Brace yourself for a bit of culture shock when you unfold the directions: there's a steep but swift learning curve, and I swear it's not actually that hard to play. And then it's just this crazy mix of simple (draw a tile, lay a tile) and mind-blowingly strategic As a person who grew up with such maddeningly-competitive-but-numbingly-boring games as Monopoly and Risk, I honestly had no idea that a game could be so engrossing. It's almost deceptively lovely: you lay out forest, meadow, and river tiles (there's not actually a board) to create a stone-age landscape full of woolly mammoths and fish ponds and rambling woods. A word of warning: once you play these games, some of the games you've been loving for years (Monopoly, Clue, Sorry, Uno) will suddenly seem so boring you will wonder what you were thinking.Īnother all-time favorite game, and our long-ago introduction to European-style board games. Most of the games I mention here are good for kids 7 and up, though Birdy has been playing them a bit longer than that (not that she had a lot of choice in the matter). If there's a gamer's store near you-you know, once of those places where a bunch of fragrantly-male adolescents is exclaiming over their Magic cards-see if they offer a game night where you can come and try a game that you're thinking of buying besides the wise preview factor, it's also a fun (free) night out. Also, they're often relatively expensive-but I have never regretted investing in one, since we get so much play out of them.

The games are almost always physically lovely, with heavy-duty, beautifully made wooden and cardboard pieces. They tend to be deceptively simple to learn and wildly complex to play, but not always some are so hard to learn that Ben has had to pre-digest the rules for us by sitting with them for hours on end until he's can explain them (I realize that this is a hindrance, but worthwhile). These are serious strategy games, often European in origin, that involve very little luck and very little boring down-time.

Tichu 6 player rules