If this video leaves you with the urge to get your Indiana Jones on, Cobra Paw is available to play in the Treehouse library and to buy in our online shop, for UK-wide postal delivery or free click & collect.
This video was produced by Matt Turner and Patrick Lickman. Check out Patrick’s website here for more examples of his great editing work. Music courtesy of Sounds Like An Earful.
Can The Prismatic Piper be considered a colorless deck when you chose a color for it before hand?
The game begins with players receiving their secret role card, determining whether they’re on team villager, trying to track down a possible werewolf in their midst before it’s too late, or team werewolf, trying to lie low and avoid detection. Certain village team roles come with special powers, giving players nuggets of information to help put them on the scent, while others act as instruments of chaos adding extra layers of intrigue.
Cue the night time phase: all players place their character cards face down in front of them and close their eyes. The various roles then trigger one at a time, letting the relevant players peak at other cards around the table, swap roles around, or perhaps lock eyes with a fellow werewolf. The game comes with a handy app to talk you through the steps, complete with (optional) spooky disco soundtrack. Then daybreak arrives, giving players a matter of minutes to exchange information, hurl accusations, and finally… decide who to lynch! If the majority vote for a werewolf, it’s victory for the villagers, but if not, the werewolves win the day.
This game needs 5+ players to shine, and the range of roles in the box leaves you with plenty of options for switching things up.
If you haven’t yet played this absolute blockbuster of a modern classic, consider your party plans sorted! There are no hidden roles here, just plenty of tension and occasional opportunities for feeling like a genius… or the opposite.
The game set-up is a five by five grid of word cards in the centre of the table, selected randomly from a sizeable stack. Players form two teams, red and blue, then each team selects a ‘spymaster’ who will be their clue-giver for the rest of the game. The two spymasters sit where they can both see a card which allocates each word in the central grid to either the red team, the blue team, a decoy beige category… or one final option which I’ll come back to.
Spymasters take turns to provide a clue to their teams in a specific format: a single word that relates to one or more of the words of their colour in the grid, plus a number which indicates how many words the clue links to. Coming up with the clues is fiendishly tricky, but once that’s done, spymasters simply sit back and maintain a poker face as their team members decide how to interpret their new information, and make a guess at which word(s) in the grid the clue relates to. Each word guessed correctly is covered by a card of the team’s colour, bringing them one step closer to victory. Incorrect guesses either end the turn (beige words), give points to the other team (words of the opposing colour) or, possibly… LOSE THE ENTIRE GAME, in the case of the one black word on the grid: the DEADLY ASSASSIN.
With so much at stake, there’s no shortage of tension here, and few moments in gaming are as satisfying as thinking up or cracking a particularly great clue… or as nerve-wracking as watching your team confidently take hold of the wrong end of the stick. This game works well with four players and brilliantly with six, and if you can’t get together in person there’s an awesome free online version here.
If you’ve mastered Codenames and aren’t put off by the idea of getting your head around a few more rules, we’d strongly recommend Decerypto – check out the review here to find out why.
I was really into pokemon cards when I was little, not so much playing the game (Mostly because I didn’t know how) but collecting them. But that was years ago. I’ve recently decided to whip them out again and am trying to create a 60 card playing deck. I have more than enough, but I can’t figure out how to properly make it. I actually have already created one, however, I got it completely wrong. As in, 15 Pokemon, 10 Trainer, and 35 Energy cards type wrong. I understand this isn’t how a deck should be made, however, there doesn’t seem to be anything on how to balance the card types out correctly.
What should the ‘ratio’ be? (For lack of better words).
Looking for a social activity that’s basically COVID-proof? Allow us to present… two-player board games! If you’re lucky enough to live with at least one other person of a game-playing age and inclination, this is a fun thing you can do without the leaving the house, inviting anyone round, or (once you have the game), even spending money!
Convinced? Great! Here are some of our favourite games for two to help you prepare for whatever comes along next…
Hive, aka ‘insect chess’, is a strong contender for my favourite two-player game EVER, which is maybe surprising given my complete ambivalence about actual chess. This neat strategy game packs bags of depth and replayability into a handful of tactile Bakelite pieces, and will fit in a handbag or even a (large) pocket if you buy the mini version.
The game itself has just a handful of rules, and absolutely zero set-up beyond tipping the pieces out of the bag and splitting them by colour. On a turn, either add a new piece to the playing area or move a piece you’ve placed already. Pieces feature different types of insects that move in different ways. In the basic version of the game there are just five species to get your head around: ants, grasshoppers, beetles, spiders and the all-important queen bee.
You win the game if your opponent’s queen is completely surrounded by other pieces, regardless of whether those pieces are yours or theirs. There are just a couple of additional rules relating to placement and movement, but that’s basically the whole game (check out the Shut Up and Sit Down review here for a more complete run-through if you like to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s).
Once you’re under way, this simple set of rules magically transforms into a quick-yet-satisfying playing experience that will get those mental cogs turning just enough without causing total burn-out, and will almost certainly leave you coming back for more.
As if that wasn’t enough, sturdiness of the pieces and lack of a board make this a game you can play pretty much anywhere. We’ve played Hive in the pub, in the park, even on a picnic blanket at a festival. Admittedly some of these settings might not be immediately relevant, but a game this durable will still be going strong when they are!
Once upon a time, way back when we were taking our very first steps into modern board gaming, Andy went on a quest to find a great two-player game for us to take on holiday, and came back with a neat little box containing Jaipur. We hadn’t played that many Euro-style games by this point, and initially I confess that the Middle-Eastern marketplace theme and apparent excess of camels left me a touch sceptical. But, as soon as I got to grips with the carefully balanced back-and-forth of the gameplay, my scepticism dissolved, and even the quantity of camels began to make sense.
Jaipur is a two-player card game in which players compete for the approval of the Maharaja, which they can gain by becoming the richest merchant in two out of three rounds of trading in the city of Jaipur’s market place.
The game mainly consists of a deck of cards containing a mixture goods to be traded and a WHOLE LOT of camels. The options on a turn are simple: either take one goods card or ALL THE CAMELS from the market place for free; swap goods cards from your hand and/or camels from your herd with the same number of goods from the market place; or, sell a set of matching goods to gain victory points (the more cards sold at once the better in terms of gaining points).
It’s straightforward on the surface, but with a hand limit of seven cards there are quickly some difficult choices to be made, and the more cards you take from the market the more new ones will appear before your opponent’s next turn and the higher the chance of them being able to claim something especially nice and shiny.
Again this game is super-portable, and packs a lot of depth and replayability into a neat little box. Plus, the recently-released second edition has given it a fresh coat of paint, making it extra vibrant and appealing.
If you prefer your games to have an engaging theme, or at the very least to contain cute plastic animals, Ice Team might be right up your ice floe. The aim of this simple, two-player race game is to get your team of polar bears from one end of the board to the other as quickly as you can, acquiring as many fish as possible along the way.
The modular race course can be arranged in different ways and there’s some randomness in the set-up, so the obstacles you’re tackling will be different each time. The rules for movement are simple: pick a bear and hop it to an adjacent ice berg tile or swim in a straight line across open water. Bears can leap-frog over each other should the opportunity arise, and some of the ice berg tiles do different things, from providing you with fish to letting you satisfyingly surf to the next spot.
There’s a bit of chance involved in winning, with the number of fish you acquire being partly determined by dice rolls, but there’s plenty of strategy too, especially when it comes to making your adorable team work together effectively.
This is a great choice if you’re looking for a game to engage a younger audience (the publishers recommend it for ages 8+), but we’re confident most adults will find it irresistible and more-ish too, and the theme feels just festive enough to make it ideal for Christmas but playable all year round!
Sometimes the premise of a game is so awesome that it’s enough to convince you to give it a try all by itself. We’ve persuaded a whole lot of people to try out Raptor at The Treehouse pretty much on the basis of theme alone, but the good news is that the gameplay is excellent too!
Raptor is an asymmetric game where one player takes on the role of a mother raptor, quietly minding her own business in the jungle/ desert (the board is double-sided) while tending her brood of babies. The other player takes control of a team of scientists, whose aim is to steal at least three of those babies away before the mother can get them safely off the board.
If you’re anything like us you already want to give this a go, but before you dive in let’s talk about how it works. Each player controls their pieces using a small deck of cards numbered one to nine. On each turn, both players draw three cards to choose from, and place the one they want to play face down. The chosen cards are revealed simultaneously (a mechanic we always love, incidentally), and determine who can do what. Each card has a particular power (adding new scientists to the board, say, or letting the mother raptor call some of her babies closer to her), but in order to activate that power the card must have a lower number than the other player. Whoever played the higher number instead gets to perform a number of actions (again, character-specific) equal to the difference in the numbers on the two cards chosen.
Every game of Raptor is guaranteed to be packed with narrative and drama. If the game has a flaw it’s that it seems to be harder to win as the raptors than the scientists, but that only makes victory all the sweeter when you do manage to get your brood to safety!
We know that for some people, competitiveness is a real barrier to enjoyment when it comes to board gaming, and probably never more so than when you’re stuck in a house together with no variety of opponents. Cooperative games offer a neat solution to this: all players work together to defeat the game, so you’re all on the same side and can rage or gloat as a team. The absolute classic of this genre is arguably 2008 release Pandemic in which players race to save the world from viruses, but although this saw a surge in popularity at The Treehouse back in March, we suspect the novelty of this particular theme has probably worn a little thin by this point!
Forbidden Desert was created by the same designer (Matt Leacock, in case you’re interested) and sees players stranded in the desert, racing to assemble a magical air ship from parts which have been scattered across the sand dunes, in order to escape to safety before their water supply runs out. So a bit like going on holiday somewhere hot, if you focus on the right bits!
Players take turns performing actions to bring everyone closer to their goal, moving around the board and excavating spaces to search for airship components. All the while, the sun beats down and a raging sandstorm roams the board, burying everything deeper and deeper under a layer of sand.
This game involves a bunch of really neat mechanics not to mention some great components, and can be played by up to five people if you have them available, although (like most cooperative games) it works beautifully with just two.
If all the options above sound a little too strategic, or if you’re up against some extreme board game scepticism, Tokyo Highway might be the answer. Ever since we added this to our library, we’ve been getting questions along the lines of “what’s that game they’re playing with the tiny cars? It looks so cool!”, and we can only agree: yes, it really does.
To be good at Tokyo Highway, you’ll need spatial awareness, a little bit of strategy, and perhaps most importantly, fine motor skills (don’t be fooled by the plastic tweezers that come with the game – they don’t help as much as you think!). The aim of the game is to place all of your tiny wooden vehicles on sections of your very own highway system, but in order to do this you’ll have to make it cross over and under your opponent’s roads in very specific ways, guaranteeing the creation of an urban planner’s nightmare!
This game is truly unlike any other we’ve come across, and has been known to lure in even the most doubtful gamers. Just make sure your table doesn’t wobble before you begin!
In Betrayal, players take on the role of characters exploring a spooky mansion. You begin the game in the entrance hall, comfortable in the knowledge that you’re all on the same side, and feeling ready for an adventure. The mansion slowly reveals its secrets as you explore, which (spolier alert) pretty much always include some truly daft architectural choices, given that the room tiles are drawn at random. Some rooms contain items (often useful stuff like weapons, etc), while others trigger creepy little events or, most excitingly, reveal omens. Each time an omen is appears, six dice are rolled, and if the total number that comes out is lower than the number of omens you’ve encountered so far… then it’s officially SPOOK TIME, because The Haunt is about to begin.
This is the point at which Betrayal really comes into its own. The basic game comes with a book of 50 different scenarios which can trigger at this point. Which one you end up with is determined by the number on the omen card that tipped the balance, and which room it was found in (who’s to say a scary plot line can’t begin with a look-up table? Certainly not us!). The only thing the scenarios have in common is that they will pit one player (the traitor) against the rest. Who becomes the traitor is determined by the scenario, but whoever they are, they will now become the keeper of the Traitor’s Tome which will provide them with their new, secret win condition and let them know their new spooky powers.
We’ve played a few games of Betrayal ourselves and had a LOT of discussions with people who’ve playing it at the Treehouse, and are always astonished at the variety of plot lines. Yes, some of them are better-designed from a gameplay point of view than others, but we’ve never been disappointed with the narrative that develops: this game has genuinely produced some of our favourite board game storylines. If you’re up for some super-nerdy viewing, check out this episode of Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop, which does a great job of demonstrating just how funny and unpredictable Betrayal can be!
Pretty much the only downside to this game at the moment is that you do need at least three people to play it, and ideally 5-6 to experience it at it’s best. If you’re lucky enough to have the player count right now, we strongly recommend giving this one a go.
I am looking for a board game along the lines of Monopoly, but, where people in the game can make children and take turns being the parents and the children.
In the middle of the board is a "year clock", that ticks forward one year with each go.
In each go, people take cards like in Monopoly to see what happens as they move around the circuit.
There, could be, many variations of this game.
Where can I find such a game?
Thanks.
EDIT: I could have made this a really nice game, but, didn’t, have time, to write down all the ideas.
People could also collect ideas, teachings, changes, lessons learned, desires, and other things, as gadgets (in the game), which may affect how people move through the game.
There could also be an AI-powered board fate controlled, smartphone, placed in the middle of the board, so that players could play a large infinitude of games with the same board and pieces (the center AI could be powered through an app (and there could also be custom apps for given boards, and users not having a board and pieces could copy them at home with material based on standard board compendium descriptions provided on websites).
Thanks.
Chella:
“We are still enjoying online games with friends and family, including improvised Just One using pen and paper; a little rough and ready homemade web version of Telestrations coded by a friend; a phone-based version of Cards Against Humanity called All Bad Cards, and most of the Jackbox games (repeat faves are Quiplash, Drawful, Fibbage and Trivia Murder Party). We’ve also been meeting our friends in Board Game Arena to play Hanabi which is nice because they live in Hamburg.
I’m lucky enough to be researching design fictions on my PhD so I’ve been able spend time playing some old and not so old text based adventures and narrative games (in the name of research!) on Steam and Itch.io, some of which I grabbed in the latter’s ‘Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality’ a while back.
We’ve had a few breaks in play, but when we can get everyone together we continue roleplaying using Discord and Foundry Virtual Tabletop. We are about six sessions into the Enemy Within Campaign from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
We’ve also recently discovered that Airbnb now offers online experience tours, so we can finally realise our literal board game name location challenge: we’ve been saving two bottles of Jaipur IPA so that we can play Jaipur while drinking Jaipur, and now we can have a complete date night of that plus an online tour of Jaipur, India!”
Patrick:
“In our house we’ve been enjoying online card games like Magic: the Gathering Arena and Legends of Runeterra. They’re not quite the same as sitting opposite an opponent to duke it out, but they both scratch a strategic itch! Magic in particular is in a good place right now, and it’s great to just drop a game or two over the course of an afternoon.”
Then, last but very definitely not least… Ella:
“I’ve been making board games into drinking games (Cobra Paw) and I’m going to make a huge Battleships board to put drinks on in place of ships, then if your opponent hits your boat you neck whatever drink is on that square 🤪”
I’m looking for any information about a card game that was taught to me by a friend, who claims this game is of Turkish origin.
The game plays fairly similar to shedding card games like Mau-Mau, Uno, or Crazy Eights. It is played with one deck of standard French cards per two persons, including 2 jokers per deck (so 3 and 4 persons play with 2 decks + 4 jokers). The player who sheds their last card wins the round. At the end of the round each player counts the value of their remaining cards and adds it to their tally. If the last card played was a joker every opponent gets another 100 points each added to their score. At the end of the game the player with the least points wins.
Before the start of the game one player shuffles the cars. The player to the left of them then cuts the deck anywhere and openly draws all of the "significant" cards or clubs, until they have either 7 cards or there is a regular card. The dealer then combines the lower pile on top, the upper pile (the one that just got drawn from) on the bottom, so that every player knows the last card. From this pile the dealer deals each player cards up to 7 cards. The remaining cards are then placed face-down in a drawing stack.
The player to the left of the dealer begins the game by playing a club or a jack. Every player also has to play a club or jack. Significant cards that force another player to draw a card can be played, but have no effect. When the turn switches from dealer to 1st player (or vice-versa), these restrictions are lifted.
If a player is unable or unwilling to legally play a card they have to draw one card from the drawing stack. If it enables them to play a legal card they may do so in that same turn, but they can not continue to draw more cards. If the drawing stock is depleted it is NOT replenished, instead you have to skip as many turns as you would have drawn cards.
When you play your second to last card you have to announce Tek, or else you will have to take a penalty card (I think Tek is just Turkish for last card). You can chain significant cards to skip that announcement. For the next game the player that did the initial cut of the deck now becomes the dealer.
Significant cards are as follows:
The cards are valued as follows:
This game was taught to me over 10 years ago by an acquaintance of Turkish origin. Since then I have played this game with many friends and family. It is our absolute go-to card game, as it is taught easily, it requires some strategy, but is not too involving as to not have a little chat while playing it. With my closest friends we even have coined a little trophy that the winner of each session gets to keep. Usually when we all get the chance to meet up we tally our scores over multiple days, but we don’t add them up until the very end to keep the rankings a secret.
The game rewards building up chains and keeping high valued cards until the end. Ending your game while others still have their jokers on their hands, seeing their desperation growing with each card you play is a priceless feeling. 😀 In the opposite direction, jokers can sometimes feel like they are "burning" in your hand.
This type of game tends to vary the rules a lot, and we had to come up with some ourselves to deal with edge cases. Therefore the rules depicted here may not reflect the exact rules you know – however I am looking for any game from the same region with sort of similar rules. We refer to it as Tek simply because the name stuck, but I’m sure the actual name was different. Any hint is appreciated.
Slowly but surely we’re getting a clearer picture of what’s in store for us over the festive season at the end of this weirdest of years. It’s looking like getting family together around a table will be ‘a thing’ this year in our part of the world, but with pubs shut in a lot of places and household mingling still limited, Christmas merriment might still need a bit of a helping hand.
That’s where (you guessed it) board games come in! Long a traditional component of Christmas for lots of families, board games have come a very long way over the past decade or so, and have never offered so many effective ways to get the fun started. Here’s our Christmas Games Guide 2020 to help you navigate these crowded waters and find the perfect family game for Christmas…