Kevan Davis - The Boardgame Remix Kit

Boardgames! Theyre pretty great - except when theyre not. When its Christmas Day and you find yourself playing Cluedo with a very clever seven-year-old, a slightly dim twelve-year-old, a drunken uncle, and three missing cards. When its the fourth day of a beachside holiday and its raining, and the pub down the road has Scrabble (which is great) but your friend knows a hundred and seven two-letter words by heart (which isnt). When your household edition of Trivial Pursuit dates from the year you were born, which means (a) the board is in three pieces, and (b) an awful lot of the questions are about Gilligans Island, which youve never seen. Maybe you even bought a more recent copy, only to find older family members grumbling at the focus on new-fangled celebrities like Britney Spears and N Sync.

If this sounds familiar, the Boardgame Remix Kit is for you. Its a set of new games that you can play using the board and pieces from Monopoly, Scrabble, Cluedo and Trivial Pursuit. Some of the new games are silly; some of them are tactical; some of them ask you to think fiercely, some of them ask you to make stuff up, some of them just ask you to sit around and chat.

For each game youre likely to have lying around the house weve included a mix of tweaks, new games and mashups. A tweak is like a house rule: a little change you can make to a game you already love that perhaps makes it a bit faster, or a bit less random, or a bit sillier. A new game is what it sounds like - a totally new game that uses the pieces from a game you own, but gives you different things to do with them. A mashup is a combination of two different games - perhaps using the tiles from Scrabble on the Cluedo board, or combining Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit.

These are ideas and games that can extend the life of the boardgames you already know. Some of them let you keep playing even after youve lost so many pieces that the original game wont work. Some of them let you play on more equal terms with people who are much better or worse at a game than you are. Some of them are great for a lazy afternoon, or when you want an easier way to spend an hour - or a harder way, or just a funnier one. We think theyre all great fun, and we hope you do as well.

So, you want to play a game. You have the Boardgame Remix Kit. You have at least one of the classic back-of-your-aunts-cupboard board Cluedo, Monopoly, Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit. But you dont want to play that game, because youve played it too often, or you dont have time, or it always ends in tears, or you just want something different. Thats where the Boardgame Remix Kit comes in.

For each tweak, new game or mashup in this book, you can see:

• What you need to play: what games you need the pieces from, and whether you need anything extra like paper, pens, playing cards, player tokens or counting tokens.
• What the game is like: is it silly, serious, tactical? Does it involve trivia, or words, or bartering, or something else entirely?
• How many players you need.
• How long the game will take. You can expect short games to run 10 to 20 minutes; medium games to run 20 to 40 minutes; and long games to run for more than 40 minutes, depending on how many people play.

Small change can make excellent player tokens as there are lots of different values to identify different players (a 5p piece for one player, 20p for another, and so on). You can use pretty much anything for counting tokens - paperclips, buttons, chocolate coins - as long as its something small that you can find a pile of.