Board games

A while ago I bought Mapominoes Europe on a whim, and I’m now having to fight the urge to buy its many variations/expansions.

As the title suggests it is broadly based on dominoes, but instead of placing tiles by the numbers they have in common, it is based on countries with shared borders. Also unlike dominoes the cards are played not in a line but in a grid, and all neighbours have to be compatible.

The mechanics are simple enough to pick up and the game is quite suitable for children - I’m having fun playing with my six year old. It does hide some surprising depth though.

All the cards are dealt between the players and the goal is to be the first to play all your cards. Every player also starts with a pair of transit cards which can be played as stand-ins for either a sea (which are listed on the cards just like countries) or as another country. You get an extra turn if you can play a card bordering more than one card, and miss a turn if you are forced to draw another transit card because you can’t go.

There are several versions of the game, some of which are compatible with each other and can be combined into a larger game. The compatibles ones are:

• Europe
• Asia & Australasia
• Africa
• Americas (N&S)

There are also two standalone games:

• USA (states)
• United Kingdom (counties)

After getting the Europe set I also got the Asia & Australasia set. Despite it taking up a lot of space, playing with those two was a lot of fun. Trying to play game with more than two would be challenging I think (although specifically in the case of those two it is helped by both sets containing Russia and Turkey).

Betrayal at House on the Hill is a board game published by Avalon Hill and designed by Bruce Glassco. The game is split into two parts. In the first, the players become trapped in a haunted house which they must explore, revealing rooms as they do. At some point the second part, the “haunt”, begins in which one player (generally) becomes a traitor and everyone plays out one of 50 scenarios pitting the traitor against the others.

An important part of the game involves tracking each of the player’s attributes (each character has a different range of possible values for each attribute). Since the included cardboard trackers can be loose and tend to slip out of place, a few different smartphone apps have appeared to help the situation.

The earliest Android version is Betrayal Character Cards. This app does the bare minimum needed. You can see a list of characters, see their attribute ranges and select the current value for each. As a small extra it also includes the birthday and hobbies of each character (which has a minor gameplay purpose).

Out of the apps available this is the simplest and has the least features. On the other hand this should run on the widest range of devices.

Ever heard of the board game Risk? If you haven’t then unfortunately I’m not going to be the one to tell you about it so go away now :).

If you have heard it, this post is going to mention a quick variation on the original rules I tend to play with friends. There may be more in the future.

The modification we play most of the time is to Risk cards themselves. We found suddenly receiving 8 or 10 troops in a country of your choice too powerful (how anybody plays with the progressive-risk-card-reinforcement rule I don’t know). So we decided that you only got the two reinforcements in the country on the card. The alteration is that it applies even the country is an oponent (we call it the Paratrooper rule). If you have paratroopers they just attack that country like normal.