Blog Posts by Mike Smith

A couple of weeks ago it was all about football; now it's hockey's turn in the video game spotlight.

NHL 12 (EA Sports)Strapping on its pads this week is the latest in EA Sports' storied NHL franchise, and it's boasting the usual bevy of new features: goalies can fight other team members, a slate of legendary NHL players are included and playable in every mode, and the create-a-player mode now supports female faces.

As fans will already know, it's an evolutionary rather than revolutionary game -- and with a range of approving reactions from critics, NHL 12 is clearly keeping its stick on the ice.

Practiced for hundreds of years in Japan, the celebrated art of origami is a real crowd-pleaser. What could be more impressive than being able to turn a flat, featureless sheet of paper into a lifelike, well-proportioned bird, frog or butterfly?

OK, so there are in fact a few things more impressive than origami, but it still ain't a bad way to amuse the kids while waiting at the doctor, show off at the bar, or put a smile on the face of an awkward date. All you need are the right materials.

Which, fortunately, are probably close at hand. Most origami designs require a square piece of paper, and you'll often see origami hobbyists using purpose-made square sheets that are colored on one side and white on the other. While you can find this in any old craft store, plain old copier paper works nearly as well, although you'll need to trim it into a square shape. Be it a placemat, an old letter, a flyer, or even a dollar bill, you're never too far from something suitable.

There's no doubt about it -- some board games are just plain boring.

Kolejka (Karol Madaj)Monopoly, perhaps. Connect 4, if you have an extraordinarily short attention span. But a board game where all you do is line up to buy things? Sounds like a instant snooze-fest.

Don't be too quick to judge, however. Designed at the Institute for National Remembrance in Warsaw, Poland, "Kolejka," which means "queue" or "line," is a new board game intended to teach Polish youths about the grim realities of life under Communist rule during the 1980s.

Love playing with numbers? Then we're betting you're a fan of Sudoku.

A staple of in-flight magazines, the pen-and-paper puzzler has become one of the most popular logic games in the world. Requiring no specialized know-how to play, it's a simply designed but tremendously challenging game. Yes, it involves digits, but it requires absolutely no math (and properly done, it requires absolutely no guesswork, either.)

It's a game of pure, cold, applied logic. Follow these tips, and your Sudoku career -- not to mention your brain -- will live long and prosper.

Summertime is just about over, but there's still plenty of time to soak up some rays before things get chilly. And thanks to some snazzy goodies, there's a lot more to do than just fly kites and stare at the ocean these days. Check out these high-tech toys perfectly suited for outdoor hijinks.

Whether you're playing Scrabble or one of its many variants (Words with Friends, that means you), chances are you've run into a rough tile rack or two.

So has Laurie Cohen. One of the country's top-ranked Scrabble players, the Arizona resident started her Scrabble career playing with her mother and sister as a child, and fell in with an upstate New York Scrabble club about 25 years ago. Her "serious" Scrabble play began in 1998. Since then, she has competed in over 80 Scrabble tournaments around the country, earning at least one world record along the way.

This October she will represent the U.S. at the World Scrabble Championships in Poland -- and she filled us in on some of the tactics, techniques, and tricks she's learned over the years.

What's a fourteen-letter word for "someone who loves crossword puzzles?"

Crosswords (flickr user: lovelihood)To the uninitiated, these oh-so-addictive word puzzles can seem completely impenetrable, packed with obscure conventions, deliberately deceptive phrasing, and clues so bizarre they don't even make sense when you know the answer.

But there's no need to be having cross words with your crosswords. Follow these tips and you'll be a master cruciverbalist in no time.

You might think of them as child's play, but there's a surprising amount of history behind paper airplanes.

Thought to have been invented by the Chinese several thousand years ago, these useful toys have helped guide some of history's most famous aviators. Leonardo da Vinci built them to test his ornithopter. The Wright Brothers used them to prototype their historic Flyer. During the early part of the 20th century, designers at Lockheed and Heinkel put them to work in the development of new warplanes.