Financial services firm The Motley Fool released an evaluation of the many skill games launched at this year’s Global Gaming Expo by Jeff Hwang, best-selling author of gaming books and president of High Variance Games LLC.
In a report on the Motley Fool website, Hwang rated the offerings from the various manufacturers at G2E in games that require a degree of skill, which are meant to appeal to younger players.
Hwang, author of The Millennial Problem: Why We (Don’t) Gamble, gave his “Best in Show” in the skill-game category to Grab Poker from Gambit Gaming. Grab Poker is a multi-payer electronic table game, played on an interactive table. Each player starts with two cards, and cards begin to appear on the table one by one. The goal is to make the best five-card poker hand using the cards that appear. But to use each card, a player has to “grab” it on the touch-screen before someone else does.
“Grab Poker is simple,” Hwang wrote, “and the kind of game you can grab a beer and sit down and play. It’s loads of fun, and versatile enough to stick just about anywhere, from the bar to the casino floor. You can play with your friends, or make new ones.”
In the “No-Brainers” category, Hwang picked Texas Tea Pinball by IGT and Space Invaders by Scientific Games. “These games are low-risk, no-brainers for the operator because the player can simply opt out of the skill-based challenges and take free spins instead,” Hwang wrote. “This allows the games to appeal to players interested in the skill-based bonus games without excluding traditional video slot players.”
Under the “Radical Plays” category, Hwang listed NanoTech Gaming’s Vegas Pinball 2047. This game allows players to pick the volatility of the main wheel, but the better the player is at pinball, the larger and more lucrative the wheel is.
Hwang placed everything else in the skill game area at G2E in one category: “Needs Work.”
