Still playing stacks of games. Here are two fun table-top games.

Pit

Why is this fun game not more widely known? A fast-paced game of trading cards which represent stocks like wheat, flax and barley. You need about 7 or 8 players. It's over one hundred years old! I think it's hard to find a pack of Pit cards in the wild, other than eBay or the odd car boot sale. When you do, you get trading, monopolies, strategy, shouting and high speed tactics. Then when you've finished, the stock market is clapped out and you have to enter a period of quantitative easing or something.

Cranium Wow

You might know Cranium, which takes familiar perennial classics like charades, Pictionary, trivia and word games and packs them all into a kind of cannibalistic mother-all-party-games, with deluxe design and frills. This is the Wow version which is mostly the same as the original but with extra stuff. We realised the board, as with many dice-rolling games, is a way of keeping "score" against the other team. I wish there were more ways of influencing the other team's behaviour (like the way two chess games are never the same). These kinds of board games are just a race, which is OK I guess.

Bonus!

Here's a really sweet series of animated cartoons called Understanding Games (from which I took the above screen shot) along with some cutesy experimental one-player and two-player web browser games built with Flash.

The Beach
Our preparation for The Beach in July is coming on well, thanks. Right on schedule. More info soon.