New board games for the family

Published 12:01 am Tuesday, December 29, 2009

New Year’s Eve traditions in many families have been board games: big bowls of popcorn, plenty of sparkling soft drinks, and real game boards and “pieces,” not virtual electronic devices. The real winner is the kid who makes it to midnight.

Here are some new family games to add to your cupboard:

Finca (Rio Grande, $39.95; 2 to 4 players; age 10 or older): This is the one I keep returning to most eagerly for its blend of simplicity, beauty and unpredictability.

The premise is that the players are farmers on Majorca, reaping various bounties of six crops and delivering them to whatever part of the island requires, say, figs and oranges.

It’s a brilliantly straightforward scheme in which each move is deter and the gorgeous physical design only adds to the pleasure.

Maori (Rio Grande, $34.95; 2 to 5 players; age 8 and up: Part of the delight of this short and rewarding game is seeing how much variety and tactical subtlety can be wrung out of an uncomplicated set of rules.

Your goal is to complete an island map using printed tiles, with bonuses for things like palm trees and flower garlands.

Players take turns moving a ship around a layout of tiles, trying to maneuver into position to get the tiles they want. The whole thing sounds too simple to work, but in fact it rewards many repeated plays.

Secrets of the Sea (Playroom, $20; 2 to 4 players; age 5 and up: This beats Candyland and Chutes and Ladders, an easy but rewarding games from the German inventing genius Reiner Knizia.

The theme is deep-sea diving, and the play mechanism is simplicity itself: You roll dice, choose one row of hidden tiles to explore, and try to scavenge some hidden treasures..

Although the game is meant for the wee set, adults will enjoy it as well.

The Kids of Carcassonne (Rio Grande, $29.95; 2 to 4 players; age 4 and up: Here’s another, even simpler, game designed to introduce the very young to the pleasures of European-style gaming.

Players assemble a landscape by adding tiles to the layout. In this version, though, there’s no matching involved — any tile can go anywhere — and the goal is simply to complete the paths that have your pieces on them.

It’s a well-judged challenge for small kids, and there’s enough strategy to hold the parents’ attention.

Dominion: Intrigue (Rio Grande, $44.95; 2 to 4 players; age 8 and older: Dominion, the card game, has been expanded with another set of 25 cards for exponentially more play possibilities.

As before, only 10 cards are used at a time, so if you combine both games for a set of 50 random options, the range is astronomical.

Many of the new cards serve dual purposes or offer the player a choice of actions, and the results can be pleasingly complex.

Connect 4 x 4 (Milton Bradley, $24.99; 2 to 4 players; age 8 and up: Connect 4 x 4 addresses a problem I hadn’t known existed — how do you play Connect 4 with more than two players? — and solves it ingeniously.

Players drop still colored checkers into an upright grid. Accommodating extra players is just a matter of creating a two-ply grid, and giving each player two blocker checkers that span both sides of the board. And voila! Works like a charm.

Catan Dice Game (Mayfair, $25; 1 to 6 players; age 7 and up: Sometimes you can’t get a full game of Settlers of Catan going, but you’re still jonesing for a fix of brick, sheep and ore. The dice game fills that gap deftly.

Resources are garnered by three rolls of the dice, Yahtzee-style, and you combine them to mark off roads, settlements and cities on a printed score pad.

Jenga Max (Parker Brothers, $21.99; 2-plus players; age 8 and up: Don’t expect this game to have much to do with the original classic Jenga (its ugly plastic pieces instead of attractive wood blocks).

The new game has its own appeal for those who like the manual-dexterity vein. Each piece is a plastic girder with a hole at one end and a wide notch at the other, which can be assembled into spidery mobiles that are large but shaky.

Misplace one piece and the whole thing topples down.

Monopoly City (Hasbro, $39.99; 2 to 6 players; age 8 and up: This new Monopoly variant tweaks some of the familiar rules. The main change is that you can now build on a property as soon as you buy it, although there are still benefits to owning an entire color group.

Also, you can buy either residential or commercial buildings (or a combination of the two); residential buildings are cheaper, but your rent goes away if an opponent builds a sewage plant or a prison on your property.

7 Ate 9 (Out of the Box, $9.99; 2 to 4 players; age 8 and up: For those with a taste for speedy-reflex games like Spit — let’s gamble and say the tween set — this variant leavens the usual card play with a bit of basic arithmetic.

Each card has a main number, as well as a smaller number between 1 and 3. If adding or subtracting the two numbers gives the number on a card you have, play it fast.

Scripps Howard News Service