I took Mythily to the local Novatium store, curious to see her reaction to the superior cloud computing experience I had been bragging about discovering. She spent a good half hour aggressively testing one application after the other at the store. Somewhere along this test drive, she logged onto a site called freearcade.com and

Spy Sight’ from Dr Wood was one of the birthday presents we gave Divya, nearly a month ago. From the play rule synopsis behind the box, it promised fabulous tactical adventure. I eagerly looked forward to an inaugural session. Finally tired of waiting for a moment between her trysts with a current boyfriend who insists on booking an extra seat in theatres, and carries bed sheets to public spaces to avoid germs(!), I borrowed the still unopened game, and test ran it with less distracted souls.

Bamboozle from Parker Brothers is a delicious union of an instant word builder and Password. This hybrid involves two teams racing to make five words, each starting with random letters. Both teams work on an identical set of letters, and stop their timers the moment they’re done!

The weekend visit to the Design Store in Bengaluru was a disappointment. As a regular customer over the years, and homes cluttered with their beds, sofas, and benches, I’d hoped to find a desk that might inspire me to catch up with all that pending paperwork. In a sign of more aggressive times where all retail channels must be explored, I

Art no. 3319 (Made in China) is Bingo which retails at a delightfully affordable `180. In a Kinder chocolate egg toy moment, I pulled out a plastic tray with three very pink moulded plastic sections that fit together to form a mini rolling machine. After some caustic (and totally unwarranted) snide comments about the colour scheme, and the little

Their delayed honeymoon took them to exotic Turkey, and when I finally met up with Karan and Suni many months later, it was over a session of Okey. The four solid wood double layered racks were set up. The 106 ceramic-like tiles were spread out face down between the racks. And after a very professionally succinct rendition of play rules by Karan, I played my first ever round of Okey!

Every now and then, comes along someone supremely indifferent to word and strategy games, who insists that if it’s not physical, it isn’t of any interest at all. ‘Sticky Mitts’ from Hamleys is a slicker version of a game we’ve seen at Indian stores for years. It retails at Rs.399. It’s well finished. The loud colour scheme slowly grows on you. And to ensure the product quality-price balance, it’s made in China.

My topic was ‘Ballroom Dances’ and it’s embarrassing that the ridiculously long ‘Viennese Waltz’ proved to be so elusive on the modest sized 12x14 letter grid. Wordsearch on www.eastoftheweb.com is elegantly black, white and grey. It would have been so easy to go for colour, clever graphics, and eye popping hot spots. Instead, the designers opted for understated elegance, and incredibly sophisticated click-and-drag handling and selected word highlights.

Curious about Cardket that I wrote about last week, I logged on to their site, hoping to see a simple online rendition, or perhaps other interesting tiles. It was a terrible disappointment. I got to see some dated pictures of an event conducted at a local cake fair, some tacky product pictures, and a bunch of inactive links.

Www.eastoftheweb.com led me to a curious collection of free online word games. There was a Tetris look-alike called ‘Popword’, and the familiar ‘Wordsearch’, with words hidden in a grid of letters. I decided to try out ‘Storyman’, which had a very Hangman feel about it. A click on the smart orange dashboard and I was confronted with