But we chose our favorites from the outliers, and they are pretty great. I love the nods to the character himself and the game he comes from. You Hidden Agenda players are some clever folks, and I enjoyed reading through your captions. So here are the top four, for your consideration.

So, you may have heard rumors about a Bejeweled board game. You may have even seen it on store shelves. And you may have asked yourself, while staring at the box, “Wait, what? Why would I want a board game version of a game I have on oh so many of my digital devices?”

Today we are here to answer that question. Or rather, to let you watch the answer. Because what we have here, in an exclusive world premiere, is video footage of a few of us at PopCap actually playing the board game. Watch in amazement as real-life PopCap employees play this game in front of your very eyes, thanks to the magic of “video cameras”  and “the Internet!” No trick photography! All stunts performed by the actors themselves! No animals harmed too badly!

So, yes, the Bejeweled board game, brought to you by our good friends at Hasbro, is a fun, “offline” version of the game, and once you watch this video, you’ll see why! So watch already! Go on! Hit play! If you’re on this blog we already know you have some time to kill!

It’s a new year and we have some great PopCap news to start off 2013. From having some of the best games to put on your newly gifted smartphone or tablet, to being ranked among the top 50 iOS games of the year, we’re starting the year off right!

• The Salt Lake City Tribune, Idaho Statesman and Daily Record have all listed Plants vs. Zombies as a must-have for the new tablets in your life. So, what are you waiting for?

• Slide to Play has created their top 50 iOS games for 2012 . . .  Zuma’s Revenge HD has made the list at number 21!

• Even though the December holidays have passed, there are plenty more opportunities throughout the year to be bombarded by family members. MacLife created a list of apps to help you survive. Plants vs. Zombies made the list as the only game to keep you sane!

• Last week, iTunes came out with a “cheat sheet” on how to become a hardcore gamer. Their “Gaming 101” list puts Bejeweled Blitz at #2 on the list of games you need to play! See more on Kotaku.

While this looks like the expert craftsmanship of contestants on Halloween Wars, we promise you'll be able to pull it off!

As a Halloween gift to our players, PopCap artists designed some nifty templates to make carving your favorite characters a much less daunting task!  Yesterday afternoon, our fearless Community team gathered to test out the templates before sharing them with the world.

Note: we don't actually recommend carving your pumpkins this early in the month. By Halloween, they'll look scary in a bad way!

All pumpkin carving starts with the messy fun of cleaning out the seeds and stringy stuff. Once you’ve got it hollowed out, choose your template and tape it on securely. Then you’ll want a simple pushpin to punch through the paper along the outlines, marking the pumpkin.

This is a labor of love. Love for Zombies, art, and you, fellow Zombie-lovers.

See the tiny little pinpricks along the outline of the Starrgh-fish? That's how you transfer the image on the page to the surface of the pumpkin before carving.

Look closely, and you can see the neat little lines showing him just where to carve!

So where can you go to get all these templates yourself?  Check out the Facebook fan pages for Plants vs. Zombies, Zuma Blitz, Solitaire Blitz, Bejeweled Blitz, and
Lucky Gem Casino over the days to come for posts sharing each game’s specific images, or download them directly from the links at the bottom of this post.

And finally, I’d like to leave you with some pumpkin-carving tips courtesy of our beloved Steve Notley:

To download each template, click the link for that character under the image:

Peashooter from Plants vs. Zombies

Sunflower from Plants vs. Zombies

Zombie from Plants vs. Zombies

Zuma Blitz Tiki

Zuma Blitz Frog

Hercules from Solitaire Blitz

Starrgh-fish from Solitaire Blitz

PopCap logo

Blue Gem from Bejeweled

Lucky Gem Casino Crown

If you’ve been following our Blog Ride (which I’m sure at least one or two of you have), you know that folks here love being a part of PopCap. Well, today I’m not going to tell you all the reasons we love this place. I’ll just show you. (Drum roll, please.)

So, without further ado, here’s the first-ever PopCap recruitment video from our awesome HR team.

Kick off your shoes, turn up the volume and enjoy. And if your boss walks by, invite him or her to join you. Who knows, maybe you’ll even share a laugh or two.

Have a fun weekend, everyone!

After reading about PopCap’s Wonder Woman-obsessed Ellen Marrett last month, one blog reader was inspired to take matters into his own hands. He decided to create a motion-sensitive box that plays the Wonder Woman theme song when Ellen starts her day.

“When I wrote up the documentation, I called it the Wonder Woman Theme Player, but I just call it my second box,” explained Michael Black, a Web Developer with PopCap’s Content Services team.

Apparently Michael has a penchant for creating one-of-a-kind boxes in his spare time. “My first box was a useless machine that had the sole purpose of turning itself off.”

Michael spent two weeks (after work, of course!) building his second box. First he researched how to use an Arduino to detect motion and play music. Then he ordered all the parts, soldered them together and spent a day or two writing code. When all the internal components were in place, he was ready to assemble his creation.

“I went to Metrix Create:Space and with the help of their staff used their laser cutter to make the box and etch a logo into the side.”

Wonder Woman Theme Box with etched logo

Then Michael enlisted the help of James Bernert, PopCap’s Facilities Coordinator, to sneak into Ellen’s office and set up the sting.

“I went into her office early in the morning and set up the box on her desk. I spent about 30 minutes walking back and forth in front of her glass door, testing the motion sensor’s sensitivity to make sure it didn’t go off when someone walked by.

“I had James spy on her to make sure it worked. The plan was that if the box failed, he’d call her out of her office before she found it, and reset it for me,” he said.

Hoping to keep his identity a secret, Michael created an email account under an alias so Ellen could get help if she had questions about her awesome box.

Documentation for Ellen's Wonder Woman Theme Player

But his anonymity was short-lived.

“I’m not sure exactly how she found out it was me, but I got an email from her minutes after she arrived at work,” he said.

Perhaps Michael forgot Wonder Woman’s ultimate superpower.

“No one can resist the golden lasso. It binds all who are encircled and compels them to tell… the truth!”

Now I know you wanna hear the Wonder Woman theme!

Based on a lot of the questions we get in Customer Support, I’ve begun to think we might be slacking off on showing our friends around our nifty home—by which I mean to say, homepage.

With that purpose, I’m starting a new column called “Old News,” to take our fair BlogRiders on a tour and show you what’s behind doors you may not have noticed.  Today’s topic is:

PopCap Passport, the free discount and goodies program!

Frequently asked question #1:

How can I get a list of all the games I’ve ordered in the past?

Check out the orange tab that reads “My Orders.”  When you sign into your Passport account, that tab will take you to a full list of all the orders you’ve placed under your current email address.  If you’ve used a number of different email addresses in the past, no problem!  Just contact Customer Support and ask us to move all your past orders over to your new email address.

Frequently asked question #2:

Do you have a discount program I can sign up for?

Why yes we do!  When you create your free Passport account, you automatically start off with a 10% discount.  When you make at least 2 purchases per calendar year, you maintain a 20% discount on everything!

Air Bjorn fun fact: unicorns don't use jet fuel but pure magic to fly their planes. But they still feel a tiny bit self-conscious when they see a pegasus glide by.

Frequently asked questions #3 & 4:

Where can I get a copy of the Bejeweled 3 Strategy Guide?

Hey, have you ever thought about making Plants vs. Zombies party invitations?

Not only have we thought about it, we thunk it straight into existence!

The free gifts available on the My Offers tab may change at any time, but currently, they include two of our most commonly requested downloads!

This concludes our brief tour of the Passport wing on PopCap.com.  Please keep your hands and feet inside the BlogRide until it comes to a full and complete stop, then head on up to the top-right corner of the main page and click on Join Passport to check it out!

Exclusive first screenshot: Madden Zombie Football 2012: The Tackling Dead

We’ve actually been working on this blog for a ridiculously long time. Why it’s taken so long to actually appear here is a mystery for the ages, though I partially blame both Society and the excellent selection of streaming movies on Netflix, which can prove to be quite a distraction if you spend a lot of your time, as I do, “working” at home.

Anyway, we’re here now, and you’re stuck with us. I have personally assembled a highly trained staff of excellent writers, only some of whom arrived in this country under false pretenses and now reside in PopCap’s unmarked, locked basement, to provide you with daily (yes, daily!) content, guaranteed to entertain and amaze you. Or at least make you go “huh.”

Now, I know what some of you may be thinking. “A blog? Welcome to 2003, Jeff!” To you I say: welcome to your mom. We here at PopCap don’t believe you have to be all fancy and trendy to get your point across. Just be glad we didn’t go with our original idea, which was to send you all daily mimeographs.

So, what can you expect from this daily PopCap blog? Good question. A few laughs. Some chortles. Maybe the occasional guffaw. We’re going to go behind the scenes with our games, let you see how the process works, talk to our amazing creative teams, post pictures of microwaved burritos, spill secrets guaranteed to score me angry internal emails, and much more. We’re going to feature posts by folks all around not just our home base here in Seattle, but also our international offices in Shanghai and Dublin.  We’re going to post artwork, videos, and really bad poetry. We’re going to talk about the casual gaming scene, the Seattle gaming scene, and any other scene we can think of, up to and including scenes involving leather ball gags. We’re going to have a zombie advice column (address your questions to zombiEAdvice@popcap.com). We’re going to run blatantly pandering contests and giveaways in a shameful and desperate attempt to increase page views. We may even post funny photos of cats.

The point is: we’re going to post a lot. We have tons of fun here at PopCap, as we hope you’ve noticed from our fine collection of games now available for purchase, and we want to extend that outward to you here, all friendly like, on ye olde intertubes, on a daily basis.

So go ahead and bookmark this page, and keep coming back to let us help you waste a few minutes of time each and every day. I’d say we’d promise you a rose garden, but then, that rose garden would probably have a few zombies in it, and they’d eat your brains, and then you’d sue us, and then no one would be happy, especially not those guys who just spent all that money on us. So let’s not make promises here. Let’s just agree to keep meeting back here with extreme regularity.  All of us here at PopCap, from our offices all over the world, are glad you are here. See you tomorrow!

–Jeff