Games and Puzzles

This game was 'Game of the Year' in 2017. Superficially it is quite simple.  Everybody starts with a castle, around which you build your kingdom.  Then you choose your dominoes. On these are pictured the type of lands you will have in your kingdom.  So you might have a domino with a square of forest at one end and water at the other, or another with meadow at both ends. After you have chosen each domino, you lay it around the castle and, like in dominoes, you can only put a farmland domino next to another farmland and so on. At each step your kingdom gets bigger.  The aim though is to build as big an area of each type of land as you can within your kingdom. So you score more points if you have a block of five squares of farmland together than you would if those five squares were split. Once you have all placed your dominoes, that's the end of the game and you have to total the points.

Each round takes about 15 minutes.

2 - 4 players

Age suitability: 8 +

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28 chunky wooden dominoes in a sturdy wooden box with a sliding lid.

Storage box measures about 33 x 20 x 2.5 cm

Age suitability: 3 years +

BJ157

 Play the centuries-old strategy game on this wooden board.

Comes with 48 colourful acrylic 'stones'.

Two-player game for people of almost all ages (not suitable for the under 3 year-olds - small bits - choking hazard).

34007

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Colourful wooden board with four wooden counters and a dice.

28 cm across

Age suitability: 3 years +

BJ788

Claims to be the ultimate wood game - not sure if Scrabble would agree.

You have to race your opponents to make a word grid and be the first to use up all the letters.

1-7 players

7+ years  age suitability

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Camel Up features a camel race and you have to bet on the winners and losers.  Throwing the dice determines which camel moves forward and how far but it's not quite so simple.

Each game takes about half an hour.

3-8 players

Age suitability: 8+

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Abalone is like chess played with marbles but thankfully the rules are more simple and straightforward.  It is two-person game that bright seven year olds will be able to play.  There's even an Abalone world championship.

You have a hexagonal board with 14 white marbles set up against your opponent's 14 black ones. When it's your turn, you move one of your marbles, or a row of two or three marbles, one step in any direction. When your marbles meet your opponents, on your next move you can push them backwards, forwards or sideways.  The aim is to push your opponent's marbles off the board and into the gutter that surrounds it but your column of marbles has to bigger than theirs.  So you need two of your marbles to push one of their marbles, three of yours to push two of theirs. The winner is the first to push off 6 marbles.  For most people, the game will last about 20 minutes.

Here's a video explaining it:

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Jungle Speed is a fast and furious, somewhat chaotic, game of observation and then of lightning reflexes, so that rules me out.

It is a matching game, a bit like snap, but, instead of calling out snap when two cards match, you have to be the first to grab the Totem (the yellow rubber cylinder thing) that sits in the middle of the table.

The cards are divided equally amongst the players (the more, the merrier).  On each card is a symbol in a variety of colours.  Some symbols are quite different, others are deceptively alike. Players place their cards in a pile face down in front of them.  One by one, each player flips over the top card and, as they accumulate, gradually makes a discard pile in front of him.  When one player flips over a card whose symbol matches the shape of the symbol on the top card of another player's discard pile, both players make a lunge for the Totem.  The winner then smugly hands over his discard cards to the loser who puts both these and his own discard cards face down under his cards.  Grabbing the Totem mistakenly results in you getting everybody's discard cards. The winner of the game is the first to get rid of all their cards.  Each game takes about 20 minutes.

To complicate the game further, there are several special cards.  One of these special cards for example changes the rules so that you have to match the colour of symbols rather than the shape. A different special card requires every player to lunge simultaneously for the Totem.  A third one requires everybody to flip over a card at he same time on the count of three.

2 - 8 players

Age suitability: 6 +

Here's an excellent Youtube video from Skip the Rules (NB the Totem has since been changed from wood to rubber):