Sub-prime Timing: Real Estate Mogul @ Toy Fair, a $99 board game

Our pal Nate Heasley is popping around at Toy Fair finding the stuff we missed, when instead he should be manning his booth to promote his award-winning board game, Wits And Wagers.

In the years I've been an exhibitor at Toy Fair, I've seen a lot of games come and go. Some are horrible games, some are great games that had either bad marketing, packaging, management or just plain bad timing. I can't say whether Joel Harden's Real Estate Mogul game is good or bad, but I'm pretty sure it's at least suffers from bad timing. Games like this take years to develop, going through many rounds of gameplay development, packaging design, sourcing and developing retail channels. So this game was probably started years ago when the real estate market was on the upswing, ordinary homemakers were flipping houses instead of flapjacks, and everyone actually thought it was cool to be a real estate mogul. And here it is debuting at Toy Fair when you really can't think of a less appealing business to be in. That's too bad, because now is actually probably a great time for future moguls to learn what they need to take advantage of the low housing prices. Of course, the game's $99 (!) price tag may prevent mogul wannabes from being able to put a down payment on anything in the short term. – Nate