Since GenCon ended on August 3rd, board gaming fans have been eagerly awaiting the release of games that made their debut at the convention. Some of the titles have started to hit stores over the last several weeks. "Blind Jack," "Railroad Tiles," and "Lord of the Rings: The Fate of the Fellowship" are just a few that are now on shelves. Gaming Expert, William Pankratz of Game by James, joined me, as always, on WJON's show about board gaming, Table Talk, to discuss some of the latest items arriving in stores, and a few updates on some old favorites as well.

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Pankratz first told us about "Blind Jack," a blackjack meets trivia card game. He says Blind Jack is pretty fun if you are looking for a twist on trivia games:

"You want the numbers on your cards to be close to 21 without going over, but you don't get to know what those numbers are. You get a little trivia thing that says like the number of houses required to get a hotel in Monopoly, or the number of weapons in Clue, or the number of Avengers in the first Avengers movie, so you have that trivia bit and the number will be from 0 to 10."

Pankratz says the game is not too intense, along the lines of "Wits and Wagers." He says they also saw "Sprocketforge" and "Nature" come in. We had the designers of Sprocketforge, Sophisticated Cerberus, on the show to talk about Sprocketforge about a year ago. Nature is a rebranding/reimplementation of the game Evolution. Pankratz says the redesign was to make the game more streamlined and easier to jump into.