Soon, playing board games will be the only thing you can afford

Those who have lost money in the stock market may be newly risk-averse, but Mattel and Hasbro are betting that those same people will be willing to roll the dice on … rolling the dice. Yes, in the latest sign that we are heading back to the 1930s, sales of board games rose 6 percent last year, according to the Toy Industry Association. That has prompted the industry's Big Two to introduce a raft of new low-tech games at next week's Toy Fair and to retool older games like Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit and Candy Land. Hasbro even plans to promote a "family game night" to spur inter-generational fun. Neil Friedman, president of Mattel brands, tells Bloomberg: "When you get into this type of economy, where the consumer does not have the kind of spendable income that they had previously, they tend to do more things as a family. That tends to be games."

—Posted by Todd Wasserman