Have you been Farkel'ed? Well you might be wondering why we haven't posted to the Blog in 2 and a half months, we haven't because we have been very busy developing our inventory to include more "non-China" toys, testing toys and games (and not just playing Farkel), and we have also been attending to the store and other life/family events.

ASTRA Marketplace was a recent event which we attended and came away feeling that the Specialty Toy industry might be one route to world peace because everyone attending was united and striving to add value to play time and assure the value of the toys we bring to the marketplace are the best quality and value for our customers.

While attending ASTRA Marketplace we reacquainted ourselves with the dice game Farkel. While being a simple game with folk origins, it only uses six dice and a few simple rules. The principle of the game is to use each roll of the dice to gain points. With each consecutive role of the dice, as one's, five's, multiples of threes, pairs, and straights are removed from play, points are earned until the play is passed to the next player, or you "Farkel" with a bad roll (no countable points) and lose any points earned during that turn at play. The player with the most points at the end of the game (when the one(s) losing give up) wins. Simple, easy to carry and store in your pants pocket, this very challenging game for players ages 7 to 100+, and is a great value and good for helping keep your mind fresh and working healthy.

SAFETOYS.com

Safetoys.com keeps coming up as a source of Toy Industry News here in the goHeidi Blog Toy News feed providing great information on toys, toy recalls, and safe toy legislation.

SAFETOYS.com is a source for information on toy safety, the latest recalls, tips for parents, and ways to keep kids safe. In the About Us page on the Safetoys.com website, Safetoys.com states their "goal is to give you the tools you need to make educated decisions when shopping for your children or those of your friends and family. There is more to toy safety than knowing which products have been recalled. Many toys that are considered “safe” may still hold serious risks for children and many products designed to protect children may not work unless used properly. Being able to identify toy safety hazards and use safety equipment is just as important as buying a safe toy."

We here at goHeidi.com like what we have found on the Safetoys.com website and we encourage you to visit the site and add it to your bookmarks to make it easier for you to return often for updates and news.

Videos of new toys......TDmonthly ToyTv

Toy Directory Monthly is another good resource to see what's hot, and of course, what's not in the toy industry. A trade e-zine for the toy, hobby, game & gift industry, TDmonthly covers all bases from the top ten toys, pending legislation, toy reviews, and helpful toy industry links.

My new favorite page on the TDmonthly website is ToyTV. TDmonthly Magazine's ToyTV crew has shot more than 1,000 videos of amazing toys and games, and these are available for viewing on the ToyTV page.

I encourage everyone to visit TDmonthly's ToyTV page and check for videos of the newest toys from the industry. Enjoy the 150+ videos of new toys!

Bananagrams are appealing!

How do you make an anagram game appealing to a bunch of people? Well, package it in a banana skin and call it Bananagrams!

Bananagrams is a really great game. We gave a Bananagrams game to our best friends as a "hostess gift" last night for our appreciation of them inviting us to dinner. After dinner we cleared the table and unpeeled the game. We had a blast. We played several rounds trying to make the letter tiles into different words while we learned the game rules and when to peel, dump, and call bananas.

As the four of us played the game it was really fun to see how each of us put together the letters to make words we that came to our minds. After playing four rounds, Michael figured it was best to start with one long word and branch words off of that. Dianne (the PhD) was making all sorts of scientific words, but got hung up the first round because she picked too many vowels. Heidi got the hang of it quickly and won a round. I won the Banana Smoothie round ("Banana Smoothie" is just one variation on how to play the game).

It is easy to see why Bananagrams has won so many prestigious awards. The game challenges the mind, stimulates creativity, promotes some healthy competition, and has several different ways of being played. I also have to mention, the game is low tech – no batteries required, no game board to use, no scores to keep, it stores in a little pouch, and is very portable. In addition to being a good staple in your household game collection, Bananagrams will make a great travel game.

Bananagrams is a goHeidi favorite.

goHeidi's Global Reach

As of 2006, goHeidi shipped toys to welcoming customers on every continent on Planet Earth - Wow! Even Antarctica, very cool (literally)!

Since this blog was established earlier this month we have had visitors from the Philippines, China, Germany, and the Netherlands, as well as domestic visitors for many of the 50 states. Using a variety of international shippers, we can quickly and reasonably deliver toys to all corners of the planet. We look forward to seeing the list of our customer's countries grow.

Come back often and check us out. We will soon be updating our blog content with reviews of the many new toys we recently discovered at Toy Fair 2008 and added to our store inventory.

Thanks for visiting, we will see you on your next visit. Heidi and Jim

We love Uglydoll!

We love Uglydoll.

Uglydoll relaunched their website this week during Toy Fair 2008. In addition to really cool new graphics, links to the ugly blog, user forums, ugly games, and much more are now on their website. You have to check it out, so go to www.uglydolls.com when you get a chance.

Also a must see; CNNMoney.com has a video piece on Uglydolls taken at Toy Fair 2008 with Alita Friedman, Director of Operations at Pretty Ugly LLC. Check out the video here: Video Clip.

goHeidi has shipped Uglydolls to every continent on Planet Earth, yes we even shipped Uglydolls to Antarctica (McMurdo Station). Uglydolls surely are global. To check out our selection of Uglydolls, click here.

My feet hurt!!!!! But, I am still smiling

Why my feet hurt…

There are 630,000 thousand reasons why my feet hurt, and it is the square footage of the exhibition space occupied by this year’s Toy Industry Association's Toy Fair at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City.

We managed to cover most of Toy Fair in two days. If we had a third day, I am sure we would have seen everything and talked to everyone. As it was, we prepared ourselves in advance with a list of manufacturers and reps, and we mapped out exactly where we wanted to go. While we were very focused with our plan, we were able to see a lot more than what was on our list, and we met a lot of really nice and very helpful people.

All-in-all we had a great experience, the only major disappointment was the arrogant attitude we encountered at the Ganz Webkinz booth. Our visit to their booth really was a not nice experience.

On a high note, we are adding to our product line many quality items, and several being Made in USA. We are adding Made in USA Scientific Explorer Kits, Harrisville Designs weaving kits, Find It Games, and Do A Dot Art books and kits. Madame Alexander is another US Company we will be carrying. European additions include Steiff plush dolls, and Pustefix Bubble products. Canadian additions include Blue Orange games. There are a bunch more toys, games, and manufacturers we have added to our offerings, so please visit our store or check us out at http://www.goheidi.com/ to see what we have added.

See you soon – Heidi and Jim