Christmas is fast approaching, & for some, it's the only time each year they play boardgames. It would be a colossal tragedy if, during this age of unprecedented variety & quality, you were stuck playing games that were a bit crap. Here is a recommendations thread:
'My family are always ganging up on each other!'
Try NOT ALONE, a simple card-based version of Murder In The Dark where a bunch of you play astronauts who've crashlanded on a weird planet, & the other player is the sinister hivemind hunting you down. It's quick, atmospheric & fun
'If I have to play another round of Charades I swear to God I will hang every man, woman & child in the British Isles'
Woah, cool your jets Murdery McMurderson. Want a party game that's a piece of piss? WITS & WAGERS has you covered. Guess answers to Qs & bet on who's closest.
'We're very competitive but too apathetic for table tennis'
If you can find a copy, SAFRANITO is 1 game where the 'spice' is right. Sorry, if it's not clear from that pun it's like shove a ha'penny mixed with a stock exchange. Bid on spices! Fail to throw a small plastic disc 3"!
'We always end up doing a puzzle'
Omg if you like putting squares by other squares I can offer you not 1, not 2, but thrice tres bien games of this nature: CARCASSONNE (southern French puzzling), ISLE OF SKYE (Scottish whisky puzzling), or TANG GARDEN (ancient Chinese puzzling).
'I can only get through it with wine'
VITICULTURE, my friend. Grow some wines. Age some wines. Sell... some wines. Let people pay you to take little tours of your vineyard. Build a windmill. Get a little wooden rooster. All this & more can be yours in... 'Grapeworld' (it's good)
'I bet we'll have an argument'
Well if you like *betting* my friend you should try QUACKS OF QUEDLINGBURG, where you compete to make the best potions, adding more & more but always risking having the whole cauldron explode in your face. Will you like it? If you're not a big fool
'I can't play complicated games, also I don't want to play for more than 5 minutes'
TIMELINE actually has you covered. Pull cards from a deck & try, 1 by 1, to put them in chronological order. I've played this with my 5 year old daughter & with my whole family. Co-op or vs. Good!
'We actually like boardgames & would enjoy the opportunity to play something complex on this rare occasion of being together & having time'
TERRAFORMING MARS with the PRELUDE expansion & the extra boards is a good option. All the expansions except TURMOIL are pretty great, IMHO.
Following on from the above, if you're after a genuinely epic experience & there are a few of you who don't mind committing, TWILIGHT IMPERIUM is an intergalactic saga with space battles, genuinely good diplomacy, trading & more. I have mixed but mostly positive feelings about it
'I want to play with the kids' toys'
The uninspiringly-titled WILDLIFE SAFARI looks like it should be rubbish but it's actually... really quick, fun & charming? Play a card, pick up a cute animal. Try to score the most points over multiple rounds. It's by legend Reiner Knizia.
'Please God nobody mention politics...'
TAMMANY HALL plays well at 3-5 & is a really exciting game of mid-nineteenth century New York politics as you compete to win elections by stuffing wards with immigrants who owe you a favour. Negotiation & bidding are tense & fun!
'... or race...'
If it's a race you want, FORMULA D is one of the best games out there, seating a mighty 2-10 players, with rules that scale from very simple (roll a dice, move your car) to more crunchy, complex versions with gears, tyre wear, varied weather & driver powers.
'...or religion.'
Holy flip if you don't mind something a little on the thinkier side, TROYES is a rewarding puzzle where you place workers in the yeomanry, clergy & aristocracy, trying to establish your dynasty's reputation while building a huge cathedral & fighting off bandits.
If you all want to work together, MYSTERIUM is essentially CLUEDO, except the murder victim is back as a ghost, the other players are all mediums & the ghost is sending them weird visions to help them uncover whodunnit. My favourite co-operative boardgame - it oozes flavour.
'I don't like all this silly theme'
LIARS DICE also sold under the proprietary name PERUDO has no theme at all. It's just dice in cups. You roll your dice, secretly look at them, & make bids. It's easy to pick up & unreasonably fun. (SKULL is the beermat version of this)
'Can't we just play something with a deck of cards?'
Well look. I think NO THANKS is one of the best card games I've ever played. Looks rubbish, but it's actually astonishingly fun at higher player counts. I don't understand why - it seems too simple to be enjoyable, yet it is.
LOVE LETTER is a wonderous card game for 2-4 players. Very small deck, reasonably simple rules, plays quick, but there's a lot of game in this tiny package. Some nice guesswork involved, plenty of surprise, but you also feel like you get to make skilled plays. Amazing.
If you want a traditional card game, the Italian trick taking game SCOPA is simple & really fun. You can use a standard deck with some cards removed or buy a Sicilian 40-card deck (modelled here by me)
If you want to stick to a standard French-suited deck, OH HELL aka NOMINATION WHIST or OH WELL (to those squeamish about language) is a terrific trick-taking game that is basically whist, with trumps, where you have to guess each turn how many tricks you'll take. It's brilliant.
'We just want to fling stuff at each other'
I can't believe I nearly forgot COCONUTS! It's beer pong but with monkey catapults, themed around the Journey to the West. It's *really fun*. There's a 2 player version, COCONUTS DUO, & you can combine them for 6 player chimp action.
Those are my suggestions for now - if you have any specific requirements please @ me below & I can make recommendations. I enjoy doing it because it's one of the few occasions on which it's socially acceptable to monologue about one of my special interests.

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More from @TimClarePoet

18 Nov
For years I've been having a weekly repeated dream about not having revised for my exams. Next year, I want to enter some game tournaments, & instead of just showing up with no prep, I want to properly train for them. What (tabletop) game should I aim for? [criteria below]
It has to have legit tournaments at at least the national level. Not necessarily in the UK, but somewhere. It can't be too skill-based if it's also popular - I'm not dumb as a rock but I'm never going to get good enough at chess to compete.
By the same token, completely luck-based games are out. They do Monopoly tournaments but I'd rather hot glue whelks to my buttocks than play that game for more than 10 minutes. Ok so I would actually give it a go but it's not a game that requires prep.
Read 7 tweets
28 Mar
Cults are a critique of society. We ogle & mock folks who fall for them, but the classic profile of people who join is someone who is lost, traumatised, struggling for identity. Nothing in the emptiness of late capitalism speaks to them. Cults thrive because we're bad at meaning.
'Wow, how could so many people put their faith in such an obvious con artist?' Well, maybe because they were pretending to offer a bunch of stuff contemporary society utterly fails to provide. Direct confrontation with our fears. Validation. Deep purpose. Community.
'Cult' has a hygienic specificity that suggests pathological false beliefs & behaviours exist Over There. Whereas, of course, these beliefs & behaviours exist on a spectrum. We all belong to communities & subcultures with dogma, rules, punishments & outgroups.
Read 15 tweets
28 Mar
I'd be really interested to see a breakdown of the top 2 or 3 best avenues for book promo by genre. We talk about promoting 'books' like they're a monolith, but I suspect the way Kindle crime readers find new reads is different to how nonfiction pop psych readers find theirs.
I'm sure there are *some* common channels across all types of book, but there must be some that only exist for, say, indie Romance authors, or SFF authors, or litfic authors, or authors writing sports biography or whatever. I'd love to get a sense of those different networks.
I love how some books can be selling like gangbusters, despite being completely unknown elsewhere, because of a community's spreading the word. Later, sometimes they spill out of their niche. But it's fascinating & exciting to me how different books spread.
Read 8 tweets
28 Mar
Not to clog up the TL with too many saucy pics, but here is my non-exhaustive 'sizzle reel' of games acquired during lockdown which have seen little to no IRL play. I'm looking for partners, when safe & legal. First, adorable tessellating kitty-stacking mini dex game KITTIN.
From the same makers, TINDERBLOX. Take it in turns building a little wooden campfire with coloured blocks & tweezers. Like reverse Jenga. Played with my daughter this morning - it's ruddy hard! Very quick, tricky filler. Maybe good as a tie-breaker / turn-order-decider.
SIDEREAL CONFLUENCE. Big multiplayer space trading game, where you're all doing deals to exchange resources to put through weird conversion engines to get better resources. I really negotiation games! Not sure whether the asymmetry forces a strategy on you but eager to find out.
Read 12 tweets
27 Mar
I get like 3 or 4 weird or inappropriate emails a year from (presumably) listeners of the podcast. Mostly they're lovely. But I bet I'd have to deal with a bunch more if I weren't a chap/white. Extra condescension, creepiness, presumptions & outright abuse. An emotional tax.
I know most folks are only too aware of this. I just, in my own slow, knuckleheaded way was like 'huh, harassing or weird messages are kind of rare for me!' even though I get a lot of emails. Then I realised some people probably have to continually actively filter.
Obviously I expect certain types of content attract more odd/abusive correspondence than others. Also I guess podcasts are an opt-in medium? It's not like 'what's this shite Radio 4's forcing on me now? Tim Clare?' Come to think of it I got more abuse when I did live radio
Read 4 tweets
27 Mar
Somehow I've managed to acquire 4 new boardgames in the last week. I'm starting to feel under seige. Really need cups of tea, components in ramekins & some patient company to try them all out!
I *think* I'd like to write a book about games, but as always the challenge is thinking of a way that would be rewarding for the reader & for me. I mean, I really enjoy peanut butter & jam sandwiches but I don't think I could spin that out into a book.
(a *good* book, that is. I can digress so intensely I bet, if one doesn't already exist, I could find an entire book in pbj sandwiches)
Read 6 tweets

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