Wednesday 6 January 2016

5 Board games to buy your enemies.

If you're like me, there are two things that you have in abundance: board games and nemeses. Why not combine the two with my handy gift-buying guide?

  1.   CocoNuts






A delightful Korean export, Coconuts has all the strategic depth of tiddlywinks with the charming aesthetic of a Happy Meal free toy.  Using cheap plastic monkeys, players attempt to fling ‘coconuts’ into various baskets.

The real charm of the game lies in its eponymous drupes (apparently Coconuts aren’t actually nuts, which is one more reason to dislike this game).   As they are an important component for a children’s game, the time between the box being opened and them all becoming lost is inevitably 1.02 nanoseconds.  Tears and recriminations will follow.  Delightfully, this is only an incidental benefit.

Coconuts is a game that just keeps on giving.  The game’s general build quality hovers somewhere between a mid ‘90s Skoda and a drunkenly assembled Ikea wardrobe.  However, the ‘coconuts’ included in the game have been sculpted with exquisite care so as to resemble (and have the consistency of) something between a squashed chocolate raisin and a small lump of fecal matter.   Notwithstanding the joy of watching children using monkeys to throw shit at each other, the horror of discovering them trodden into the carpet over the next year is worth the price tag alone. 

Possibly the most evil thing to ever come out of the Korean Peninsula.

    2 Mouse Trap


This title’s main appeal is the arduous amount of time it takes to set up, combined with the infinitesimally brief moment of enjoyment children get from playing the game.  Gameplay involves hours of shuffling cheap components into place, followed by a fleeting glimpse of happiness before the drudge begins again. Mousetrap is either a shit board game or a Turner-prize worthy comment on contemporary working conditions. 

Happily, as well as the immediate inconvenience it provides, Mousetrap will also condition their children to take up roles in a Sports Direct distribution warehouse. 

Children are our future. Destroy them, destroy them all. 

3. Cards Against Humanity

For a brief period in the mid 2000's faux randomness became an acceptable proxy for a sense of humour. Cards Against Humanity is the spiritual continuation of this trend.  

It titles itself ‘a party game for horrible people’.  This is patently untrue.  I am horrible.  Most of my friends are horrible.  Cards Against Humanity is a party game for boring people.  It a book of ‘painting by numbers’ phalluses, Swedish flat-pack humour for the terminally short of brain cells. 

If you've ever used the term "ROFLCOPTER" this game is for you. You twat. 


4. X Wing

Like crack cocaine in your cappuccino, X-Wing is quite good but horribly addictive. 

After initial exposure the following symptoms typically present within 3 months:

1. Pointless debating online about when and if one can reroll a reroll. 

2. Buying ships THAT WERE NEVER IN THE FILMS, even stooping so far as to buy ones from animated series for CHILDREN.

3. Neck beard growth.

4. Financial ruin. 

5. Fedora purchasing. 

6. Fatal attempt to construct a 1:270 scale Death Star. 

5.  (F.A.T.A.L) From Another Time, Another Land


This roleplaying game has a strong claim on being the worst thing ever created by anyone, ever. On the second page of the character sheet listed alongside height and weight is the following key measurement: anal circumference potential.  Yes, potential: i.e. not anal circumference ‘at rest’.  What follows is all a ‘circumference table’ detailing the capacity of different races, ranging from a meagre 3” for an dwarf up to a monstrous 30” for an Ogre.

Perhaps most heinous of all, quadratic equations are a requirement of most game mechanics.