Sep 11 2011

Board Game Remix: Colonel Mustard in Old Kent Road with a Triple Letter Score

When we were young, school holidays were endless. There were lots and lots of hours to spend playing board games. When necessary, we’d make new games ourselves.

(When we were thirteen we invented a cricket board game using cards and dice. We looked up Kerry Packer’s address in the white pages and sent a copy to him. He was kind enough to write back. World Series Cricket introduced their own cricket card board game the following year. Our’s was better)

I’ll bet you’ve got a set of Monopoly, Cluedo, Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble somewhere around your house. And I’ll bet that some of the pieces are missing. And I’ll bet that you haven’t played them for a long time. They each take so long to play. Who can con their family into playing Monopoly for 4 hours?

How can you use these games again, and make them fun? The ‘Board Game Remix Kit’ is the answer.

The Board Game Remix contains a number of new rules (‘tweals’) for each of these games. It also includes some fantastic ‘mash-ups’ that combine them in different combinations to create quite different games.

As they say in the introduction.

Boardgames! They’re pretty great – except when they’re not. 

When it’s Christmas Day and you find yourself playing Cluedo with a very clever seven-year-old, a slightly dim twelve-year-old, a drunken uncle, and three missing cards. 

When it’s the fourth day of a beachside holiday and it’s raining, and the pub down the road has Scrabble (which is great) but your friend knows a hundred and seven two-letter words by heart (which isn’t). 

When your household edition of Trivial Pursuit dates from the year you were born, which means (a) the board is in three pieces, and (b) an awful lot of the questions are about Gilligan’s Island, which you’ve never seen.

Maybe you even bought a more recent copy, only to find older family members grumbling at the focus on new-fangled celebrities like Britney Spears and ‘N Sync.

If this sounds familiar, the Boardgame Remix Kit is for you. It’s a set of new games that you can play using the board and pieces from Monopoly, Scrabble, Cluedo and Trivial Pursuit. Some of the new games are silly; some of them are tactical; some of them ask you to think fiercely, some of them ask you to make stuff up, some of them just ask you to sit around and chat.

The Board Game Remix is available as an eBook.

It is also available as an iPhone app.

A free sample containing some chapters to give you the idea is also available.

It is a great way to wile away some of those rainy days in your summer beach house.