Life's a Game 12: Best of British

This year we're sharing with you our game of the month. These are all favourites from our collection, or ones we play with our friends.

December's game is Best of British.

Time for the final game in this years collection, and its a good'un. You may have noticed a lack of trivia games in these posts - time now to correct that. Over the years we've had many a fun evening playing Trivial Pursuit, Dingbats, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and Bezzerwizzer, but the one in our current collection that we've played most is this one. Best of British.

   
Part of the same family of games as the Logo Game, Best of British is a nice gentle quiz all about the things that make this group of islands a fine place to live. You might get questions on anything from cream teas to Coronation Street, from breeds of cow to people called John, from castles to things that are pink. It's the huge range of questions that makes this one a game that can be enjoyed by a large range of people. 

   
Questions come in groups of four on a theme and the game comes with a randomly multicoloured board. Each question is coloured and if you answer correctly you jump to the next square of that colour. Sometimes this will be a frustrating one step but you can also make huge leaps forward with just a couple of correct answers.

If blue gets their next red question correct they'll move six squares, the red person on the other hand only gets to move one.

We'd definitely recommend this game, as I said, its a good'un.

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Life's a Game 10: Carcassonne by Rachel

This year we're sharing with you our game of the month. These are all favourites from our collection, or ones we play with our friends.

Octobers game is Carcassonne and is brought to you by Rachel, a good friend and a fellow lover of board games:

Chris and I have acquired a good cupboardful of games over the years but Carcassonne remains a firm favourite. I think one of the main reasons is that - whilst we thrive on having friends over for games evenings - on the odd occasion it’s just the two of us. Most of our preferred games fall at this hurdle, fortunately though Carcassonne is just as enjoyable and challenging with 2 players as it is with 6.

Chris likens Carcassonne to a big jigsaw puzzle, as you start the board with just one tile and build the rest as you go. On your turn you pick up a tile from a facedown pile and place it so it fits (city to city, road to road or field to field) orthogonally to another tile. You can then place your Meeple on the tile you have just placed (and not anywhere else!).  The options:


1. Place your Meeple into a city

2. Place your Meeple on a road

 

3. Place your Meeple on the field to make him a farmer.

   

4. Do nothing. A perfectly legitimate move as you have a limited number of Meeple. Once you’ve put them on the board they’re stuck there until you ‘complete’ the city or road. In the case of farmers they are stuck for the rest of the game!

The next person then picks up a tile and you keep going until you have run out of tiles. Now Meeple are quite protective of their property – so once you have claimed a city, road or field it is YOURS. Nobody else can just add a tile on and decide they want to join you. (unless they’re sneaky but we’ll get to that later).

So, how do you actually win this game? As usual, it’s about points.  There are 3 main ways to score points:

1. Complete a city that your Meeple is in. You get 2 points for each tile, so the blue Meeple has just finished a city and would normally get 2 points for 3 tiles = 6 points. Luckily for him he’s got a blue and white shield, so that gives him a bonus 2 extra points – making a total of 8. (The yellow city is still open as it doesn’t have a wall going all the way around it)

 

2. Complete a road that your Meeple is on. This is when both ends are closed. You get a mere 1 point for each tile, so it’s not as prestigious as a city.

3. Farming a field, which doesn’t happen right until the end of the game.  By the end the board will probably be split into 2 or more farms. The edge of a farm is marked by road, city walls and the edge of the board – see the board below. They can be notoriously difficult to spot, (especially on larger boards) and it takes a few times of playing to become adept at seeing them. Each complete city in your farm is worth 3 points.  If a city isn’t complete it’s worthless for a farmer. So here there are 3 points for 4 cities = 12 points. Farms can really swing the end of the game – adding some extra tension.

(If you have expansions, your board will be much, much bigger than this as you get more tiles with each expansion).

Now you’ve got the fairly mundane mechanics of the game, here comes the interesting part. Depending on your level of competitive-ness and mood you may wish to be sneaky and ‘join other Meeple’ in their ventures (ie steal from them!) You can join them indirectly by placing your Meeple into a new city, etc. and then placing a tile to join them together.

For example:

The yellow Meeple has just started their own city. It is not joined to the blue Meeple city at the moment (you can’t join diagonally) so they can get away with it.

However, a move later the yellow Meeple has put down a tile joining the two cities together.

This can happen for cities, roads and (is most common) for farms. When you end up sharing it’s fine – in fact a joint venture can even help you both get more points. However, it’s a tightrope to walk – can you trust your partner? For instance if yellow sneaks in another Meeple so there are 2 yellow Meeple and only 1 blue Meeple, blue gets nothing! How ruthless are you?

I have to confess I haven’t fully explained all the ins and outs or even more obscure ways of scoring points. But you’ve heard enough from me, the best thing is just to give it a go now. Honestly, it’s much easier to play than to explain! Besides where would be the incentive to play if I explained about the expansion when the Dragon gobbles Meeple and there are magic portals?

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Life's a Game 6: Maindealer

This year we're sharing with you our game of the month. These are all favourites from our collection, or ones we play with our friends.

June's game is Maindealer.

This month we come to another of our charity shop finds with a game that's copyrighted 1987. Maindealer is a classic board game in style. Players set out to buy cars which they can then sell for a profit with the aim of having the most money at the end of the game.

The cars themselves vary wildly from the cheapest Russian car at £1000 to the most expensive German at £13000. One of the best ways to accrue cash is to collect cars originating in the same country and then starting yourself a dealership. We find that people naturally gravitate towards either collecting lots of cheap cars or relying on a small collection of expensive ones to earn them their winnings - both can be successful if lucks on your side.

On of the things we love about this game are the little details, both in the board itself and the cards that fate can toss you.

"Everyones" favourite square.

Why, thank you very much!

A double whammy here of a vintage looking "new" computer and the mate who is merely "away"!

Punter cards can cover all aspects of life...

... while Dealer cards mostly get you to sell cars with varying amount of profit.

One of the downsides of this game is its length. It can take a while to get going and start your collection, but once it gains momentum things start to get more exciting. Not a game to be played in a hurry but one we've had lots of fun with on wet miserable days! If you can find yourself a copy we'd recommend giving it a go.  

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Life's a Game 5: Scrabble

This year we're sharing with you our game of the month. These are all favourites from our collection, or ones we play with our friends.

May's game is Scrabble

This months game needs little to no introduction. Scrabble, the popular board game where players take it in turns to construct words from a limited rack of letters and connect them to the words already played. Points are awarded based on the letters used, and multipliers are scattered over the board for higher scores. 

This game can be both immensely satisfying - scoring 40 points through clever letter placement - and rather frustrating - when you have a rack of vowels and your opponent scores 40 points through clever letter placement! All in all though it's a good fun, thought provoking game, that can be enjoyed by anyone who likes playing with words.

All the letter tiles, with their points.

Selecting a letter to see who goes first - my E narrowly beat Joe's F.

Starting to build up words - in this particularly game the board has already rather dense making things tricky.

The final board. Joe narrowly beat me on this occasion - I'll get him next time! 

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Life's a Game: 2. Go

This year we're sharing with you our game of the month. These are all favourites from our collection, or ones we play with our friends.

February's game is Go.

No, we're not talking about the ancient Chinese game involving little black and white counters. We're talking about Go, the 60's board game that takes you around the world on the hunt for souvenirs. While this is part of our charity shop collection, it is also one of the few that we went hunting for rather than stumbling upon. Joe's mum played this game as a child and Joe has fond memories of playing it too.

The premise is fairly simple - travel from city to city to collect a fixed number of souvenirs and then race to be the first back to London. As with every game there are the spaces everybody wants to land on (Thomas Cook - tickets and bureau de change under one roof), and those everyone avoids (Customs!). Some precise dice rolling is needed to get you from country to country while avoiding the hazards that might befall every traveler. It is a rare game where a freak storm does not whip an unwary passenger from their route and park them in an obscure part of the board - that's all part of the fun (though mighty frustrating if you were almost back to London and suddenly you find yourself in the Falkland Isles!).

One of the joys of the game are the details, and none more so that the range of currencies you need to use to buy your tickets and souvenirs. From Deutchmarks in Germany to Yen in Japan all with different exchange rates, its worth picking yourself a good banker for this one! Fortunately a handy chart is provided to make things easier.

I'd say this is one of the favourites on our shelf. Even the most cunning of players can be derailed by an unlucky dice throw and that makes it a good game for all the family.

Catch up with previous Life's a Game posts here.

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Life's a Game: 1. Shave a Sheep

One aspect of our life that, up till now, we've not mentioned on this blog is a love of board games. In particular we enjoy hunting down older games from charity shops. While this has a tendency to be hit and miss (we've certainly bought a couple of duds) it has also produced some gems which we'd like to share with you.

Therefore, in 2014, we're going to feature a board game of the month, working our way through the highlights of our collection. Some will be old, some new and some will not be ours but belong to friends.

January's game is Shave a Sheep.

This is the most recent acquisition in our charity shop collection and kept the family very amused over Christmas. It's a simple enough game: first you make yourself a sheep from the Lego provided. Then you roll a dice to try and collect wool for your sheep - but beware, if your sheep looks too good someone might try and swap their sheep for yours, or even set the wolf on you! Fortunately the wolf seems to eat wool not sheep, so all is redeemable.

The best bit of this game in our opinion is the Lego sheep. While you might start the game with a sheep that looks like the one on the box it seems impossible to keep it that way. As other players take their turns you often find yourself fiddling with your little sheep; first you make it longer, then maybe shorter, perhaps switch the eyes and the nose, start checking the box for spare parts... a yellow eye? Thank you very much.

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Photo Friday - Pontcysyllte aqueduct

Pontcysyllte aqueduct near Wrexham. We sat and watched a few canal boats go over on a pleasant autumn afternoon.

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