Alrightgames: Travel Monopoly

Travel Monopoly

1984 (2014 edition) / Portable economic board game / 2-4 players / UK

****

Tedious, overlong, but about as classic as anything gets, buying everyone's favourite boring board game was an unexciting inevitability, but I at least managed to surprise myself by going for the portable version. When I saw them reduced to Alibaba-style prices in Morrisons – without the associated guilt of supporting criminals and the carbon footprint – I ultimately decided not to resist.

It's all a bit fiddly and cheap, especially the mini money and unnecessarily tiny dice that are just going to get lost, but the practical downsizing is generally done well. Maybe we'll even use it in its intended travel capacity to help induce sleep on cross-country train journeys in the future.

Alrightgames: Yahtzee

Yahtzee

1956 / Dice game / 2-10 players / USA

***

I'm done with buying games for a while, so it was nice to learn that I'd accidentally picked up another one already when buying a set of nice dice for the sake of having dice. Transcribe some messy score sheets and you've got everything you need to run the forgiving gauntlet of tactical dice rolls, where leaving things to chance is sometimes better than overthinking.

Like most games, traditional and modern, purpose-defeating online versions are a lot snappier.

Alrightgames: Fighting Fantasy – Starship Traveller

Steve Jackson, Fighting Fantasy: Starship Traveller

1983 / Adventure gamebook / 1-3 players / UK

***

I wasn't expecting this sci-fi stretching of the fantasy gamebook format to be all that good when rounding out my genre trilogy, but I was hoping it would be a good retrofuturistic wheeze at least. Finding out that it was straight-up Star Trek fan fiction with the proper nouns changed was a bit disappointing, but it's an easy shorthand (and light years better than the official gamebooks they put out). You can even recruit subordinate siblings to handle the tedious dice rolls of your away team if they want to feel useful and you need someone to blame.

These mini episodes aren't especially compelling, but the arena's large enough to welcome return treks to seek out new varieties of premature death every time like a maddening arcade game.

Alrightgames: Fighting Fantasy – Deathtrap Dungeon

Ian Livingstone, Fighting Fantasy: Deathtrap Dungeon

1984 / Adventure gamebook / 1 player / UK

*****

It's Knightmare, it's great. The gamebook was the peak literary movement, why am I wasting my time on schmoes like Dickens and Shakespeare?

Some of these are available as apps, but that's hardly in the spirit. Second-hand scribbled-on paperbacks won't set you back too much.

Alrightgames: Fighting Fantasy – House of Hell

Steve Jackson, Fighting Fantasy: House of Hell

1984 / Adventure gamebook / 1 player / UK

****

I used to see these gamebooks in Oracle Books about 25 years ago, when they were already a decade out of date, but would've been right up my street. Alas, unadventurous 10-year-old me plumped for Sonic gamebooks instead, only to wind up trapped in a poorly playtested maze every time. Served me right.

This horror-themed one would have been particularly affecting for playing into my recurring haunted house nightmares, and wandering the wallpapered labyrinth, opening foreboding doors against my better judgement, brought that all back. Even if it's just retheming the usual dungeons with four-poster chambers of horrors, it does the trick for me.

This was an indulgent purchase for myself, but now it's high on the list of things I'm looking forward to scaring the shit out of my daughter with in the future.

Alrightgames: Hanabi

Hanabi

2010 / Cooperative card game / 2-5 players / France

***

Another bargain fake, the Chinese characters on the box are even unintentionally thematically appropriate this time. The focus on basic numbers and colours and the atypical cooperative approach should make this a fun family game in the future, unless the escalating stakes will just make the inevitable slip-ups even more explosive.

Alrightgames: Little Master Chef

Little Master Chef

2019 / Collecting card game / 2-5 players / India

***

The insultingly cheap price, slightly out-of-place financial element and my own racism suggested that this was likely a well-conceived retheming of an existing format before I read that it's basically Monopoly Deal for people who aren't quite boring enough to want that in the house.

Seems like a reasonable game, though in order to understand how to play it, you need to be too old for the patronising packaging. This makes its target audience parents or other well-meaning relatives buying it "for the children," like you've claimed for about half the things on the shelf.

Alrightgames: Love Letter

Love Letter

2012 / Deduction card game / 2-4 players / Japan

***

Another arbitrary favourite of Alibaba and the forging intellectual property thieves (probably because there's not a whole lot to print), this took some rumination even at £3.41, but its girly fairytale kitsch won out over the tiresomely dystopian Coup. I've got a daughter, I might as well embrace princesses.

It kills a few minutes if you can't be arsed to set up Cluedo. Two players will rarely get all the way through their ten-card deck. Even if you don't like it, the handy bonus pouch is cheaper than buying a dice bag off eBay.

Alrightgames: Backgammon

Backgammon

~3000 BC (~1980 version) / Strategy board game / 2 players / Mesopotamia or somewhere

****

It was about time I learned what this thing was, having never worked out how to scale those stalactites and stalagmites on the Amiga public domain version in childhood that helpfully didn't include rules and evidently lacking the curiosity to check out a free online version since then.

Maybe because it's the underdog, or because I came to it independently without expectations, I warmed to it faster than I ever did to chess. It helps that I can actually get my head around it too.

Traditionally acquired through 3-in-1 games compendiums with a board you'll never reverse, my vintage Spears version was bundled with a discounted Deluxe Draughts set in my convoluted quest to pick up a stout chess board. I wonder what backgammon boards double up with? I still see a cave.

Alrightgames: Draughts

Draughts (a.k.a. Checkers, et al.)

~3000 BC-ish (~1980 version) / Strategy board game / 2 players / Don't know where it's from

**

We all know Junior Chess, though I needed a quick refresher, as I only had limited childhood experience playing the game with the boring pawns from my dad's Spears chess set, and was impatient to upgrade to the expansion that added more interesting horses and stuff.

My daughter's only getting raised with a la-di-da authentic version because I was after a sturdy Spears chess board to get some use out of my ooh-get-her gold-plated Star Trek chessmen and no one was selling those separately. So far, it's ended up mainly being used for makeshift farmyard animal bowling. The hardwood clacking is satisfying.

On the Omnibuses: February

Charles Dickens, The Complete Novels

Oliver Twist (1838) **

The sarcastic, humanitarian commentary keeps this series of unfortunate exemplars from being truly depressing, but it's mainly interesting as an unreliable docudrama, with handy statistics to share as if they were facts. Even as one of his more reasonably-sized books, with a cast you can keep track of without a flowchart, it can't help itself from getting distracted. Such is the burden of omniscience.

Never making it past my mandatory minimum daily page count in the big book, I fell back on cheating, distracted audiobooks to get through the second half. There's hopefully one in here I'll enjoy.

John Milton, The Poetical Works of John Milton

Paradise Lost, Books I–VI (1667/74) *****

The endless similes are annoying, and if the excessive fawning before Heav'n's awful Monarch isn't satirical after all then it's just distasteful, but this is still the peak of old-school literature. Being one of the few small books among oversized omnibi has made this a convenient and inappropriately epic companion for walking my appropriately blind cat, with wandering attention and slow. This might be a disrespectful chapter in its antiquarian journey, but so was flogging it on eBay for a few quid.

Crockett Johnson, The Adventures of Harold and the Purple Crayon: Four Magical Stories

Harold's Fairy Tale (1956) ***

The original story was the most impressive kidz' klassik I checked out on a baby's behalf before we started reading together. She still couldn't be less interested in Harold's duochromatic dreamscapes, so I got on with the cash-in sequels myself. The fairy tale spin doesn't take this one too off course, but the adorable logic's samey.

Harold's Trip to the Sky (1958) **

Most notable from the fore edge for its dark pages, this star trek feels so uneventful that this is still the most noteworthy thing after reading.

Harold's Circus (1959) ***

Back down to Earth for wholesome family fun with exploited animals and freaks. None of the sequels were really worth reading, as expected, but I will insist on these value multipacks.

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

The Universal History of Iniquity (1935) **

These unreliable summary biographies are presumably proving some sort of point, because they're not entertaining yarns in their own right. It picks up at the end, when he starts summarising folk tales instead, but he can hardly get credit for that.

P. G. Wodehouse, The Jeeves Collection: Three Books in One Volume

Carry On, Jeeves (1925) ****

After the desired origin story it's back to more of the same as the previous book (all of the books?). Character growth would kill the serial, Jeeves' increasingly supernatural air is presumably the author exhausting the thesaurus. Eminently readable, but funnier on infrequent visits than when you're into the swing, what? Even without the cash-in cover, there's no unseeing Fry and Laurie, and it's all the better for it.