This game stinks.

Wait, come back. It’s actually a great game, and the components are wonderful. There’s just one problem. The leather dice cup that comes with the game smells a little unpleasant. It’s not unbearably obnoxious, just the sort of whiff that will make you stick your nose inquisitively into the cup, curse at the pong, then will lure you back for another sniff, just to check it was as bad as you thought.

It’s not enough to mark the game down – in fact, that a leather dice cup is included with the game is a definite thematic plus – but just something to be aware of in case you’re overly sensitive to such things. For the rest of us, we’ll enjoy the cup, as it’s quite satisfying to use, tipping the dice again and again. Yes, this is a game with lots of dice rolling – but worry not, it’s not a game of pure random chance. Unlike, presumably, the red-in-tooth-and-claw of actual Stone Age life.

Stone Age casts you as the leader of a small tribe of little wooden cavemen, and it’s your job to grow your tribe, keep them fed, gather resources, build huts, and score more points before the Bronze Age dawns. Each round, the new starting player will begin by placing one or more cavemen on one area of the board for a certain action. Play then passes clockwise, until all tribesmen are on the board. Then, again beginning with the starting player that round, all actions are resolved one player at a time. All players then pay out food, and the token representing the starting player – which we call Brian thanks to his resemblance to bellowing actor Brian Blessed  – passes clockwise. And so the game continues until one pile of huts have been bought, or almost all the civilisation cards are gone.

As you start with only five meeples in your tribe, it can be tough to decide where to place them. The most in-demand spaces are in the village, where you can work in the field and reduce the need to go hunting, or produce tools that help offset poor dice rolls, or spend two of your men (or presumably, one man and one woman – though who knows how modern they might have been in prehistoric times) and add one to your population at the ‘adoption hut’. Depending on how resistant to scandal you are, you may want to use a ruder name for this.

Outside of the village, you can gather resources, and this is where the dice-rolling comes into play. If you choose to gather food, wood, brick, stone or gold, you get one die for each tribesman you commit. There’s unlimited room to gather food, but space is tight everywhere else. Finally, you have civilisation cards and huts. Huts are simple, trading resources for points, while civilisation cards give you both an instant reward and points at the end. And it’s these cards that make the game deep, and are, to me, the game’s biggest drawback.

The cards have several different ways to score at the end of the game, such as points for huts, points for how many cavemen you have, how many tools, and so on. There’s also a set-collection aspect; some cards have symbols, the more you collect, the more points you’ll earn. It means that there are several different routes to victory, and you’re free to choose the path you think will win you the  game. Therein can lie the danger;  you can spend your time happily collecting resources and huts to find that your opponent, with their handful of cards, has gone on to beat you by 122 points. The problem is that this means the majority of points will be scored at the very end of the game, which can reduce the tension a little.

The good aspects of this game outweigh this relatively minor grumble, though. The game scales very well between two and four players with some minor rule adjustments. With the exception of dice cup odour, the components are brilliantly produced with lots of nice details. Gold is in the shape of the traditional gold bar, bricks are little oblongs,  wood comes in satisfying little planks that stack up nicely in your resources collection, and your meeples look like little hairy ruffians. The main board manages to be full of interesting art without being cluttered, and each player has a board to organise huts, cards, and resources. It’s a lovely thing to behold.

It still stinks, though.

Stone Age at BoardGameGeek

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Twilight Struggle is not a light game. Not by our standards, anyway - GMT, the publisher, rate it a mere four out of a possible nine. Mind you, GMT also produce huge games that look like this monstrosity. Let's just say it's a bit more complicated than Lost Cities. As it would be unfair to write a full review of Twilight Struggle after just a handful of games, this is instead our initial impressions of the game.

First, what is it? It's a wargame of sorts, but as it's the Cold War with its intrigue and subterfuge and war by proxy, it's not a wargame as you might know it. In fact, direct conflict is disastrous: trigger nuclear war during your turn and you immediately lose. Nuclear armageddon makes losers of us all, of course, but as the instigator you look pretty bad. I guess that sheepishness you'd feel would make you the ultimate loser.

Twilight Struggle is about influence - spreading your influence, reducing your enemy's influence, and attempting coups to flip countries to your way of thinking. One player takes on the role of the USA, attempting to stymie the red menace, while the other tries to unite the workers of the world as the USSR. The board is a map of the world, with important countries/groups of countries highlighted as boxes and linked to show which are 'next' to each other. The board has a fairly stark and minimalist look, with pale colours to help show which countries are part of which region, and a few tracks for keeping score and tracking turns. The turn track and "Space Race" have photos of US & Soviet leaders and little symbols of spacecraft, but apart from that it's very uncluttered, giving it a sober, war-room-like feel. There are no units, as in most other wargames, but instead tokens representing the level of influence you have in a country, which can be flipped if you have enough to have control. With so many countries and possibilities it's a little overwhelming at the moment, but the blue/red of the control side of the tokens do give a very good overview of the state of play.

At its core, Twilight Struggle is a card driven game. There are 110 cards, each representing an event from the Cold War. Some are events that favour the USA, some the USSR, some whomever plays the card. Each card also has an Operations Value, which can be used instead to spread or reduce influence. If a card has one of your events (or a neutral event) then you have to choose between the Ops Value - allowing you to increase your influence - or the event. You can't have both. If, however, the event helps your opponent, then playing it means the event will be triggered. There are a lot of choices here - how do I minimize the impact of this hideous event that favours my opponent? Is this card worth more as the operations value or the event? If I do use the ops value, do I take the safe option of increasing my influence, or do I take the riskier (but potentially more rewarding) route of kicking my enemy out of that country I need to control?

While you have the long-term goal of trying to control the most regions and gaining the most points, some cards are 'Scoring Cards' that must be played and focuses the players on the short-term goal of taking a particular region. In the beginning, only Asia, Europe, and Middle East scoring cards are in the deck, making the game focused on these areas. If you don't have one of these cards, there's a good chance your opponent will, and your opponent's move may reveal this threat. Unless it's a bluff. Or a double-bluff. Come the 'Mid War', all other areas might be scored, making the game rather tense as you try to guess if your enemy is making plays for a card coming up in the future, or if it's a bluff, or if they're about to gain a bunch of victory points as they take over Europe and play the Europe scoring card. Similarly, if you have a scoring card, it's a game of bluff as you try to build up your influence in that area, whistling and remaining nonchalant as you subtly build up influence without arousing suspicion. It's a fantastic way of abstracting how certain regions became battlegrounds in the Cold War.

Twilight Struggle seems, at this early stage, to have staying power. As further games are played, and the importance of certain cards, countries and strategies become clearer, we're hoping to indulge in some rather tense ideological warfare with more focus and less randomish "um, maybe this is a good move"-type play. The signs are good.

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Alan writes:

Alan: Aha, this is how the line of sight rules work.
Gillian: What's "line of sight?"

This short snippet shows the difference between Gillian and me. I may have picked up Memoir '44 without an exact idea of how it would work, but years of video games such as X-Com or Jagged Alliance 2 or tabletop games like Warhammer meant that I at least had an idea of concepts such as Line of Sight, or Hit Points, or Damage Modifiers. But even these basic terms were alien to Gillian - yet we were able to pick up and play Memoir '44 with almost no fuss. It's a wargame, in that there's tactics and strategy and dice rolling, but a pretty simple one.

The first thing anyone will notice about Memoir '44 is that once the game is set up, it looks fantastic. Other games may go for wooden blocks or cardboard chits, but Memoir '44 knows what it is. It's a game about recreating warfare, and chances are the last time you did that, you were wielding a stick and making the noise of a gun while charging across the playground. So you get a whole load of plastic soldiers and tanks to play with.

As you'd expect from the name, the game takes place around the D-Day Normandy landings of June 1944. Each of the 16 scenarios pits the Allies against the Axis forces. The board is double-sided, one side all green, and one with a beach, so while some battles take place inland, in some you'll be recreating the assault on the beaches. The board is divided into hexes, and there's an illustration on each scenario showing where hills, trees, bunkers and barbed wire should go- all thick cardboard hexes or plastic like the soldiers. Troop deployment is part of the set up - your forces are where they start are decided by the scenario.

On your turn, what you do is dictated by your hand of Command Cards. On your turn, you play one of these cards, take the moves and attacks it allows, and then draw a card at the end of your turn. Most of these cards allow you to move units in one section of the battlefield, so you're always having to adjust your strategy to what your hand will allow. It's as much about managing your hand of cards as it is your troops.

Attacks are resolved by using dice; the more powerful he unit, the more dice you can use. Fr example, infantry use 2 dice when shooting at a unit two hexes away, while a tank unit uses three. Hits are decided by the symbols on the dice, so more fragile units have more chance of being hit. It's a neat system that gets rid of the need for lookup tables and calculations and other things that can make wargames quite daunting. Hit points are easily tracked, too - each hit removes a model, and when a unit runs out of models, it's destroyed. Each destroyed unit gives you a victory point, and depending on the scenario there may be victory points for taking a particular hex. Get the required points, usually between four and six, and you've won.

Memoir '44 is an easy game - perhaps too easy for some, as sometimes opportunities for tactics are low and luck can occasionally decide a game. It's very accessible, and is perfect for anyone with an interest in WWII, as the theme is strong and there's lots of historical detail in the rule book. With the mountain of expansions available, it does at times feel like a starter pack - though nowhere near as bad in that respect as the likes of Warhammer or Warhammer 40K.

And don't worry about the Line of Sight rules. They're simple.

Memoir '44 at BoardGameGeek.

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Alan writes:

Time for a big deal. It's time to talk about Dominion.

Why such a big deal? Well, so far the games I've written about are either getting on a bit, like Carcassonne, or a little bit under the radar, like Cold War. Dominion is still pretty 'hot'. It's still winning awards, including the prestigious Spiel des Jahres. It's getting a bit of hype outside of the usual places, with mentions in the likes of Wired and the usually video-game-centric Escapist. At my local gaming night, there can be a bit of debate over what games to play, and games come in and out of fashion, but there's usually always someone up for Dominion. There are already two expansions out, and there's talk that there will be seven in total. Dominion is a big deal (though there's more shuffling that dealing in the game itself).

Apparently, Dominion is a game about controlling land. I know this because I just looked at the rules, and it says so in the introduction. I've never felt like I'm claiming land when playing. The rules then go on to be a little bit more honest: "This is a game of building a deck". That's more like it. What you really feel like you're doing is creating, as you play, your own deck of cards that you will use to win the game. Despite the large box, Dominion is a card game - all that's inside that box is 500 cards. That's a lot of cards. Here's how it works:

First, pick which ten sets of cards you will play with, from the twenty-five in the box. Here's the suggested starting set of 10, plus the treasure cards and VP cards that are part of every game:

You start the game with a deck of ten cards - three 'Estates' and seven 'Coppers'. The Estates are victory point cards, utterly useless to you right until the moment the game ends - at which point the VP cards are the only cards of any worth.

The Coppers are more immediately useful. Take this starting deck of cards and shuffle them up. If you're not good at shuffling, don't worry - this game will give you lots of practice. Deal yourself five cards. This is your starting hand.

Each turn works in the same simple way. You have one action, and one buy. At the end of your turn, you then discard your hand into your personal discard pile, and deal yourself five new cards. If you don't have enough cards in your deck for a new hand, you take your discards pile, shuffle it up, and this becomes your deck. With your starting deck, there are no action cards, so it's buys only. With the three copper cards, you can buy anything costing 3 or less. Let's grab a Silver. This, along with the hand, is discarded. Play passes to the next person, and you deal five more cards.

Again, no actions, but four copper this time. That's enough to buy a Smithy, which allows you to draw three more cards. As before, your hand and the Smithy is discarded. Play passes on, and five more cards are dealt. Except your draw pile is now empty - all of your cards are now in your discard pile.

Not to worry - shuffle up that discard pile, and make a new draw pile. Deal five cards.

Hooray! An action card. Play the Smithy, draw three more cards.

Now you have three Copper and one Silver. For your buy, you can now buy anything worth 5 or less. Play continues until either the Provinces (the big value VP cards everyone wants) run out, or three other piles are gone. That's it. Simple.

Except it's not really simple. What strategy will you go for? Buy up the cheap VP cards? Nice idea, but they'll clog up your deck, giving you frequent useless hands. Wait until you can afford the big VPs? Ah, but what if you wait too long? Maybe you should buy the card that attacks your opponents... or maybe you should buy a defensive card, in case they attack you... Every choice you make feels meaningful, as you know that you will get to use whatever you're buying in the future. There's an element of risk, too - should you play the card that gives you +2 Treasure, or should you play a card that allows you to draw the Gold that you know is in your draw deck?

Dominion is a game that can be played casually of an evening, but it's also the sort of game where you could create spreadsheets and graphs and figure out the best strategies. Good luck, though, if that's your thing - there are actually over three million possible games in this box - the number of ways you can choose 10 cards from the 25 possibilities is 3,268,760. It'll take you quite a few years to get through that many games.

And if you were to take the time to play over three million games, a couple of things about the game might eventually get to you. The cards are clear and functional, and most of the art is nice enough, but a couple are rather ugly. It may be a rather useful card, but I really don't like the orange-haired weirdo on the Festival card. The Militia look pretty unthreatening for a military force. The Bureaucrat card, on the other hand, has rather nice art despite it being a bit duller than a festival.

Also, you'll notice that each card has a black border. While this looks nice, it's apparently quite likely to fade quickly, not a great design choice. These are relative minor gripes, however - Dominion is easy to pick up, has loads of depth, and plays in a short enough time that you can have a few games in one sitting - even more so if you're playing with two, as there are less VP cards up for grabs. You can adjust the game with your choice of cards, too - if you want a relaxing game with little conflict, you can choose a set with little interaction. Conversely, you can choose a vicious set of cards and have everyone hate each other by the end of the game.

But they'll probably still want to play again.

Dominion on BoardGameGeek and Rio Grande Games.

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Alan writes...

One thing that has surprised me since board games lured me in is the choice of themes. Growing up with Fighting Fantasy books and Games Workshop, I was used to two themes - fighting in the future, and fighting in a sort of medieval fantasy past. Orcs with axes, or Orcs with laser guns. That's not to say that they're without merit, of course; in particular, the maniacal religiosity of the Space Marines in Warhammer 40K is a particularly great unexpected touch that adds a lot to the game. But within gaming, I was expecting a world of sci-fi and fantasy, with perhaps the occasional historical battle. Of course, I was wrong. So far on this blog we've had intrepid explorers and medieval French towns. Time for some warfare. Except - again a pleasant surprise - we're not shooting at each other. Like the real cold war, it's a game of influence, bluff, and pushing your luck.

Cold War: CIA vs KGB is a Fantasy Flight game, and I've noticed that this seems to mean a quality product, certainly in terms of the components. Some may find that there are pieces here that are unnecessary and too flashy. There's a 'balance token', for instance, that's assigned to the player who is losing; that player gets to choose who goes first when taking cards. The balance token is a green poker chip with a shiny pair of scales pictured. It could be replaced with a rule that simply says: "The player with the least amount of points, or the player who lost the last round if it's a tie, chooses who will play first." But I like my little green token. As I like the rest of the components. All of the cards have evocative photos and are of a high quality, the larger agent cards look like mini personnel files, and there is a 'domination token', or shiny poker chip, for both sides. The game could have been done more cheaply, but I'm glad they've gone that extra mile. It looks and feels fantastic. I mean, look at this:

Quality, all over. Apart from one place. The rulebook.

The rulebook isn't awful. I mean, all of the rules are in there and it has examples and isn't riddled with typos or anything, but something's gone wrong when you're dividing a game into six phases and it's still confusing. There are at least three rulebook replacements as downloadable files on BoardGameGeek - that's not a good sign that the included rules are doing a good job. I'm not entirely sure of the problem, but I suspect that it's over-explained. There are also little unnecessary rules about shuffling - one player shuffles then the other cuts. Frankly, if you can't trust your opponent not to fiddle with the deck, get another opponent.

The game plays like a sort of 'advanced blackjack'. First, an objective is revealed - this is usually a country, but can be an event. It'll be worth some victory points, and has a 'stability value'. Players take turns drawing 'groups', eg police, artists, radio stations, in order to get as close as they can to this stability without going over. But each card belongs to a faction - military, economic, political, or media - that has a one-off special effect, such as stealing a group, or forcing your opponent to discard one. You win the 'influence struggle', you place your domination token. That's right, the victory points aren't yours yet. Each player then reveals his 'Agent X', one of six characters who may affect the outcome of the round. If the loser has the Master Spy, he takes the points. So if your opponent looks like they're trying to lose, watch out. Unless they're trying to make you think that. Or maybe they're trying to make you think that they're trying to think that. And so on.

Gillian: Now, I will warn you, bluffing is involved. Bluffing, of course, being a fancy word for 'bare-faced lying'. You don't know your partner's hand, and you don't know whether they are trying to win or deliberately lose. And to begin with, neither do they know this of you, but if you're rubbish at bluffing, they soon will. Nothing like the joy of winning a round only to find out that, with a turn of your partner's agent card, the points have been snatched away from you like the star prize on a gameshow.

Gillian was a terrible bluffer, at least in our first game. "Hmm, I think I'll pass, I don't want to risk civil disorder," she said, unconvincingly. Civil disorder is similar to 'going bust' - go over the stability number, and you lose the round, and your Agent X. I didn't believe her for a second, and sure enough, she had played the Master Spy. In subsequent games, however, her bluffing is much improved.

In short, then, an excellent game that can be used to teach your loved ones to effectively cheat and lie, with a great backdrop of paranoia and tension.

Cold War: CIA vs KGB 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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Gillian writes...

I've always thought of Alan as a man who would be suited to the salons and gentleman's clubs of Victorian England - he is at odds with the Youth of Today, particularly those in slatted sunglasses, and has customised his iPod to resemble some form of steampunk mechanical orchestra. In this crazy costume-drama-cum-Adventures-Of-Willie-Fogg fantasy, he strides from the cold and smoke-filled north to the oak-timbered premises of a society of visionary scientists and thinkers, checks his stovepipe hat and snuff tin at the door, and fulminates hirsutedly about scripture, temperance, a good whiskey and lands left to discover. So it was with some interest that I eyed the box of Lost Cities in his bag during a train journey to the coast.

Lost Cities allows the player to choose from one, or more,  of five possible expeditions - Egyptian pyramids, Mayan temples, underwater kingdoms, the wastes of the Poles, or what I initially presumed to be Mars until I realised that while the Victorians gave us photogravure and excellent moustaches, they didn't really have any grasp on intergalactic travel. Perhaps it's Vesuvius. Anyway, you have your five territories to go and explore, and it's you and your opponent's job to select wisely which ones to explore. From there on, it's essentially a card game - the hand of cards dealt gives you a selection to choose from, you start laying the cards corresponding to each area, which ideally would be the full set numbered from two to ten, but as there is no restrictions on how many or which territories to choose, your opponent may well get in there first with the best cards, or even withold the plum numbers in an effort to lower your score.

Now, my experience of poker is based on watching gambling advertisements and knowing someone who loved gambling to the point of betting on virtual horse-racing - I have never tried to play myself, and as I'm about as good as hiding my reactions as a two-week old Jack Russell, I doubt I'd be much good. Lost Cities, though, awoke the competitive streak in me pretty quickly. As some of the game involves racing to place your cards (which must be placed in order, so you can't start with the high scores first and then collect the rest over) before the deck runs dry, you need to watch your opponent, particularly if you and they are both fighting over the same territory. What also spices the game up are investment cards - these represent multiplication of the final score, but can only be placed before any numbered cards, so just like the stock market or a box of Beanie Babies, you have no idea how much of an investment something will be until you make your choice and see what happens.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. Once your deck runs out and the round is over, it's time to score - and as each expedition gets twenty points knocked off the score to represent the risks involved, investment cards can be a real burden. Less than twenty points worth of cards, and you end up with a minus score. A minus score which then, thanks to investment cards, will get multiplied. If I learned anything in GCSE Maths it was how to get frustrated easily, and when I saw what I thought were wise investments result in a score of -60 in my first round, I realised that it paid to both weigh up the risks and watch your opponent's actions carefully.

Alan: On the odd occasion that I've played darts, there's something that I find more frustrating than trying to hit the right bit of the board. I stand there with 89 to get, my dart in treble 17, and my tongue poking out of the side of my mouth as I try to figure out what I have left. It's a bit like that at the end Lost Cities. Your opponent's score, and indeed your score, are hidden information to those of us without fast arithmetic skills. There's a bit of tension as you add up your scores and it's close - but there's also a bit of annoyance if there's a wide disparity.

You could, if you wanted, strip back this game to just the numbers and miss out the theme entirely. It barely matters that you're a moustachioed explorer, but it's nice and unusual nonetheless.

The best thing about Lost Cities so far is that one of us often says "again?" at the end of that round. You know a game will only take ten minutes or so.  

So. It's a nice, quick game - you can play one round, or as many as you like in the style of the sore loser's 'best of three' - and the cards and very small board means it's portable enough to play on a train. You will need a pen and paper to score up, and possibly also the knowledge that multiplying minus numbers is A Bad Thing if you want to up your chances of winning. Me? I was hoping that, against everything dimly remembered from hot afternoons drawing pictures of robots in the back of my maths exercise book, that the x sign would quickly start cancelling itself out.

Lost Cities at BoardGameGeek

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