Alan writes:

I hope everyone is having a great Christmas. But for some poor souls, the holiday season can be a time of bitterness and sadness. I'd like to take a moment to think about those less fortunate, those who are having a holiday that won't be filled with cheer and goodwill, but instead full of tears, regret, and frustration. I'm talking, of course, of those people who, with their family gathered around them, think it's a great idea to break out Monopoly.

But Monopoly is a classic that the whole family knows, you may well be thinking. But like Cliff Richard and the clap, just because something has been around for a long time and remained in circulation, it doesn't mean that it's any good. If a game generally has an obvious winner two hours in, but it takes another two hours to confirm it, something's wrong. All those stories of families falling out around the Monopoly board? Maybe it's not the family that's disfunctional. Maybe it's the game.

So my advice for the holiday season is to keep yourself warm by slinging that copy of Monopoly in the fire, and setting up a game that's quick to learn, has some interesting decisions, and won't cause violent recriminations and fistfights and banishments from the family home by the end. I recommend For Sale.

I've found that For Sale is quite easy to bring to the table. The property-buying-and-selling theme helps, as it's familiar and not going to put anyone off in the same way as a fantasy or sci-fi theme might. "It's like Monopoly, but quicker and better," you can say, even though the first part of that is a lie. It's not like Monopoly. It's fun.

Set up is simple. Each player gets a pile of coins, with which they will use in a series of auctions to buy a portfolio of properties (or hand of cards, if you prefer). These cards are valued between one (a cardboard box) and thirty (a space station). On each round, one card for each player is revealed, then in turn each player has the option of bidding higher than previously, or passing. If you pass, you pay half your current bid, or nothing if you haven't bid so far, and take the lowest-value card on display. If you win the auction, you pay your full bid. Then another auction round begins, starting with the winning player, until all the cards are gone.

With everyone now owning property, it's time to sell them off quick before the market tanks. A second deck of cards, this time representing sale values between nothing and £15K, is laid out one for each player, just as with the properties. Everyone selects a property card and places it face down, revealing it when everyone has done so. The highest value property gets the highest value cheque, the second-highest value property gets the second-highest value cheque, and so on. Soon your hand of properties will be replaced with a hand of cheques. Add these to anything left over from auctioning. Got the most money? Hooray! You won! Don't have the most money? Well, you didn't win, but with a game as short as this, you may be able to win the next one.

For Sale has a lot of interesting decisions you can make for its short play time, but never complicated enough to linger over. There's some randomness and luck, but not the frustrating kind, just enough to make the game different from play to play. Crucially, while some good decisions in the auction phase of the game can leave you in a strong position for the selling phase, a win is not guaranteed. Unlike choosing For Sale over Monopoly - then a win is almost certainly guaranteed.

For Sale at BoardGameGeek.

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Alan writes...

I had a couple of false starts when it came to getting into gaming. All the talk of 'gateway games' isn't for nothing - pick the wrong game and you'll be put off. I blundered into Static Games in Glasgow a few years back and stumbled back out with MidEvil. There were a few attempts to play it, but it just didn't seem fun at all. Despite the nice theme and components, it felt cheap and random lacked any tension or meaningful strategy. It sat unloved on my shelf.

Flash forward to a few months ago, and I read this article in Wired:

Instead of direct conflict, German-style games tend to let players win without having to undercut or destroy their friends. This keeps the game fun, even for those who eventually fall behind. Designed with busy parents in mind, German games also tend to be fast, requiring anywhere from 15 minutes to a little more than an hour to complete. They are balanced, preventing one person from running away with the game while the others painfully play out their eventual defeat. And the best ones stay fresh and interesting game after game.

Now this was intriguing. I headed to my local game shop, where I expressed an interest in Catan.

"Who will you be playing with?" asked the owner. "Probably mostly just me and my girlfriend," I answered. I left with Carcassonne. It was a canny move by the proprietor. Carcassonne was cheaper than Settlers of Catan, but he's extracted quite a bit of money from me since, and will no doubt continue to do so. Carcassonne drew us in, and has retained its magic - and I suspect it will be a long time before we're bored with it. It should have a place in every home, gamers or not, as much as the television, or the PC, or the kettle. I have a vision of a wonderful future, where pubs have a spillage-proof Carcassonne set alongside the pool table and dartboard, where kids play as much Carcassonne as video games, where it's the social lubricant it should be. It'll never happen. The world is missing out.

It should be clear now: I like Carcassonne. I'm almost delirious with glee at having discovered it, and this is without playing a single expansion (barring The River expansion that comes with the base game). I suppose I better explain why.

There's something in the components that's reminiscent of the old toys my generation never really had or was interested in, those wooden toys only seen in sentimental Christmas films. Those chunky little wooden people (or meeple as they're known) are very satisfying to handle and place on the board. Apparently it's good form when playing Go to place your piece with a confident click, and the similarly the sturdy stick-figure meeple allow you to make moves you are unsure about with apparent confidence. The wooden tiles are thick and will likely last quite some time. So that's it. Some little wooden men, some thick tiles, a scoring track. The games we grew up with had so many more pieces - Monopoly with its paper money, houses and hotels; The Game of Life with those fiddly plastic pegs and cars, even Chess with its confusing bishops and pawns (well, my set was confusing, anyway) - and nowhere near as much game. We were robbed, frankly. There's a simplicity here that's wondrous to behold.

The game itself is very easy to learn. Choose a tile. Place the tile where you want, as long as its allowed. Then, if you want, place one of your counters on that tile. If your piece is on a completed city, road, or cloister, you get it back and score points. Place a 'farmer' in a field and you lose that piece for the rest of the game, so you have to decide if you want to grab a nice looking field early and lose out on possible points elsewhere. No meeples left? Tough. You'll have to complete something before placing anything else, so while it's tempting to get all of your followers out there scoring points for you, there's always the possibility that a better opportunity may present itself with no opportunity to grab it. It's especially gutting when you have a nice cloister and nothing to place on it. That's nine points you'll never see, you think, as you glumly place the empty monastery down.

Like any great game, there's simplicity hiding depth. Once you have the main principles, you have options - do you block your opponents, or concentrate on scoring some points? Should you make this city bigger, or make sure you complete it before the end of the game for full points? What colour should I pick? (Green is out, obviously, as Gillian always picks green.) The game even adapts to your mood. If you're in a punchy mood, you can play aggressively and really annoy your opponent, trash-talking and building up the resentment that can throw your opponent into a right mood. But if it's late at night and you're just looking to relax, you can keep to your side of the board. There's a real satisfaction in putting the tiles together to create a map alone, even without the game, a sort of lazy creativity.

In short, I recommend this game wholeheartedly. It's a fantastic two-player game, and can accommodate more if you're looking to indoctrinate friends. Get it if you don't already. Dig it out again if you do. Or play the online version, which trades ease of scoring for tactility. That's not a trade I recommend long-term.

Carcassonne at BoardGameGeek

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