The sponge of said cake is the basic flow of the game, the slightly bland foundation that makes everything stick together and work. Each player has five planets, and four plastic spaceships on each planet. To win, you have to get some of these ships on to your opponents’ planets. The first to achieve five “foreign colonies” wins. To help you do this, you have a hand of cards from a communal deck – some attack cards, some negotiate cards, some reinforcement cards.

On your turn, you flip a card over from the Destiny Deck to find out who you will be attacking this turn. You don’t get to choose, chance does. Point the Hyperspace Gate at the planet you want to attack, then place up to four ships on the gate. Alliances can now be temporarily forged – a good opportunity for arguments, debates, grudges and recriminations. Both the attacking and defending player may ask for allies, and anyone who accepts can place up to four of their ships to assist.

To resolve the encounter, the attacker and defender simultaneously reveal a card from their hand. If it’s two attack cards, it’s simple: the higher number, somewhere between zero and 40, plus any ships on your side, wins. Reinforcement cards can then be chucked in to snatch a victory. Negotiate cards are an automatic loss if opposed by an attack card, though the loser does get to grab cards from his opponent’s hand as compensation. If two negotiate cards are played, a deal can be struck, with cards and colonies available for swapsies. As you’re unable to refill your hand until you have no cards available to play, it’s important to try and play Negotiate and low attack cards at the right time. Allies also get their spoils: attacking allies get to share the planet with and gain a foreign colony, while defensive allies can claim extra cards or retrieve ships from the ‘void’, or ship graveyard. All losing ships go to the void, the sad cosmic toilet in the centre of the table.

If you lose your encounter, then its the next player to go. If you win, then you have the choice of a second encounter, or you can pass. At its heart, Cosmic Encounter is a pretty basic game of hand management and negotiation. Or rather, it would be, were it not for the other ingredients that make this extended metaphor cake more appetising – the jam, cream and the marzipan.

The jam and the cream are cards that make up the rest of the deck. Aside from the attack and negotiate cards, there are also one-shot artifact cards for special effects, and Cosmic Zaps to stop your opponents’ plans. There are also ‘flares’, and here are where Cosmic Encounter really gets interesting. At the start of the game, two flare cards are dealt to each player. Those flare cards correspond to an alien race, and the player chooses one of these races, before all of the flares are dealt into the deck. Each race has a special power, and these flare cards allow the holder of the card to use a mini-version of that power, or a super-version if the flare corresponds with their race.

But it’s these races that really make Cosmic Encounter special. They’re the marzipan on the cake, and I’ve deliberately chosen marzipan – the most divisive of cake toppings. Each player has a power that can make the game wildly imbalanced. For example:

• The Loser – the winner in an encounter loses and loser wins
• The Virus – instead of adding ships to card total, the Virus multiplies
• The Sorcerer – swaps encounter card with opponent before being revealed
• Tick Tock – wins after ten unsuccessful attacks and successful deals

Each of these powers isn’t just a small addition to the game – they affect fundamentally how the game will be played and how the players will interact with each other. With these  four in a game, it looks like the Virus is initially the strongest player, but the Loser and Sorcerer mess with that completely. And Tick Tock doesn’t even have to go on the offensive, he just has to make sure no one wins before he can.

These powers are what make Cosmic Encounter an incredible game. Similar to Dominion, every game is different and it’s unlikely you’ll see the same four or five powers if you play a thousand times. With an attack every turn, it’s very much an in-your-face game and there’s more than a little chaos and luck. It’s not a game you can play quietly, negotiation, whining and bullying are necessary to stand a chance of winning. There’s a good reason Cosmic Encounter is still going after thirty-five years and five different implementations. It’s great. Like marzipan.

Time for a big deal. It’s time to talk about Dominion.

Why such a big deal? Dominion isn’t just a deckbuilding game – it’s the game that created the whole deckbuilding genre. It’s won a whole shelf of awards, including the prestigious Spiel des Jahres. It’s getting a bit of hype outside of the usual places, with mentions in the likes of Wired and the usually video-game-centric Escapist. At my local gaming night, there can be a bit of debate over what games to play, and games come in and out of fashion, but there’s usually always someone up for Dominion. There are already six expansions out. It’s a big deal (though there’s more shuffling that dealing in the game itself).

Apparently, Dominion is a game about controlling land. I know this because I just looked at the rules, and it says so in the introduction. I’ve never felt like I’m claiming land when playing. The rules then go on to be a little bit more honest: “This is a game of building a deck”. That’s more like it. What you really feel like you’re doing is creating, as you play, your own deck of cards that you will use to win the game. Despite the large box, Dominion is played entirely with cards, and all that’s inside that box is 500 of them. That’s a lot of cards. Here’s how it works:

First, pick which ten sets of cards you will play with, from the twenty-five in the box. These piles of ten cards each are a central ‘pool’, plus the treasure cards and VP cards that are part of every game.

You start the game with a deck of ten cards – three ‘Estates’ and seven ‘Coppers’. The Estates are victory point cards, utterly useless to you right until the moment the game ends – at which point the VP cards are the only cards of any worth.

The Coppers are more immediately useful. Take this starting deck of cards and shuffle them up. If you’re not good at shuffling, don’t worry – this game will give you lots of practice. Deal yourself five cards. This is your starting hand.

Each turn works in the same simple way. You have one action, and one buy. At the end of your turn, you then discard your hand into your personal discard pile, and deal yourself five new cards. If you don’t have enough cards in your deck for a new hand, you take your discards pile, shuffle it up, and this becomes your deck. With your starting deck, there are no action cards, so it’s buys only. With the three copper cards, you can buy anything costing 3 or less. Let’s grab a Silver. This, along with the hand, is discarded. Play passes to the next person, and you deal five more cards.

Again, no actions, but four copper this time. That’s enough to buy a Smithy, which allows you – when it’s played – to draw three more cards. As before, your hand and the Smithy is discarded. Play passes on, and five more cards are dealt. Except your draw pile is now empty – all of your cards are now in your discard pile. Not to worry – shuffle up that discard pile, and make a new draw pile. Deal five cards.

Hooray! An action card. Play the Smithy, draw three more cards.

Now you have three Copper and one Silver. For your buy, you can now buy anything worth 5 or less. Suddenly you have more options and can buy more. Draw the right cards from your deck and in combination you’ll have  enough to buy a Province – the big value VP cards everyone wants. Play continues until either the Provinces  run out, or three other piles are gone. Whoever has the most VPs in their deck wins. It’s that simple.

Except it’s not really simple. What strategy will you go for? Buy up the cheap VP cards ASAP? Nice idea, but they’ll clog up your deck, giving you frequent useless hands. Wait until you can afford the big VPs? Ah, but what if you wait too long? Maybe you should buy the card that attacks your opponents… or maybe you should buy a defensive card, in case they attack you… Every choice you make feels meaningful, as you know that you will get to use whatever you’re buying in the future. There’s an element of risk, too – should you play the card that gives you +2 Treasure, or should you play a card that allows you to draw the Gold that you know is in your draw deck?

Dominion is a game that can be played casually of an evening, but it’s also the sort of game where you could create spreadsheets and graphs and figure out the best strategies. Good luck, though, if that’s your thing – there are actually over three million possible games in this box – the number of ways you can choose 10 cards from the 25 possibilities is 3,268,760. It’ll take you quite a few years to get through that many games.

And if you were to take the time to play over three million games, a couple of things about the game might eventually get to you. The cards are clear and functional, and most of the art is nice enough, but a couple are rather ugly. It may be a rather useful card, but I really don’t like the orange-haired weirdo on the Festival card. The Militia look pretty unthreatening for a military force. The Bureaucrat card, on the other hand, has rather nice art despite it being a bit duller than a festival.

Also, you’ll notice that each card has a black border. While this looks nice, it’s apparently quite likely to fade quickly, not a great design choice. These are relative minor gripes, however – Dominion is easy to pick up, has loads of depth, and plays in a short enough time that you can have a few games in one sitting – even more so if you’re playing with two, as there are less VP cards up for grabs. You can adjust the game with your choice of cards, too – if you want a relaxing game with little conflict, you can choose a set with little interaction.

Conversely, you can choose a vicious set of cards and have everyone hate each other by the end of the game.

If you didn’t want it, then you should have put a chip on it
– Beyoncé Knowles, attrib.

No Thanks! is an incredibly simple game. Thirty-three cards, numbered from 3 to 35. A bag of chips, eleven for each player. And only one decision on your turn – take the card, or put a chip on it.

To begin, nine cards are removed from the deck, not to be used in this game. The first card is then flipped over, and players in turn start making that choice – throw in a chip from his limited and hidden supply, or take the card and any chips that have accumulated. If you take the card, play stays with you for the next card – take it or chip in. If you have no chips to throw in, you must take the card. And so through the deck until the cards are exhausted.

One very important wrinkle – a run of cards is only worth the value of the lowest card. So if you have 12, 13, 14, and 15, you’ll only be taking a hit of 12 points.

From these very simple rules comes a short, brilliant game. If you’ve taken the 33 and the 35 appears, do you risk taking it and the bunch of chips on it, in the hope of the 34 appearing later? Remember, there are nine cards not in the game, and if it doesn’t appear that’s a lot of points you don’t want. But if it does appear, do you then risk throwing a chip in and passing – a card so high is unlikely to be grabbed by anyone else early, so you can use this opportunity to amass a few more chips. Unless, of course, someone at the table has no chips left – they’re hidden, remember – and they have to take it. Or maybe they’ll take it through sheer malice…

No Thanks! claims a playing time of twenty minutes, but that’s enough to fit in three rounds and teach the game. Like Kakerlaken Poker and For Sale, it’s a short and easy game with incredibly simple decisions hiding psychology, brinkmanship and luck management, and can be easily taught to non-gamers. Everyone should have a copy.

Monopoly is a terrible, terrible game.

I can hear the mixed reactions already – the murmur of approval from some, outraged shock from others. For many people, Monopoly is what they think of immediately when board games are mentioned. It’s ingrained in the popular consciousness – the most common response to someone discovering that I like board games is to then say, “what, like Monopoly?”

This equating of Monopoly with board games has, unfortunately, ruined our relationship with the board game. It’s not just Monopoly‘s fault, of course, but it’s the main culprit – it shares some blame with Clue/Cluedo, Frustration, The Game of Life, and a few others. Board games, to most people, mean frustrating over-long games of random chance, or simple children’s games that simply are not appealing to adults.

“But I have good memories of playing Monopoly!” you may be thinking. But you don’t. What you do have are good memories of spending time with your friends and family, and having a nice time despite the awful game sitting between you, not because of it.

If you’re still not convinced, let me describe the what I think are the worst of Monopoly‘s problems.

Roll and move

Pick up the two dice, roll them, move that number of spaces, then do what’s required of you. Sometimes that will be paying money in rent or tax, sometimes it will be a Chance or Community Chest card, or maybe an opportunity to buy some property. What you don’t have, very often, is much in the way of choice. It’s either mandatory, or a simple yes or no.

Roll the dice, move five spaces, land on Super Tax. Pay £100. And pass the dice to the next player. Pick up the dice, roll, move. Pay rent to your opponent. Pick up the dice, roll, move. Do what’s required. And so on

Every space you land on in Monopoly is entirely determined by the roll of the dice, except the odd occasion when it’s determined by the flip of a card. The meaningful choices – when to buy hotels, when to buy property – is limited by these random die rolls. It’s no coincidence that this mechanic has fallen out of favour almost completely in board games – and when a game does use this mechanic, such as in Formula D, the player can choose which die to roll. The best games are about mitigating randomness and playing the odds. In Monopoly, more often than not the game is playing you.

The runaway leader & player elimination

It usually doesn’t take long to determine who will win a game of Monopoly. Unfortunately, the game has to continue several hours beyond this point to make this winner official. According to the official rules:

You are declared bankrupt if you owe more than you can pay either to another player or to the Bank…A bankrupt player must immediately retire from the game. The last player left in the game wins.

So in a four player game, three players need to be eliminated in order for the game to end. And for three people to be eliminated, one player is likely to have been the obvious winner for quite some time.

Monopoly creates a ‘runaway leader’ – as one player collects rent, he’s likely to invest it in houses and hotels and more property, causing higher rents. Meanwhile the other players have to sell houses and mortgage property to pay these rents. The balance tips in one player’s favour. This cycle continues until one or two players are rolling in cash and the others are reduced to penury. However, the £200 gained from passing Go keep them in the game a little longer… but not so they can ever catch up; that’s nearly impossible. It merely drags the game on for longer.

And what do the eliminated players do once they’re bankrupt? Do they merely watch the game miserably as it drags on to its conclusion? Player elimination is, like roll-and-move, rare in modern games, because a game that doesn’t involve everyone all through the game is not fun. Small World, for instance, lasts a set number of turns determined by the number of players. Settlers of Catan and Cosmic Encounter are a race to the required number of victory points. Almost no modern game requires the winning player to slowly grind his opponents down in order to win, and for good reason.

House rules

Auctions are oddly rare in Monopoly, even though it’s right there in the rules: If you do not wish to buy the property, the Banker sells it at auction to the highest bidder. Why is this? It’s probably because auctions are difficult, and Monopoly is seen as a family-friendly game – asking Little Jimmy to decide if a property is worth more than the current bid is tough, especially when all you were asking him to do a minute ago was roll dice and count. It’s not seen as fun, so it’s a rule that’s often ditched.

It’s the same with mortgages. Cards are flipped over, so they’re both owned and not-owned? And then I have to pay back an extra 10% to get it back? Seems weird and complicated. Probably best to get rid of mortgages too.

Then there’s Free Parking. Monopoly has quite a few spaces and cards that are punitive – and, because of roll and move, they’re arbitrarily punitive. It also has a space that does nothing. It’s no surprise that many people try to mitigate the random punishment by placing taxes and fines in the middle of the board, ready to be claimed by anyone landing on Free Parking. All this does, however, is drag the game on for longer, as players who should have been eliminated are still rolling in dough after a lucky roll.

House rules are, in general, a bad sign. If a game is fun, why does it need all of these extra rules? Players are, unwittingly, trying to fix a game that isn’t fun.

It’s not a game

Of course it’s a game. It’s got a board, and dice, and cards, and – eventually – a winner. But the overwhelming majority copies of Monopoly are not games, but instead are souvenirs, or are merely decorative. That’s why they’re released in so many iterations – Family Guy Monopoly, Lord of the Rings Monopoly, Tehran Monopoly, Arsenal Monopoly. It’s not a game to be played, it’s a piece of merchandise to be bought to celebrate something else that you like.

Monopoly is terrible. Throw your copy away. Never inflict it on anyone as a gift. Play better games.

The excellent images on this post are creative commons-licensed photos by Mark Strozier… used because I can’t take photos of a game I refuse to own.

Each type of tile scores differently – for example, each tusk gets you two points, having the least amount of fire will get you negative points, and having a large variety of other animals will score a bunch of points at the end. What really makes this game different is the way the spoils are shared. The starting player can take as many tiles as he wants from the middle of the table – even, if he wants, all of them. The next player has a choice – take tiles from the pool, or take the first player’s tiles. If he takes the first player’s tiles, one of those has to go back in the shared pool. Play continues, with each player making the same choice – tiles from the middle, or someone else’s tiles minus one. The round ends, and scoring begins, when the last player not to have any tiles takes the remaining loot from the centre.

It’s part game, part social experiment. On your turn, if you take too many tiles, someone will simply take them from you. Take too few and you’ll score poorly. So there are tough decisions as you try to take more than your fair share, but not so much that anyone objects. That it’s a game with scoring means that you’re forced to be rational – and when it comes to sharing, people are not rational.

Of course people are not rational, you think. But neither are you. A thought experiment: you need to go to the shop to buy a loaf of bread. In the shop nearest you, the bread costs £1. Walk another three minutes and you can buy it for 50p. Most people will walk that extra three minutes and save 50p. Now imagine you want to buy the latest Fantasy Flight big box game. It comes with a whole load of miniatures and tokens and stuff, so let’s say it costs £100 in the nearest shop. But walk another three minutes and there’s a shop selling it for £99. Less people than before will walk that extra three minutes to save that £1.

This makes no sense. In the first example people feel that walking three minutes is worth 50p. In the second they feel it’s not worth £1. For an economist, this is stupid – if someone walked three minutes for 50p, surely they should do so to save £1. Our flawed human reasoning doesn’t see it like that, seeing the 50p and £1 savings relative to what we’re buying. It’s something to keep in mind the next time you see SAVE 50% stickers.

When we’re asked to share something, our reasoning is similarly flawed. The “Dictator Game” isn’t a game as such, but an experiment in psychology and economics. Two people who don’t know each other play the game – one is given a sum of money, and told to share it with the other person in any way they choose – they are the ‘dictator’. The other person has no input into this decision at all. If people act entirely in their own interests, as traditional economics says they should, then they should take all of the money, or at best leave a minimum amount for the person they don’t know. But they don’t. People tend to split the money more evenly than they ever need to, despite no compulsion to do so.

Add in a bit extra to this and you have the “Ultimatum Game”. The dictator doesn’t have the final say in this game – instead, the other player gets to accept or reject the offer. If the other player rejects the offered split, no one gets any money. So if one player gets £50,  peels off a fiver and offers it, the other player can – and often will – say “no”. Again, to the economist, this makes no sense. The second player is getting £5, which is better than nothing – why on earth would you reject something in favour of nothing? But people will, when given too little, punish both of them for not playing fair. Similarly, the first player tends to see foresee this outcome, and in general will offer more than the minimum player two will accept. Rationally, he should offer the minimum, and rationally, his partner should accept it. But this is a far rarer outcome than an equitable split.

What this means is up for debate – but it does mean that people are not rational about sharing. Some see it as a evolved, altruistic behaviour ingrained in us. These games are designed to be played as one-off events, but in reality we have to share with the same people again and again. The ‘iterative’ game is different – people have memories, and if we screw them over this time then they might remember and screw us right back. It’s not just people who act this way – naturalists have seen patterns of altruism and punishment in animals.

Which brings us back to Mammut, which seems to be an exception. Because players score each round, it’s in their interests to act rationally, and grab all they can for themselves. Anyone taking too little through some misguided altruism will simply lose the game. If economists want to hold on to the simplicity of ‘rational actor theory’, then they could do worse than play board games.

Games: competitions where you pit your strength, or skill, or will, or brains, or something else and in some combination against a number of other people.  There are rules, winners, losers, a score, perhaps even celebrations or rancour.

Tales of the Arabian Nights is not, by that definition, a game.

Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books from your childhood? The ones where, after making some arbitrary choice, you would flick to the page directed and find out you had made the wrong choice and were now dead – but it didn’t matter because you’d subverted the book by keeping your finger on the previous page. Those who have read these books, or the Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf books, will feel quite at home with TotAN. The focus of the game is the spiral-bound Book of Tales, designed not to be read cover-to-cover, but full of numbered paragraphs picked out and read depending on the player’s decisions. Also in the box is a board showing Southern Europe and North Africa, a whole load of tokens, piles of cards, a few dice, and stand-up cards to represent our heroes – Ali Baba, Aladdin, Sindbad, Ma’aruf, Zumurrud and Sheheherazade, in order of who I tend to choose for fear of appearing ignorant about pronunciation.

Choosing your character, you’re then given a quest card, which will require you to go forth, travelling around the board and having encounters. On your turn, you move up to the allowed number of spaces as determined by your wealth, and, wherever you land, flip over an encounter card. Your encounter could be with a beggar, or a monster, or a witch, or anything within the large range of cards provided. This is where the fun begins. Let’s take an example turn.

You are Ali Baba, and your current quest, determined by a random card from the Quest deck, is to ‘seek treasure’ – simply head out into the world and find yourself a nice trinket to show off. Travelling a little aimlessly, you move to Kiev, and flip a card from the Encounter deck. Your encounter is with a toothless old hag. But what sort of hag? Rolling a die, you ask the player holding the Book of Tales. The reader consults a table using your card and die result, and tells you it’s a ‘diseased’ hag. Ew. What do do with this diseased hag? Your choice comes from another table – the storyteller instructs you choose from ‘matrix C’.

Each player has a chart of the different reactions you can take to your encounter – in this example there are eight different things, ranging from ‘enrich’ to ‘rob’, letting you be nice or nasty or somewhere in-between. One of the choices is ‘follow’. Let’s try that. Using your reaction, the player with the ‘reaction matrices’ can read off the appropriate number. Finally, you roll the ‘destiny die’ to see if you should read out the numbered paragraph given, or the one before or after. Now the reader can, in his or her best hammy acting, tell us what occurs.

And what happens? Well, in this case, it turns out you were so overcome with sympathy you couldn’t help but give your money away to this poor unfortunate wretch. You lose some wealth (tracked on the board), have your misfortune mocked by your fellow players but gain the status of ‘blessed’ for being such a good guy, which may affect encounters in the future. I’ve deliberately chosen a relatively mundane encounter here so to avoid spoilers – there are encounters with mystical creatures, magical objects, with undersea kingdoms and jewelled fortresses. You can get meet handsome princes/beautiful princesses, get married, and find a magic carpet for Sunday excursions with the kids. You can also end up a penniless pauper, in jail, cursed by a genie you slighted. You’re never quite sure what’s going to happen, or how your reactions will play out – and that’s why TotAN is not for everyone.

Strategy? Tactics? Forget it. In TotAN you have very limited control over what happens to you – and very often the choices you make are meaningless and arbitrary; you choose your actions with no idea of what the consequences will be. It’s also often terribly unfair. I’ve spent entire games with the rottenest of luck, lost in the sea just off France, making landfall only to be thrown, crippled and diseased, in a hideous dungeon. All the while, the player next to me, is gaining unimaginable wealth and eventually the title of Sultan. ToTAN is purely about storytelling, and while there is a ‘winner’ (whoever makes it back to Baghdad with enough ‘story’ and ‘destiny’ points) it’s of little importance.

It’s not flawless, even if it appeals to you. Already slightly fiddly with the tables and matrices, the game gets even fiddlier towards the end. Having a ‘master skill’ means you can avoid the randomness of the destiny die by choosing a paragraph that references that particular skill – useful, but it often gives a lot of work to the reader. The game doesn’t scale as well as it claims, either. Despite the box claiming 2-6 players, more than 4 means too much downtime, and two players gives one of you slightly too much to do on your opponent’s turn. Fun with the right group, Tales of the Arabian Nights is at its best with enthusiastic readers unafraid to make a fool of themselves.

Forbidden Island makes no sense. Four powerful treasures that control the elements are hidden on an island, and it’s the players’ task to go and grab them, before the island sinks. Why is the island sinking? It’s a security measure. The ancient race that once owned these treasures decided to stash them somewhere that would start sliding into the ocean the moment someone steps ashore. While it might be effective,  I feel it’s not the future of security. I could be wrong, though, so look out for home burglar alarms that are wired up to cranes and wrecking balls, ready to start demolishing  the entire house when a thief clambers in a window.

Back to the island: it’s made up a grid of rather nice chunky tiles, laid out at random. The tiles are double-sided, one normal, one ‘flooded’. Of these 24 tiles, eight are special places where you can grab a treasure, and one is Fool’s Landing – your only route to escape the island. Once the board is set up, you then set the ‘water level’ – the waters will rise throughout the game, but by setting this starting level you can play one of four difficulties, from Novice (a good chance of winning) to Legendary (masochists only).

On your turn, you take three actions, take a couple of treasure cards, then sink a bit of the island. Your actions can be moving around, ‘shoring up’ the island, grabbing treasure, and giving treasure cards. If you’re on the right space and have enough of the right set of cards, you can grab one of the rather nice treasure pieces – but the chances of you having the right cards on your own are low. Cards will have to be passed around by people on the same tile – you’re all on the same team, working together, and you either beat the game as a team or sink and drown together. But you have to work as an efficient unit, because the island is, as we know, sinking. And sinking fast.

The island does its sinking at the end of each players’ of each turn. The current player reveals a number of cards from the flood deck, determined by the difficulty level, and the tiles named on the revealed cards are flipped to show that they’re flooded. A flooded tile is in most ways the same as a normal tile – you can still move to and through them, grab treasures from them… but if a revealed flood card names an already-flooded tile, then that part of the island sinks forever, and is removed from the game. Worse still, hidden in the other deck, where your nice and useful treasure cards reside, are three “Waters Rise” cards. Draw one of these, and the water level moves up closer to the skull & crossbones marker (which means you lose, in case that wasn’t obvious), and the discarded flood cards are shuffled and placed back on top of the deck.

That’s right, on top. Those tiles you’ve only just flipped over and are flooded? Those are the ones that are likely to flood again, and sink – unless you get to them in time. This is a brilliant little twist. You know what cards are going to appear, if not the order, which means you can plan for them… but the price of that knowledge is that you know it must be Bad News. You can fight back against the flood by ‘shoring up’, flipping the tile you’re on or one next to you, back to its unflooded state. While it’s necessary to do this to keep vital routes open, you can’t save everywhere. Parts of the island will sink, and you have to make sure you’re choosing the right places to save and where you can let sink.

While Forbidden Island is being marketed as the kid-friendly, stripped back version of Matt Leacock’s Pandemic (of which more in the future) it can at times be a little unforgiving, especially if you dismiss it as an easy kids game. Even on novice level you’re not guaranteed to win – fail to protect one of the two places you can pick up a particular treasure and it’s an instant game over. But the cooperative nature of the game and simple rules make it very good entry level game for kids, and a handy replacement for Pandemic when you lack the time to play this game’s older brother. Overall, a very good race against time with rules simple enough to fit on a small reference card, unnecessarily nice components, all in a small shortbread tin-like box.

Ah, Dr Reiner Knizia, you are both terribly predictable and wildly unreliable. Your name on a box tells you exactly the sort of thing you’re likely to get, and yet reveals next to nothing about how fun your design will be to play. You’re often accused of churning out games that are too ‘math-y’, yet your name is synonymous with some of the most addictive and accessible games. You have over 500 games to your name, a German designer working in a very German industry… but you live in England. Just who are you, Dr Knizia?

I have decided that Reiner Knizia is, in some ways, the Guided By Voices of board game design. If, like me, you are a GBV fan, you know that they’ve have some amazing tunes. Pick up a GBV album, and you can almost guarantee there will be eleven or twelve great tracks there, better than the average hit rate. Unfortunately, the typical GBV album is about 25+ tracks long, so you have to be prepared to put up with a certain lack of quality control. And so it is with Reiner Knizia.

Ra the Dice Game is a game where… well, it’s something about Egypt. And dice, obviously. You’re rolling the five colourful dice to move or place cubes in different areas of the board. Roll ‘Pharaohs’ and you can move up the Pharaoh track, where the highest gets points and the lowest loses some. Roll ‘Nile’ symbols and you can move up or ‘flood’ The Nile – you gain points the further up you are, but only if you’ve taken the time to ‘flood’ it, that is, add an extra cube rather than move. Rolling ‘Civilisations’ means you can place cubes for points in that area of the board, but space is limited, and where you can place is governed by the colour of the dice. With the ‘Monument’ side of the die you can place cubes on a grid that score in different ways. The ‘Ankh’ side is a ‘wild die’ you can add to other dice to make the combination you need.

The sixth side is big lad himself, Ra. Like Yahtzee, you roll dice three times and then stick with what you get – unless it’s Ra. Those dice get placed on the track at the top of the board. Get two and the Ra token moves closer to the end of his track and the end of the round. Get three and get three points. Four or five means a “disaster” for your opponents, removing their cubes from the board or shifting them.

Each game mechanic in RtDG on its own is a little lacking and not terribly interesting. And unfortunately, when you put them all together, all you have is a handful of not-too-great bits of game, adding up to not a lot. It doesn’t scale very well – three players isn’t bad, but with two it’s over too soon, and with four there’s a bit too much waiting around with uninteresting things happening. It also suffers from that common complaint of the Knizia game – pasted-on theme. Lost Cities, to take another Knizia, is a game where theme is unimportant because the game itself is fine – it’s simply an excuse for some nice art on a solid, entertaining game. But when the game is a bit lacking, you notice that the game has very little to do with Egypt at all, beyond the symbols and very lovely dice. RtDG is not completely without merit – and is actually rather clever – but the decisions you make just aren’t interesting enough, and intelligence of the design doesn’t translate to a fun experience.

Kakerlaken. Kakerlaken.

You could call this Cockroach Poker, if you really wanted to, but that would deny you the joy of saying the much more euphonious German word: ‘Kakerlaken’.

Kakerlaken.

Kakerlaken Poker is a extremely simple game, a kids’ game, really. But it’s the game I grab if a group of non-gamers wants to play a game, especially if alcohol has been taken. It is, to put it politely, a game of bluffing. Less politely, it’s a game of looking your friends and loved ones straight in the eye, and telling them bare-faced lies. All there is to the game is a deck of 64 cards, eight of each of the slightly disgusting creatures: frog, stinkbug, spider, rat, bat, fly, scorpion and – of course – cockroach. Each card is different, and the art combines creepy-crawly with cartoon cutesiness. If you’re wary of putting these cards in the hands of the squeamish, don’t be – they’re cartoony enough to be palatable, but retain just enough ickiness for the theme.

To start the game, all of the cards are dealt to the players, and then it’s up to the starting player to choose a card and a victim. The player puts his chosen card face down, and announces what it is. His target has a choice – believe the player (“yes, it is”), call their bluff (“no, it’s not”) or look at the card and announce what it really is (or lie) choosing a new target who has not yet seen the card.

Whenever someone guesses, they either take the card (if they were wrong in their belief or disbelief) or the last person to announce what the card was (or wasn’t) takes the card if their bluff (or truthfulness) was called. In other words, if you get it wrong or fail to lie convincingly, you get the card. and place it in front of you. The next player to play is whoever placed a card in front of them. Get four of one type of card in front of you, and you lose the game. And that’s it. There is no winner in Kakerlaken Poker, only a loser to jeer at.

Kakerlaken Poker is really a guessing game, but don’t let that put you off – there a little bit of strategy here. You can play the odds based on what’s in your hand and on the table – if you can see seven bats already, what are the chances this is the eighth? But even more fun is simply looking someone in the eye – someone you may know very well, and asking yourself: “is this person lying? Just how good a lie-detector am I? And how good am I at lying?”

Kakerlaken Poker is a lot more fun that its simplicity would suggest, though it does need the right group. One final piece of advice: if you play against your mother, as I did, you may find to your dismay that she can tell when you’re lying. And not just once or twice, or even just more than average. Every single time.

Lost Cities, your time is up.

It’s almost an involuntary reaction amongst boardgamers. Ask them: “What’s a good game I can play with my wife/girlfriend/fiancée?” and 86.3% of the time, Lost Cities will be mentioned as a possibility. The other 13.7% of the time, the answer will be preceded by: “Well, most people would say Lost Cities, but…” Lost Cities is the default answer, even if you’re reacting against it.

Lost Cities has now lost out to a younger and better-looking rival. Jaipur is, like Lost Cities, a two-player card game with a rather pasted-on theme. You and your opponent are traders, competing to be the Maharajah’s personal trader. To win, you have to be the richest two out of three weeks (or rounds). What you’re really doing is collecting sets of cards and discarding these sets for available tokens. At the end of the round, the person with the highest score from these tokens wins.

You start with a hand of five cards each, and five cards between you, in the “market”. The cards will either be one of six different ‘goods’, or a camel. If you have any camels, they come out of your hand and sit in front of you. That’s your ‘herd’, which doesn’t contribute to your strict hand limit. The rules are simple – you buy, or sell, or grab all the camels in the market. To buy, you either grab just one card from the market, replacing it with a card from the deck, or take a number of cards from the market, replacing them with cards from your hand or from your herd. To sell, take goods cards of the same type and discard them, grabbing tokens for each card. If you discard three, four, or five cards at once, you also get a bonus token. If you want to grab all the camels, you do just that, taking them all from the market and putting them in your herd.

And that’s pretty much it. But these simple rules throw up some very interesting decisions. Each pile of goods tokens is slightly different, with high prices at the top, and lower prices as they start to run out. And once they’ve gone, there’s no more. So do you hold on to your diamonds, trying to get more together to grab more points and maybe a bonus, or do you sell them now and make sure your opponent doesn’t grab the high points at the top of the pile. Do you take all of the camels to give yourself more bargaining power… or avoid that because the cards that turn up in the market might be exactly what your opponent needs?

Jaipur’s simple learning curve is best demonstrated by the experience I’ve had teaching the game, not once but twice. The first round is a learning round, as my opponent figures out the game and I win, though I’m not playing too aggressively. The next round I again play timidly; I am destroyed. The final round is a proper round. And then you want to play another game, as it only lasts twenty-five minutes.

Dump Lost Cities in a dusty drawer to be near-forgotten: Jaipur is the new king of the ‘couples game’.