ShareThisThis year, my theory is that board games are to modern American society what tea leaves and animal entrails have been to others: an omen by which we can foresee our fate. Two of the season's best new offerings, Atlantis and Forbidden Island, are a grim reminder of the deluge that may await us in the age of global warming. And don't get me started on Panic Tower.
Still, board games should properly be a source of conviviality and delight, and most of the year's new releases fill that bill admirably. As in past seasons, the San Francisco Chronicle's crack team of gameology experts (actually just me and some likeminded buddies) have combed through this year's crop in an effort to separate the best from the also-rans. Here's some of what we found.
Family games
Atlantis (Mayfair, $35; 2-4 players; age 10 and older; 30 min.) To read the rules of Atlantis, you might suppose you were about to play Candyland for grown-ups and older kids -- and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. But that description obscures just how straightforward, ingenious and thought-provoking this game is. The playing area is a path of colored cards that stretch across the water from the sinking island to the safety of the mainland, and players race to get all their people to land by moving to the next available tile of a given color. As the tiles disappear, those leaps get costlier, and it takes considerable planning to keep your head above water.
Forbidden Island (Gamewright, $16; 2-4 players; age 10 and older; 30 min.) The tradition of cooperative games exemplified by such recent hits as Matt Leacock's Pandemic takes a welcome step into the family room with Leacock's newest winner. A grid of cards represents a sinking island, from which the players in collaboration must retrieve four treasure items before making a safe exit by helicopter. Each player has a different suite of skills, which makes working together essential, and the play mechanism is straightforward enough to please kids and adults alike.
Dweebies (Gamewright, $11; 2-6 players; age 8 and older; 20 min.) This whimsical card game falls into that special category of games that are harder to win than they appear at a glance. The cards feature a variety of cartoon characters (the artwork is independent of the actual gameplay, but it adds to the charm), and players take turns adding them to the grid. Match two cards at the end of a row or column, and you clean up. Sounds easy, doesn't it?
Lemming Mafia (Mayfair, $35; 3-6 players; age 8 and older; 20 min.) Even if the game itself weren't a modest delight, you'd have to give kudos to whoever thought up the idea of these underworld rodents. Six of them, decked out in lurid fedoras and neckties, are in a race to plunge off a pier, and the players try to influence the outcome by filling their shoes with concrete or jackhammering it off again. The game is quick, simple and perfectly wonderful.
Panic Tower (Goliath, $25; 2-8 players; age 6 and older; 20 min.) Cross Jenga and Twister and you'd wind up with Panic Tower, an enjoyable test of physical dexterity. It's played with wooden blocks on a grid of colored squares, with cards that instruct you where to stack the blocks and how. Things get trickier when it comes to swapping one rickety tower for another, and soon the blocks have tumbled in a heap and someone has gained a point. There's a regrettable degree of determinism at work here -- unlike in Jenga or even Pick-Up Sticks, players don't actually get to make any decisions -- but that's a small downside.
Word on the Street Junior (Out of the Box, $20; 2-8 players; age 8 and older; 20 min.) Last year's breakout party game returns in a fine new version perfectly suited for the younger set. As in the original, the goal is to spell out examples of a category and pull its component letters over to your side of the board. This time, the categories are simpler (a video game, a number, a month), and the letters include vowels as well as consonants for quicker scoring.
10 Days in the Americas (Out of the Box, $25; 2-4 players; age 10 and older; 30 min.) The latest installment in the 10 Days series doesn't add anything new or distinctive to the franchise, but the underlying game is so good that it hardly matters. Once again, players have to string together a series of 10 cards that outline a continuous route by land, sea or air. This time around, the terrain is North and South America, including the full swath of the Caribbean. There's no need to diversify if you already own, say, 10 Days in Europe or 10 Days in Asia, but every family rec room ought to have at least one.
Scrabble Flash (Hasbro, $30; 1 or more players; age 8 and older; 10 min.) What we have here is cool technology in search of a commensurately cool game. The set consists of five small electronic boxes that look like oven timers, each with the ability to display one letter; the cool part is that when you line them up side by side, they communicate well enough to know whether you've formed a word. So the task is to form as many five-letter words as possible in a given time -- which is entertaining in a limited way, but still feels like a missed opportunity.
Party games
Funglish (Hasbro, $20; 3 or more players; age 12 and older; 15 min.) This fast-paced, nifty party game is just the right idea for family gatherings -- or gatherings of any kind. The object is to clue a series of nouns (pill, steam iron, etc.) using an array of helpful adjectives printed on cardboard tiles. Those include shapes, colors, value judgments, nationalities and so on, and the cluing consists of stacking the adjective tiles into piles marked "Definitely," "Kind of" and "Not." It's wonderful to watch the answers come into focus (or fail to) through the accumulation of positive and negative descriptors.
Fictionaire (Days of Wonder, $10; 4-7 players; age 10 and older; 30 min.) I'm not ordinarily very taken by variants on the old parlor game Fictionary -- that's a source that has generally been pretty well tapped out -- but this French import, which involves bluffing about encyclopedia knowledge rather than dictionary definitions, does put an enjoyable new spin on it (there are four sets, each sold separately). Instead of trying to fool everyone with your fake facts, you're focused on just one guesser, and the fake answers have to be made up on the fly, which makes for an interesting game of chicken. The only misstep is the packaging, which simulates cigarette packs down to the shiny foil inside. Seriously?
Trivial Pursuit: Bet You Know It (Hasbro, $30; 2 or more players; age 16 and older; 45 min.) The latest effort to keep the Trivial Pursuit line fresh borrows a page from Wits and Wagers. In addition to answering questions on their turns, players bet on whether their opponents will be able to answer correctly; if your bets gain you enough money, you can opt out of answering questions on subjects you don't know. It's a good wrinkle, as wrinkles go, which means that your reaction to this new version is likely to match your feelings about the original.
Five-Second Rule (Patch, $25; 3 or more players; age 10 and older; 20-30 min.) The premise is deceptively simple, but this game provides a burst of good, undemanding party play for young and old alike. Each card gives a category, and players have to produce three of them within five seconds: three private colleges, three of the original American colonies, three breeds of cat. This is harder under time pressure than you might imagine, which is where the fun comes in. The one downside is the difficulty of settling judgment calls under the same time pressure; also the timer contraption, which substitutes whimsy for usefulness.
Guinness World Records: The Board Game (Haywire, $30; 2-6 players; age 8 and older; 30 min.) If nothing else, this one sets a record for most extraneous paraphernalia bundled with a game. There's a rope, dominoes, marbles, a standard deck of cards and more -- all so players can occasionally try to do little bar-bet stunts in between failing to answer trivia questions about world records. What no one seems to have realized is that weird records don't make fun trivia, because they're not things that people know.
Strategy games
Macao (Rio Grande, $45; 2-4 players; age 12 and older; 90 min.) It takes only one brilliantly innovative idea to turn a solid game into a masterpiece. In Macao -- an otherwise conventional game of trading and resource management -- that idea involves a trade-off between wealth and time. Players have to choose between acquiring a few resources soon or lots of resources on a future turn, and the longer you postpone the payoff, the bigger the payoff becomes. Unfortunately, it's hard to know now precisely what you'll want in five turns -- plus, if you ever get caught with no resources at all, the penalties are severe. The surrounding mechanisms depend a little more on luck than one might wish, but Macao is still the most rewarding new strategy game of the year.
Lords of Vegas (Mayfair, $45; 2-4 players; age 12 and older; 60-90 min.) This zingy creation transfers the basic mechanism of Sid Sackson's classic Acquire -- a grid of square plots that players collect by chance -- to the world of Las Vegas casinos, with enjoyable results. Which real estate you get is a matter of luck, but it's up to you to expand your lots into competitive casinos -- muscling out your opponents, taking over their operations, and trading and gambling your way toward the lucrative spots on the Strip.
Albion (Rio Grande, $45; 2-4 players; age 12 and older; 75 min.) With better balance in the design, this game of Roman imperialism would have been a clear favorite instead of a near-miss. Players compete to expand their legionary forces into Britain, building fortresses and fighting off hostile Picts as they move north. But getting to provinces first confers a huge advantage, and the player who takes an early lead never loses it; one mistake in the early rounds takes you out of the game immediately.
Loopit (Goliath, $30; 2-4 players; age 7 and older; 20 min.) Last year Goliath introduced Tayu, which still holds up as one of the best two-player strategy games to come along in years. Loopit is a pallid sequel, which tries to combine a similar theme -- playing tiles that connect in a network of squiggly lines -- with an annoyingly arbitrary scoring scheme out of Scrabble. The result isn't much fun; I mention it now only as an excuse to give Tayu one more fond plug.
Where to buy games:
Most of the games listed should be available online, either at www.funagain.com or from retailers such as Amazon.com. A wealth of helpful information can also be found at the indispensable (and aptly named) website www.boardgamegeek.com.
(E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman(at)sfchronicle.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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