This time last year we were planning our annual holiday, which was to be a trip along the canals of the West Midlands, Staffordshire and Warwickshire, with Anglo Welsh Holidays, starting from their base at Tardebigge. We spent a week on the Stourport Ring going clockwise via Worcester, Kidderminster, Kinver, the Netherton Tunnel, Brindley Place and back via Cadbury World and Alvechurch. A key part of the planning was “what board games to take” of course. With space limited on the boat, there was going to be little opportunity to lay out anything with a huge playing board, and also not wanting to lose any small pieces we went for the games with fewer components. In fact it struck us that these were similar criteria we had used previously when planning a camping holiday so if you are going camping, caravanning or campervanning this summer, these might also work for you.

Games that made the cut and went in to the suitcases included:

• Dodekka – a card game that plays out in a long line of cards on the table, ideal for the table in the boat.
• Concept – a small board with only a few playing pieces and consists mainly of playing cards.
• Exploding Kittens – which had recently arrived as a result of our Kickstarter sponsorship, a simple card game to play on deck or in a canalside pub.
• Dixit Odyssey – with seven on the boat this is a nice game for up to 12, with an elongated scoreboard ideally shaped for the dining table, and again consists mainly of playing cards.
• Carcassonne – using an iPad scoreboard app we dispensed with the scoring track to save space and obviously ensured our road building did not take us off the edge off the tile-able world.

Due to lack of funds we’re not narrowboating this year (unless this e-store becomes seriously busy!), but if we were, we might also take with us some newer acquisitions such as The Game, again doesn’t need much space to set out the card piles, and perhaps Jungle Speed which just requires space for the players’ card piles and the central totem.

After the holiday it got me thinking – someone needs to create a board game about narrowboating. And make sure it fits on a long, narrow board, so narrowboaters can play it! The only recent game I know of on this theme is Canal Mania but that’s more about building canals. There is actually some strategy to narrowboating itself, particularly around locks, whether to wait for someone coming the other way to fill a lock, or wait for someone to accompany you through a double lock. Also tidal considerations if using rivers – and so on. Plus… there is always the possibility of a broken lock gate, or closure of a section of canal to throw your travel plans into disarray.

Perhaps a board game with a flavour of Catan where you are trading traditionally-canal-shipped goods like coal or wool around the country. Or maybe a 21st century version where you are a marina manager trying to hire out all your boats and recover them in one piece within 7 days, and managing the resources needed to deal with breakdowns and other issues that may crop up. Perhaps incorporating an element of Tokaido where the boats need to visit as many interesting places as possible before the game ends.  I can also see a canal-themed version of something like The London Game working well, where players can thwart each others’ plans with a “shopping trolley tangled in your propeller”  or “hireboat caught on lock cill, miss a turn” cards.

So, to board game designers out there, as Bamber Gascoigne or Jeremy Paxman would say, “there’s your starter for 10” for a narrowboat game. Happy to help with play-testing and future sales of what could be a veritable board gaming masterpiece. And if our dream of owning a narrowboat called something like “The Floating Meeple” ever comes to fruition, we’ll be able to play it in the correct environment too!

So being a board game store, it’s not surprising that Monopoly is one of the most popular terms searched on here. However it’s not something we stock. Monopoly has a bit of a reputation for giving board gaming a bad name, for reasons eloquently described by DanQ.

It takes too long to play, people get knocked out early and have to sit around watching everyone else, there’s very little strategy involved, it’s a poor financial model, the rules are unclear and lead to many house rules being required, it encourages bullying playing styles,  and many more reasons.

Next time you are heading to a place where there is a chance someone will say “anyone fancy a game of Monopoly”, do a bit of pre-planning, and arm yourself with a copy of one of the alternative games below. You should find – even if none of your party has played them before – that they are quick to pick up and more enjoyable than watching Uncle Tony building endless hotels on Park Lane and disappearing behind his piles of cash.

Catan

Catan (formerly known as Settlers of Catan) is still a game where you are trying to be the person with the best pile of resources to win the game, however this is not in terms of cash, but victory points, which are earned from building settlements and cities, and having the longest road or largest army. This is done by earning wood, ore, brick, wool or grain from the hexagonal land tiles of the playing area, and where necessary, trading with other players. Because some of the scoring is secret in terms of hidden victory points you may have earned by pulling a card from the Catan version of the “Community Chest”, it is often not always certain that the person who is apparently only one or two points away from winning, will actually do so. Potentially anyone could steam out of the chasing pack to nab the win by a short head, if they play their cards right. There are extensions such as the Seafarers one shown here, so lots of options for mixing things up if you find it getting stale.

Ticket to Ride

If you like the geographical aspect of Monopoly, rather than building houses on Regent Street, why not build a railway line to Smolensk instead. We play the European version and also the UK expansion, but there are maps for several other countries too. Here, you and your opponents are all trying to build railway connections between various cities, it’s first-come-first-served on any given route, so you may have to divert your route if another player gets in your way. Again there is some secrecy in that when you complete a route assigned to you, you only declare it at the game end (the UK expansion plays differently in this regard), and there are extra points available for the longest route on the board. So an apparent leader who has been laying tracks and picking up odd points here and there without completing their whole route, can easily be overtaken in the final reckoning.

Dixit

A different type of game, Dixit gets players’ creative juices flowing by getting them to give semi-cryptic clues about some surreal images shown on the game’s playing cards. Don’t make the clue too obvious though, if everyone finds your card out of all those played in each round, you won’t score any points. Also if your clue is too obscure, and nobody gets it, the same thing happens.  So each time you are the “storyteller”, you are trying to give a clue that connects with just a few of your competitors in each round, whilst at the same time they are playing cards from their hand to try and fool the others that their card is the correct card and pick up some bonus points. There are plenty of expansion packs available so if you do feel you have overplayed the original set there are many options to keep bringing in new images for players to describe.

Pandemic

Maybe you are not comfortable with the idea of one person ending up being the winner of the game? If so then look at co-operative games such as Pandemic. Played on a world map, you are a team of players trying to combat various virus outbreaks that develop around the globe. However, like Whac-a-Mole, they just keep popping up. Every time you sort out one outbreak in India, another one starts in South America, which is just where your team aren’t. Fortunately your team has specialist roles, and the Dispatcher can help get people to where they need to be quickly, while the Scientist is much quicker at finding cures. The longer the game goes on, the more potential there is for epidemics to occur, so time is of the essence and combined team thinking is the order of the day. If you find all the cures, the team wins as a whole, but if mankind is overrun with diseases… well at least you won’t be around too long to be disappointed!

There are many more games that work well in the sort of Christmas / holiday / birthday scenarios where people get together for board games, so do look through the tag cloud in the margin for more ideas. You may also find this video by Scott Nicholson enlightening (it’s from 2010 though and things have moved on a bit since). Dice Tower produced a video on a similar theme in 2014, providing alternatives to mainstream board game titles.

New in stock this week is Junta, a game we’d not had in before, but I was reminded of it by Andrea who recalled playing it in her student days. First released in the late 70s, this latest repackaging has been done by Alderac Entertainment Group whose portfolio also includes the popular Love Letter.

Andrea said:

“Junta is a game, that for me at least, was a game once played and never forgotten. Almost thirty years ago (suitable for children 14 and over) a friend introduced it saying that I wasn’t allowed to play it. It was too backstabby for girls. The gauntlet had been well and truly thrown down! I begged, assured him that I could cope, please let me play. The box looked great, the game sounded interesting. Please let me play.

In the face of such an onslaught from one girl, the boys caved in. An afternoon of backstabbing, double dealing, downright deviousness ensued. Only at the end did they realise that the girl had won and won in such a way that they were expecting her to have come last.

They never forgot and neither did I. Now, who would like a game of Junta. It’s OK, it’s suitable for mums too…”

Junta, is a game of power, intrigue, money and revolution, and players represent various office holders in a fictional banana republic. Each player has a certain number of votes depending on role and cards held. These are important as they must first elect El Presidente and then vote on the budget that he proposes. El Presidente then draws cards face down from the money deck (which varies in denomination from $1 to $3) and must propose a budget for the year, distributing the money as he sees fit amongst the various offices. Of course, loyalty to him is usually rewarded. El Presidente can also keep some of the loot for himself. And since no one but he knows the value of what he drew, no one knows how much he kept.

Players may attempt to assassinate the other players by guessing where they will be from among five locations. Players who successfully assassinate another player take that player’s money, as the only safe money is the money that has been deposited in a Swiss bank account, and the only way to get to the bank is to survive the assassination round. There are also potential coups where opposition players seek to take control of a majority of the power centres. The game time is stated as two hours but it can go on longer, and the goal is to amass the greatest wealth in your Swiss bank account.

For more details, the rules PDFs are on the Alderac site here and here.

Yesterday the Golden Geek Awards for board games were published and it’s no surprise the winners feature several of the games that we have been selling in great numbers over recent months. Game of the Year Pandemic Legacy has been sold out for a while but we hope to get more in soon. However as this store focuses quite a bit on family games, we were pleased to see the winner and runners-up in that category are products we do currently have stock of.

Between Two Cities, a runner-up, is a recent addition to our portfolio, in which you sit between two cities and work with the player on your left to design the heart of one city, and with the player on your right to design the heart of another city. At the end of the game, each city is scored for how liveable it is, and your final score is the lower of the two cities you were working on. So to win, you have to share your attention between two cities. The player with the highest final score wins the game.

Other runner-up, the co-operative game Mysterium, our family played a few times over Christmas, with different members of the family having a turn at being the ghost. The object is for the ghost to communicate, without speaking, the identity of a murderer, location and murder weapon (like Cluedo), but using just illustrated cards to give clues to the other players, who are an investigating team. It’s a delightfully mind-bending game, and for the ghost player sometimes agonising as the investigators go off after a red herring. I remember as the ghost I was trying to direct a player towards the nun character and constantly giving them vision cards with lots of black or dark colours on them, but they were always picking up on other elements of the images and consequently selecting incorrectly!

The category winner was Codenames which we also played a lot over Christmas, and I recently demonstrated to members of the Riverside Inn Business Breakfast club. We had teams of about seven each, working on a large version of the 25 x 25 word grid which I had prepared the day before. The idea of the game is for each team’s spymaster to give single-word clues to the identities of the names of the team’s field agents (shown by the code names on the grid). First team to correctly identify all their agents, without contacting the assassin, is the winner. It was all looking good for the blue team who were ahead nearing the end of the game, but the blue spymaster gave a clue which was too ambiguous and led to his team contacting a red agent, and thus giving an extra point and the game advantage to the red team. With red then to play and with only one relatively simple word to identify, it was a mere tap-in for a red victory.

If you’d like to try out any of these highly praised and award winning games, you’ll find them in the shop pages via the links above.

 

So when we set up our board game retail business we wanted to focus on games that have particular attributes and dynamics – such as strategy, co-operation, deduction, knowledge, dexterity, mental agility and skill. And we’re particularly interested in games that have a wider appeal, rather than niche battle or card-collecting games. We started off with all the popular Euro-style games such as Catan, Ticket to Ride, Agricola and so on, and have also connected with the newer games such as Sheriff of Nottingham, Code Names and other more recent releases. But there are so many games out there, that we are still catching up with games that have already been out a while, and two of these “new to us” games are in stock today.

Spyfall is a game of bluffing, probing questions, clever answers, and suspicion. At the start of each round, players receive a secret card informing them of the group’s location – a casino, space station, pirate ship, circus, (30 unique locations!) – except that one player receives the SPY card instead of the location. The Spy doesn’t know where they are, but wins the round if they can figure it out before they blow their cover!

Players then start asking each other questions during the intense 8-minute rounds. Non-Spy players want to ask questions and give answers that prove to the other players that they know where they are. But if your questions and answers are too specific, the Spy will easily guess the location and win, so you need to practice a bit of subtlety. But if your questions and answers are too generic, you might be accused of being the Spy. So there is a bit of a similarity here with being the Storyteller in Dixit. The Spy will also sometimes be asked questions (just like any other player would) and have to come up with questions of his own, without knowing anything about where he is! If you listened carefully to the other players, you’ll be able to come up with a plausible question or answer… hopefully.

Once per round, each player may accuse another player of being the Spy. If all players agree, the game ends and that player’s secret card is flipped up. If the Spy is captured, each of the Non-Spy players win the round. If a Non-Spy is revealed, the Spy wins. Finally, if the Spy figures out where they are, they can reveal their card and make a guess. If they’re right, they win the round. If not, the Non-Spy players win.

The game is played over a series of rounds and points are awarded each round. A complete game is typically five rounds and the cards are randomly dealt each round. You could even be the Spy two rounds in a row! After the last round, the player with the most points is the winner.

On a completely different theme, Elder Sign is a fast-paced, cooperative dice game of supernatural intrigue for one to eight players by Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson, the designers of Arkham Horror. Players take the roles of investigators racing against time to stave off the imminent return of the Ancient One. Some similarities here with Mysterium or Betrayal at House on the Hill then. Armed with tools, allies, and occult knowledge, investigators must put their sanity and stamina to the test as they adventure to locate Elder Signs, the eldritch symbols used to seal away the Ancient Ones and win the game.

To locate Elder Signs, investigators must successfully endure Adventures within the museum and its environs. A countdown mechanism makes an Ancient One appear if the investigators are not quick enough. The investigators must then battle the Ancient One. A clever and thematic dice mechanism pits their exploration against monsters and the sheer difficulty of staying sane and healthy, all within the standard game duration of one to two hours.

Welcome to our new store! You may previously have known us as GamesCache, and before that, Slotcarcentre – however after a torrid time with Scalextric and Geocaching sales in recent years, we have decided to focus purely on the games aspects of the business. Board games are enjoying a revival and it’s an area we have just as much knowledge of.

Hence the new identity and new web site, which also ripples through to Twitter and Facebook. If you are wondering where the new identity comes from, given the store owner’s interest in classic rock, it’s a play on the song “I’ve Seen All Good People / Your Move” by Yes, which appears on “The Yes Album” from 1971. The lyrics have a chess metaphor and there are a few lyrical references which are echoed in the site logo too.

We’re still in the same location and still providing the same service. If you are looking for Scalextric and geocaching items, have a look on our old GamesCache site and our EBay pages where the last of our remaining stock is being sold off during 2016.

As Wil Wheaton says at the end of TableTop episodes… “Play more games!”