sink the 8 ball first, which should not be a surprise to anyone who has played billiards.
Each player starts with seven colored balls — solids or stripes — with the 8 ball placed to the side. You have four cards in hand, with cards being a double-colored pocket, a colored cue stick, a colored cue ball, and blocks. On a turn, you take an action, such as playing a pocket card onto the table, playing a block card, or discarding a card and drawing a replacement, either from the deck or the top of the discard pile.
Alternatively, you can sink a ball by playing the correctly colored cue stick and cue ball while a pocket of this color is available and you still have that colored ball. After you sink all seven balls, you can use any colored set to sink the 8 ball.
Throw Hands is a straightforward concept for 2-8 players: Everyone has their own deck and starts with a few cards in hand, and in real-time you start playing cards following the familiar "rock-paper-scissors" model. If scissors is on top of the discard pile, throw rock and say "Rock!" to call dibs and cut off others. Refill your hand as needed, and try to play out all of your cards first. (This game is similar to ButaBabel, which I reviewed in 2016, but without the aspect of playing on other players' discard piles in order to end up with the secondmost cards in your pile.)
Foolette is a 2-6 player betting party game in which you try to end the game with the most money through deceptive and smart bidding.
Each player receives a stack of chips and a card showing one of the 36 numbers. Players take turns placing chips on the board, either directly on a number or on borders and edges that touch two or four numbers. Cards are being revealed bit by bit, and if you're directly on a revealed number, you can shift those chips to other locations.
Your goal is to win money by sussing out others' numbers and keeping yours hidden enough that opponents can't profit by placing stakes on your location.
I spotted several booths like this around Toy Fair, and while I assume they're meant to convey a playful spirit, like, hey, let's chill for a moment from all the business deals and toss the ol' beanbags around, they mostly came across as a way to fill the booth of an exhibitor that cancelled at the last minute, with the space now being only 95% dead instead of 100%.
