BORED? GAMES!
Author: Ivan Brett | Publisher: Headline Home
Folk games are something close to all our hearts. Whether we played them as children and formed strong bonds and memories of play with them, or if we think of them as some indestructible part of human culture – they’re important foundations to a lot of what we think of as modern gaming today.
Ivan Brett has collected together 101 of them, just in time for the summer holidays. They’re a mix of games to play with your hands, in your head, or on your feet – all broken up into the number of players you might have. The range is huge, from the journaling game using Pi and drawing games where one player attempts to make a happy ending while the other makes it more gory, to games about taking turns suggesting an evolution to animals to the self-descriptive Short-Sighted Star-Spotting in which players attempt to spot strangers around with even the vaguest passing resemblance to famous persons.
They’re mostly good fun, and a lot of the joy of the writing itself is in the very inventive examples that Ivan offers throughout the book (“How much would I have to pay you to be stung by a wasp every day for a year?” from Sweeten the Deal). Your mileage with the games will vary with the kind of situations you find yourself in, but part of the utility of the book is that once you know a game – it’s hard to forget it. This is a kind of games-culture pre-loading that will serve you well beyond immediately playing any of the games. A worth entry on any bookshelf, especially if creative entertainment options for younger gamers is a looming challenge. *
CHRISTOPHER JOHN EGGETT