Gadget Guru
This month GaGu takes care of our readers’ most burning issues, such as how to keep restless hands occupied with handy (sorry!) little gadgets and what to do when your pants get stuck in your bicycle chain. Yes, we’ve no idea either
AAlthough GaGu’s ‘unsportsmanlike behaviour’ has seen him banned from board game night at Guru Towers – it is apparently not acceptable to bring weapons to the Snakes & Ladders table – he is happy to report that the ever-creeping purple miasma of tech is seeping quickly from the real world into the cardboard one.
You may have heard of Monopoly Ultimate Banking (around £28), one of the six million Monopoly variants which, this time, removes all the fun of hiding half your paper fortune under the board or cannily palming an extra 500 from the bank by using little virtual credit cards. But don’t play that: Monopoly is rubbish, and your family agrees. You may also have heard of digital versions of many popular games hitting platforms like the iPad – no dealing with components, setup or flagrant rule infractions, but the tactile pleasure of sitting around a table is completely lost. Some games also have scoring apps to help you keep track if your skill with pen and paper is that of a three-year-old hopped up on Skittles; GaGu is solidly OK with these.
As you may have guessed by Guru’s willingness to answer your question, there are much better games which use tech in far more interesting ways. Start with the mildly-technical Space Alert (around £40) which has you playing a CD in the background which dictates events unfolding as you try to rally a crew to deal with them, the actions of which you won’t fully understand until the turn plays out afterwards.
X-Com: The Board Game (£55) is where we start getting a bit deeper, with a companion app which actively drives the action, controlling the alien invasion in real-time. And Fantasy Flight’s tremendous dungeon-crawler Descent (£75) has recently been updated with an app which takes on the previously player-controlled role of Overlord, allowing more dungeoneers at the table and causing far fewer catastrophic relationship fractures.
“Some games have scoring apps to help you keep track if your skill with a pen is that of a three-year-old”