Games Galore!

Today's post is from bookseller Emy, who reveals a hitherto unknown competitive streak!

Christmas is a great excuse to get round a table and play a good old-fashioned board game.
Except, if you're anything like my family, the same person will always win Monopoly and no-one can agree whether 'za' is an acceptable word in Scrabble (it is, especially if I'm using it on a triple word score). No-one actually makes it to the table and you all sit around watching a film you've seen more times than you'd care to mention.
Solution? Try something totally different! We've got some fantastic games in store that you've probably never considered.

First off we have Fleeced, from those lovely people at Aardman Animations. The basic premise is that you must get to the centre of the board, use a card to open a building, rustle the sheep within and get back to your starting spot. Rinse and repeat until all the sheep are safely stored away. Of course, your competitors are all attempting the same thing and they can steal your sheep as well. And the most difficult part? You must use your whistle every time you move with your sheep or they all wander off, leaving you looking a little, ahem, sheepish. A great game for all the family and dead easy to learn.

If you're looking for something a bit more challenging, try 7 Wonders. You have to build one of the seven wonders of the world. You can choose to achieve victory through a multitude of strategies, using culture, commerce, science, warfare and resource gathering. It's a very diverse game which changes every time you play and, while it takes a few games to really find your feet, once you're there you won't want to stop.

Not evil enough? How about Zombies!!!? (Do I really need to explain this one? Don't the three exclamation marks say it all? No?) Take one zombie infested city, add humans, bullets, health packs and a helicopter, conveniently placed just out of your reach. And backstabbing. Oh, so much backstabbing. Each turn, one player places a piece of the map, add the items and zombies that tile requires before moving his or her human and several zomies. And why would you simply move the zombies out of the way when you could point them at your competitors and run quickly in the other direction?

For more zombie fun there's Zombie Dice, a good warm up to any games evening, or to liven up that half hour between eating the last bit of  Christmas pudding and watching the Queen's speech. There are three symbols to learn - brains, shotgun and footsteps. Pick three dice from the pot without looking, roll and choose how you proceed. Brains equal points (and points mean... victory and and a justifiable smugness! (Sorry, no prizes!)), shotguns are your doom and footsteps mean you don't get to eat, but you also don't lose an arm. If you roll three shotguns, you get no points and that's your turn over. Until then, you can keep drawing dice and 'stick' with the amount of brains you have. First to thirteen brains wins!

Allergic to dice? Dominion is certified dice-free and is packed with healthy, healthy cards, full of delicious victory points. Build your deck and buy victory points, but beware, the more victory points you buy, the less effective your deck will be! A very simple game to learn, with endless strategy options and a varied game to game play. You select, at random, varied card groups from the box, so each game will have different cards available and you must modify your game play to fit.

Are you good at building French cities? No? Why on earth not? What have you been doing? Reading a book, you say? Oh well alright, but I'm not going to let you off again. For this you'll need Carcassone. Build cities, fields, roads and monasteries and place your meeples (little people pieces), to score points. It all about grabbing points for completing things before the game ends and sabotaging your opponent's chances of finishing. A different game every time due to the randomly constructed map and so easy to learn. Besides, it has meeples!

Last, but not least, The Settlers of Catan, a trading, building board game with cards. Achieve the most victory points by gathering supplies, building villages, roads and cities, buy cards to build your army, trade with your neighbours and the bank and attempt, above all else, to roll a 7 and sabotage your opponent's resource supply line. A little more involved but worth the effort, especially if you enjoy a spot of haggling.



 Give a new game a try and you won't be disappointed!