Twelve Days of Christmas

On the Fifth Day of Christmas My True Love Gave To Me…

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…A Five-Player  Game To Play With His Parents and Sister. – Five Gold Pirateologys

Five Gold Pirateologys
Five Gold Pirateologys

The Rules:

Pirateology, the long and the short of it (and it’s pretty long game, as they go) is that it’s a last-man-standing game. Literally. At the end of the game, the last pirate left on the board wins. So, with a nice, clear win-objective, how complex could this game be? Well, actually, it’s got lots of bits, gold coins and Skull Cards and such, but once you’ve played it once, you’ll probably have grasped all the important factors to the game. You start the game with just a pirate piece (and can only roll one die to move), and you have to journey to get a Crew Card before you can exchange it for a ship, which moves much more speedily (with two die). There is also a Compass Spinner which is used to determine the direction in which you’re sailing. Now that this has been established, there’s a pretty simple following to the rest of the game, you can find treasure, bury treasure, battle other pirates, face sea monsters and sail through hurricanes, all in aid of being the toughest pirate sailing the seven seas!
To remove other players from the board, all you have to do is battle them to the point where you’ve taken all their treasure, they’re then eliminated from play. Easy, right?

For Christmas?

The game itself is brilliant, but it can be quite lengthy, so I wouldn’t invite Aunt Jean to play unless you’re at your wits end for ways to get her to fall asleep, since she probably doesn’t have the attention span required for this game. It’s a good family game, for 2-5 players, that teaches strategy and patience (good for educating children) and has lots of epic-looking little figures and coins and stuff to fiddle with. I would recommend this game to play on Christmas, but only if you don’t have anywhere important to be anytime soon…

This post hasn’t been linked to a full post about the game because we haven’t written one yet, however, there is a plan for one to go up later this year!

Happy Fifth Day of Christmas! May you receive five beautiful gold somethings 🙂

On The Fourth Day Of Christmas, My True Love Gave To Me…

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… A Four Player Game, And The Suggestion That We Double Date – Four Calling Buccaneers

Four Calling Buccaneers
Four Calling Buccaneers

The Rules:

Buccaneer is a pretty straightforward game, in which you sail around the ocean as a pirate; trading with ports and fighting (or running away from) other pirates to collect treasure. The aim is to get treasure worth 20 points in your home port to win the game. You can also choose to sail to an island in the middle of the board and take cards which can be anything from an errand, to a disaster or letting you have free treasure. It’s a very exciting game, if you desire to read more about it, go here, and read our exciting post on the game!

For Christmas?

A great game to play with friends or family, with very clear rules and a simple objective. So simple in fact, that you could give Aunt Jean a copy and it wouldn’t matter that she lives alone because she could probably teach her favorite dogs to play on teams against her. Or at the very least, trying would keep her off the streets and stop her terrorizing the neighborhood. It’s a very light-hearted game, good for laughs and great for small gatherings.

Happy Fourth Day of Christmas! If you get bored in the days to come, have a pirate-impression contents with your friend or family, laughter guaranteed!

On the Third Day of Christmas My True Love Gave To Me…

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…A Triple-Player Game and Introduced Me To Her Best “Friend” Steve. – Three French Scotland Yards

Three French Scotland Yards
Three French Scotland Yards

The Rules:

Scotland Yard is a game about catching a criminal! While (like most board games) its not a very accurate representation of this it is good fun. I won’t go in to the rules in detail as you can view our previous post on the game for more details here.

For Christmas?

Not strictly a three player game (its a minimum of three players and a maximum of 6) it can be played by a fairly large group which makes it ideal for gatherings. Additionally the rules are quite simple and to the point so Aunt Jean may be able to pay attention to them long enough to grasp them and stop complaining about her cleaning lady who she swears is stealing from her, which is completely plausible apart from the fact that she doesn’t have a cleaning lady!

Happy Third Day of Christmas! I hope your true love did get you three French somethings!

On The Second Day of Christmas, My True Love Gave To Me…

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…A Two-player Game and Promised The Evening To Me – Two Polarity Doves

Two Polarity Doves...not world class photoshopping
Two Polarity Doves…not world class photo-shopping

The Rules:

The aim of Polarity is difficult to describe, it involves magnets (hence the name) and some skill, patience and a steady hand. However rather than going into it in great detail here I will simple link you to the very detailed post my sister has done on it (on this very blog  and only two days before this post) that’s very informative and right here!

For Christmas?

I personally would consider this a great game for Christmas, one to bust out and show the relatives as something a bit different from the average board game and something I’m sure everyone will want ago at. It might even stop Aunt Jean from recounting the endless tales of here youth to you as she infers how lucky your generation are and how things weren’t this easy back in her day! However she may consider the balancing magnets as witchcraft declare you all heathens and start shouting “The power of Christ compels you”. But hey whats Christmas without a slight mental break down by someone.

You may consider this a cop-out as we have already posted about Polarity, well then just to warn you a few of the posts will be things we have already done posts on and the others will be ones we are doing full post on very soon and we are not chickening out we are simply highlighting good games we think you should all play regardless of weather we have posted about them yet or not!

Happy Boxing Day!

On the First Day of Christmas My True Love Gave To Me…

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…A Single Player Game and a Card Saying “Sorry!” – Solitaire…in a Pear Tree

The natural environment for any singel player game!
The natural environment for any single player game!

The Rules:

The Aim of Solitaire is to have one piece left in the middle of the board, after removing all of the other pieces by taking them. Taking is accomplished by jumping over other pieces in a Draughts (Checkers) type fashion. Unlike Checkers, jumping my only be done horizontally and vertically and you may only move to take, so, once all taking options have run out, the game is over, and unless you are left with one piece in the middle slot you have lost!

For Christmas?

Well this game could be good on Christmas if you’re alone or just want a few moments to yourself amidst the hubbub, chaos, and potentially drunk distant relatives. The game only takes a moment to understand, but it’s quite hard to get the hang of, however, once you’ve figured out one win strategy, you can win every time, so pros and cons. You may be called anti-social if you’re caught playing it on Christmas Day when Aunt Jean has just turned up and she only gets to see you once a year and wonders why you’d rather play with little wooden pieces than hear about her 13 dogs and a guinea pig… I appear to have digressed.

So on that note this is the first of twelve posts going up over (you’ll never guess it), the next twelve days which will touch briefly on twelve different games we suggest that everyone should play in 2014, the aim originally was to have them go up in player amount according to the day but we don’t have games to cover every player amount, so really they’re just be games we suggest you should play! See the Twelve Games of Christmas – 2013 page for the full list (will only be complete after the Twelve Days).

For further information on good one player games see this list!

Have a very Merry Christmas!

Update – The End of 2013 and The Start of the Year of the Board Game!

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Some Changes and the Future:

So we’ve been looking at the way we do things and have come up with some ways to make things better (we hope) and to make this more like a real website with more structured content and more things to do! Starting in the new year we plan to implement a few things:

Firstly:

Regular posting! Monday evening will be “Tame the Board Game Day” with new posts going up once a week every Monday. Unless we’re doing a specific event or its a “Breach the Keep” post which will come as the game develops and I get all the different aspects of it in order ready to actually Give Away! But they will now be separate posts and never added on to the end of anything else.

Secondly:

We’re re-thinking the format of our posts, we aim to make them more accessible by adding a standard structure and also giving aspects of the game a rating as well as giving the game an overall rating.

Thirdly:

A Video Blog! We’re hoping to add a video blog to compliment our existing posts, we will aim of at least one video a month to go with one of the posts in the month. However, this may prove more challenging as we have to find time where both me and my sister are around and ready to film, which is proving hard.

Fourthly:

We will expand into social networking…I really don’t want to do this, as I hate social networking, but it seems to be the way to get places in this day and age so we will be setting up a facebook page at some point in the new year!

But Before All That:

We have a few things to finish this year off. We have two more normal game posts going up before Christmas, then we have the “Twelve Games of Christmas – 2013”  which, for every day of Christmas, we will put up a brief post of a game with the same amount of players as the day… Well up until about seven players then it might just be other games we recommend.

Then we will be doing a “Drinking Games” Special for  New Years eve (of course) to give you something to do at your wild house parties!

That’s all for now, keep reading!