Board Games 4 Two

Memoir ’44

Memoir ’44 has fast become the last word in historically-accurate but still immensely playable war-games. It’s WWII and the Allies are locked in a titanic struggle with an implacable enemy. You can play out over 15 different scenarios – key battles from the epic conflict. This game is just beautifully designed. The designer, Richard Borg, has a real passion for these events that shaped the modern…

Two players go head to head in a game of trade and diplomacy set in the desert. The Tuareg nomads trade in goods and money to control other tribes. You must defend against robbery, and carefully deploy your pieces to yield the best results from trades and to keep your opponent from gathering too much wealth and influence. The rule book starts by explaining that it is men who wear the veils in the…

This is a fantastic little abstract strategy game. Each player has four pawns and a Master set out on a 5×5 game. Movement is dictated by a random draw of cards made at the beginning of the game. Each player gets two cards and one is played in the middle. The middle card determines who goes first. The cards, named after the twelve Chinese Zodiac signs, with a few extras, give you a movement…

Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation

This is the updated version of the LOTR game of the same name, and it has already earned its stripes as a classic of the genre. The story you probably know by now – the free peoples of Middle Earth must destroy the One Ring forged by Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom. The forces of Sauron must stop them at any cost. It’s gardening, beer-swilling, singing Hobbits, tough and boisterous dwarves,…

The Benefits of Playing Board Games

I suppose I can’t just simply write, “Because they rock!”, although I will start with that. Because they rock! I’ve been writing about board games for a while now and the more I write about them, the more I think about them, the more I realise they are one of the most overlooked tools in the arsenal of the thinking ape, or whatever it is we are. I know, there’s plenty of people who love board…

Top 5 Tips To Destroy Your Friends At Munchkin

Ok, so it’s not a 2 player game, but it definitely is one of the best card games out there (in my humble opinion). If you’ve ever tried your hand at [easyazon_link identifier=”B004U7JJWE” locale=”US” tag=”boardgames05f-20″]Munchkin[/easyazon_link] you know it’s a fight till the end. Unfortunately, many players make mistakes on the way towards the end game which leaves them vulnerable and at the…

An Interview with David Ausloos

This is quite an old interview – but a good one. Especially for any budding board game designers out there. Can you please introduce yourself? I am David Ausloos, 39, a self-proclaimed dreamer and I love to create worlds. Preferably inside a small cardboard box or on a piece of paper. Where are you from? I am from Antwerp and I still live there. Call me adventurous wink Where did your interest in…

The aim of the Gobblet game is to get four of your pieces in a line, either horizontally, vertically or diagonally, like tic-tac-toe or noughts and crosses but played on a 4×4 board. The thing that makes Gobblet, well, Gobblet is the fact that you have three sizes of pieces, and each will fit neatly inside the next biggest one. This means that with the biggest Gobblet you can cover the two…

There may be a lot more to the simple board game than meets the eye. From any kind of scientific perspective, a great many things are happening simultaneously each time you play a board game. First and foremost, at least two people are getting together with the express intention of spending some time together working on a common goal, that being the playing of the game.

In order to foster the right spirit, many games are competitive in nature, such that you are both attempting to play the game, to achieve the goal of having played the game, but you are also competing to affect the outcome of the game i.e. to win. This is a beautiful example of how games balance seemingly conflicting goals to allow the common goal to be achieved. Both players want to win, but more, they want to play the game. It is more important to play the game since the game cannot be won unless it is played.

Playing the game risks the opposite of your aims being achieved - you may lose. But people are always willing to take that risk if the game is good. Why?

With the best board games, you learn even if you lose, and those who go on to become the best players know this better than anyone. What then is this strange artifact, this thing that teaches us about itself and ourselves, while we play it? Looked at from a purely metaphysical perspective, we see games, therefore, belong to a subset of entities that humankind are somehow living in a symbiotic relationship with. If you look deeper still, we could go so far as to say that games are the universe itself and that they give us a glimpse into an alarming and fascinating property of matter - it can organise itself so that it can teach itself things.

Even according to the materialists, this is phenomenally weird. According to the purely materialist principle, matter organised itself into life, not the other way round. Matter is the pre-existent substrate of life. However, it is interesting to note that once it has organised itself into life and, by extension, human beings, they begin to organise other matter into games. These games utilise certain immutables, like the laws of physics (for the rolling of dice), as things with which the gamers can interact. Is there anything more profoundly fascinating than the idea of a substance (matter) which can be both alive and dead at the same time, animate and inanimate, and which can apparently have both of those two seemingly independent states of being interact with each other for mutual benefit. That is just weird.

I think that all board games are a form of Ouija, but Ouija is the oddest and most spooky demonstration of this weirdness. I would liken it to the radio. Playing one game is like tuning into one radio station, let's say it's Monopoly world. The players then channel the information of the Monopoly matrix for an hour or so. Same with other games. You might not think any of the information you get is odd or strange, since most of it is about Monopoly, of course. Ouija is like taking the same radio set and instead of tuning into one game, in particular, you move the dial around to pick up whatever is around, not just the stuff on the Monopoly frequency. Hence, more weirdness.

The word “Mancala” actually refers to a whole family of games. It has been played around the world for thousands of years. It’s a beauty, since all you need are some counters, and some little pots to keep them in. There are variations in how many counters or stones are used, and how many little pots each player has on each side. The commercially marketed Mancala in the West is a little wooden…

In Warhammer 40,000: Conquest, the race, and the fight is on to gain control of the newly-discovered Traxis sector of planets and systems. You take command of a warlord of one of seven possible factions – the Astra Militarum, the Orks, Chaos, Eldar, Dark Eldar, Tau, and the Space Marines. Each planet you will fight over in the system will give you resources to help further your campaign, should…

Chess is a very old game indeed, and it has seriously stood the test of time. Although relatively simple, it can get fiendishly complicated very quickly. Playing Chess is undoubtedly extremely good for the brain, but I for one find it extremely hard work. My nerves just can’t take the strain. The fact that it takes an hour to play means that by the time it gets round to the endgame, my nerves are…

This is a truly ingeniously conceived little game. As the name might suggest, the aim of the game is actually to build a patchwork quilt faster than your opponent, and whilst scoring more points. The game uses ‘buttons’ as currency and with these, you purchase pieces of differently shaped pieces of material which you then arrange on your quilt board. Each piece has a different value in buttons,…

Sun Tzu Matagot Review

Sun Tzu and his epic story come to a table near you with this great little ancient-style wargame. It’s all about tactics, tactics, and more tactics. The legendary Sun Tzu not also wrote some pretty influential philosophy on tactics for warfare, which has apparently been particularly applicable to the world of business in recent years, he was primarily an accomplished general with an extremely…

Put simply, everyone should have a copy of this game. If you have any interest in history, the mood and feel of this game are unparalleled in bringing to life the various battles of the American Civil War. Over the course of thirty different campaign scenarios, each player pits their wits and their strategic know-how against the other player, but also against the prevailing conditions of each…