I don’t want to say that Edward is all in on this IP book, but as we were strolling through Target, he spotted a game. His pitch, “It’s an IP, Dad. We need it for the book!” So, without hesitation, we added Buffalo Games’s Tecmo Bowl to the cart. It wasn’t that hard of a sale for me though. I loved this Nintendo game back in the day. While I prefer the Tecmo Super Bowl to its predecessor, I was not about to let this chance at nostalgia pass me by.

In Tecmo Bowl, which came out this year, 2025, you and your opponent manage football teams in an effort to outsmart, outthink, and outscore them. We got home that evening, put on Sunday Night Football, sat down, selected our teams, and flipped the provided coin to start Tecmo Bowl. Let’s see how it went.

Trophy Idea

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Another fun series of games that I discovered through my research was the Hasbro "Rivals Editions." In this series, Hasbro took one of its classics and boiled it down to a two-player, mano y mano showdown. I was interested in how you could boil some of these games down to two players, for sure. So, first up, Monopoly! Grab your biggest rival and let’s battle it out over Monopoly: Rivals Edition!

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You know me. I love to give credit where credit is due. While reading the book, Who’s in the Game? by Terri Tolles Patkin, I came across an interesting variant to Operation; Operation: Brain Surgery. I immediately had to look into this. Operation debuted in 1968. It hasn’t really changed in the past 30+ years, other than the “funatomy” parts. No new gameplay was offered until 2002 with the debut of Brain Surgery. Since then, it has had a few other variants on the brand: Pet Scan, Botched Operation, & most recently Junior.

Anyway, I went on Board Game Geek and looked into this weird sounding Operation Brain Surgery, and you should, too. It is Cavity Sam’s head, just his head. You are a brain surgeon trying to find head themed funatomy parts like Train of Thought, Bright Idea, Cat’s Got Your Tongue, etc. And to find them, well, you put your hand into his head. Dig around using only feel in search of the correct new funatomy parts. I am sure this is 100% medically accurate.

So, gather your fellow medical buffs, and let’s dig into Sam’s head in Operation Brain Surgery.

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