March's game is Chronology
Another charity shop find, this months game takes a little more thinking about - though it is set out in such a way that even those with only a slight knowledge of history can take part and enjoy it.
Unlike some of the games on our shelves, this one doesn't take long to explain or play, with a game taking around 30 mins. Each player starts with one card face up on the table, then everyone takes it in turns to be read a historical event. If you can correctly guess where this sits in the timeline of events you have in front of you then you get to add the card to your line. The first person to have a set of ten cards wins the game.
Of course this means that the first round is not that hard - you just need to guess whether the event took place before or after the card you were given at the start. Once you have nine cards on the table, perhaps some of them grouped quite closely chronologically, guessing the location of the tenth can be quite a bit trickier.
A lot of the cards are based in the last 200 years, but the dates do stretch all the way back to the Ancient Egyptians (everyone breaths a sigh of relief when asked was the building of the pyramids before or after WWII) and could involve the discovery of America, the first successful heart surgery, or the production of the first Barbie. There's no way you could know all the events in the set - but because you only need to know where it sits in history, not the dates themselves, there's always a chance for a guess.
Good for when a game of Monopoly just seems too long, or for a change of pace from other board and card games, I wouldn't say this was the best game on our shelf, but we've played it multiple times with different groups of people and always seem to enjoy ourselves - and you can't say fairer than that.
p.s. The next challenge in The Great Swift Bake Off is approaching. This month two dozen biscuits are the order of the day. We'll open Mr Linky next Wednesday - what will you make?