We're back from the European trip and the 2008 International Puzzle Party held this year in Prague, the Czech Republic. We'll have more pictures and story on the party soon. Here's a page about the Prague Czecherboard puzzle Kate had designed for the occasion. It has an open challenge and a prize for solvers.

This year's 25-year retrospective covers 1983, a sparse year for new products but a great year for Kadon's consolidation and learning curve. See 1983: The lesson of quality for historical notes and the making of Memory Bank. It's also the year we discovered lasercut acrylic, which gave Roundominoes a whole new life and opened the door for our entire product line. More...

We have a new booth! Some of you may have seen it on its maiden voyage in the Florida shows this winter. Thanks to all who helped to make it. Why the fuss? It's the first change in 18 years!

Kaliko is temporarily out of stock. Please check back from time to time, as we are in the process of making more. We regret the inconvenience.

We're happy to announce a couple of exciting new products:

Doris was unveiled at the 8th Gathering for Gardner in Atlanta the end of March, with great presentations by its inventor, Zdravko Zivkovic, and our co-explorer, Toby Gottfried, whose computer program and ingenuity tracked down the most unusual solutions and their sometimes unbelievable numbers of solutions. The theme of the Gathering was the number 8, and Doris's octagonal tiles were right on that wavelength. Zdravko, Toby and Kate had spent a couple of dizzying months emailing ideas, questions and discoveries back and forth from Serbia to Florida to California. It all peaked when the guys got on their planes for Atlanta and Kate drove up from Miami. The private world premiere edition of 10 sets with their lavish full-color books sold out in a day, and we now offer a public first edition of 10 special sets with the full-color books on DVD. More....

Pearl Fisher is the brainchild of Ferenc Palinkas, a profusely creative Hungarian IT engineer. Thanks to email, brainstorming around the planet between Budapest and Miami could proceed 24/7. We are very proud to present this uniquely challenging strategy game. Ferenc and his associates have also worked up an online version that lets you take on the computer at various levels of difficulty. Our handcrafted wood set invites play by two humans. This is a game you'll want to play many, many times. Move pearls and shells on the board, uncover the right pearls to score (if you can remember where they are!). More....

A further find from G4G8 was the permission we received from Daniel Erdely to make and offer his wondrous Tulips tiling through our website. We had made up some special sets for Daniel to use in an exhibition, and they were so beautiful that they simply belonged in our playable art and Tactile Graphics section. See for yourself why it took our breath away. This is not an easy puzzle. If you acquire it, be prepared for a fine campaign to reassemble the 210 tiles. We offer custom color choices. More...

It could only be called Dazzle. For almost ten years, this dazzling design was in the incubator, while inventor Charles Butler cooked up more hot ideas for it, and his co-inventor, Kent Forrester, pursued the patent and trademark registrations. Kate, too, did intermittent research and fretted over the fact that it seemed rather hard to solve. Now, at last, we are excited to release this unique and beautiful set. A rare treat—because it has 30 tiles, Dazzle can accommodate even 5, 6 and 7 players. Its large, mosaic-like dodecagons are hand-inlaid with three frosted colors, their glistening sheen a feast for the eyes. And those game strategies will really spark your imagination. More...

Karl Wilk of Ontario, Canada, has done it again. For 2007 he won the Gamepuzzles Annual Pentomino Excellence award with his amazing polyomino construction, The Pentomino Clock. See now his latest awesome symmetrical solution, Cyclops, that makes concentric rings of polyominoes from size 1 to 9. It took Karl six weeks and one and a third pencils to solve just the "9" ring, and over 10 weeks for the whole pattern... by hand! Note how he has even the holes symmetrically arranged. We dedicate this achievement to the memory of Arthur C. Clarke, who spread polyomino passion to the world since 1976.

Manoover and Gemstones among 100 best games! Our two recent games have been selected by Games Magazine for the list of the top games for 2008. These unusual and beautiful boards are in the classic Kadon tradition of aesthetics plus originality, and their friendly competitive strategies are unusually challenging. You'll find yourself thinking in whole new ways. You'll be very pleased to share these with family and friends.

A fourth design has joined our guest showcase featuring innovative polyform sets by French puzzle explorer, Jacques Ferroul. We make all four of these puzzles by special order for his visitors as well as for our own. Jacques' website provides all the puzzle challenges for these sets, free to download, so we supply only brief leaflets with them.

• His Poly-Spidrons^TM is an intricate set of 54 shapes made of combinations of triangles and spirals, based on the Spidron^TM concept of Daniel Erdely, and Jacques' webpage for these shows a wealth of beautiful and difficult, though solvable, designs.
  
  
• Jacques' second design, Tetrapentos, has the tetriamonds and pentiamonds (brothers to our own Mini-Iamond Ring) filling a hexagon with 5 spare triangles. Jacques has worked out a large collection of delightful and stylish designs for these and presents them on his website. We offer Tetrapentos in a tray and as a pocket edition.
  
  
• Jacques' other neat little puzzle design, Stelo (Esperanto for "star"), forms a star and dozens of other beautiful designs with 12 of the simpler pieces from Poly-Spidrons. Interestingly, doubled-size models of the Stelo figures can be solved with the full Poly-Spidrons set. Jacques has dedicated Stelo as a memorial for his grand-niece Maïlou.
  
  
• Jacques' newest creation is a polyform puzzle based on golden triangles—La Ora Stelo (Esperanto for "the golden star") contains 25 tiles and has boundless possibilities for forming amazing designs. Its pentagonal tray provides 8 nested rings for exploring ascending sizes of shapes showing the inflation of the golden ratio. Jacques has dedicated La Ora Stelo as a memorial for his friend Jean-Pierre Puisais-Hée. More...

• www.tactilegraphics.us is an entrance to Tactile Graphics and Tilings and Designs.
• www.playable-art.com is an entrance to Tilings and Designs, Abstract Strategy Games and Edgematching.
• www.polyformpuzzles.com is an entrance to the Essential Polyforms section and Polyominoes and Polycubes.
• www.thelifeofgames.com leads to our journal, The Life of Games.