Now the summer holidays have started, there’s no better way to keep your brain in shape and have fun than with board games, whether its some serious strategising with chess, or earning wads of monopoly money. You can play them outside in hot weather far more easily than a wii, and the sun doesn’t interfere with the screen in quite the same way that it does with a psp. And if you’re starting to feel like your wit is a little too razor sharp, remember, with a little imagination most board games can easily turn into drinking games. Cheers! Now go on, roll that die.

The Tried and Tested

Monopoly:

The rules: Roll a dice to travel around a board that’s a square approximation of London. Land on streets to buy them with Monopoly money. Build houses on complete sets and charge your opponents to land on them. The last one in when everyone else is completely bankrupt wins.

Beware: Under no circumstances make any kind of mortgage/property sharing agreement with the flatmate on course for a first in Business Management. Don’t be surprised if people think creatively. Even if you don’t play often, it is surprisingly easy to ‘learn’ the forfeits and rewards on the Chance and Community Chest cards, but change them subtly so that ‘drunk in charge – fine £20’ is read aloud to the group as: ‘it’s your birthday, get £10 from every player’. If it really was your birthday you’d probably be drunk anyway which means it isn’t really cheating.

How it will help your course: It’s obvious that if you’re studying anything to do with banking, finance or property you can apply the way people invest their cash in the game to your larger uni projects. Think of it as a microcosmic economy. Monopoly can also teach you people skills which could be valuable for the future. Look how one player cajoles and coaxes another into a disastrous deal/rent ‘understanding’. Try it on your landlord. Look how the top hat owner is obsessively buying up the stations like a Russian business man after an English football club. The game will also comfortingly keep you in cosy student-land, not worrying about house-price explosions or income tax. Savour that in the universe of Monopoly you can buy an entire street in Angel Islington for £200 when in reality, by the time you graduate that may not even cover the price of lunch.

Risk:

The Rules: Each player or team has an army of little men with cannons and guns and an equal share in the ownership of the world. Players must take over the entire planet using gory and barbaric weaponry, mostly dice, on a map-shaped battlefield. Unfortunately, this takes approximately the same length of time to do as an average undergraduate degree. A more manageable version is Mission Risk, where players complete 4 tasks with objectives such as: Have More Units on the Map than Anyone Else, Contol Three Continents and Destroy Terrorism.

Beware: Risk reduces the hellish effects of war to that rather sad, slightly hollow feeling you (or at least, I) get when you lose a board game. But, rather than getting het up about the morality of that, why not remember that this isn’t actually war, it’s actually just a board game. Phew. It’s also worth knowing that the people you expect to be good at Risk aren’t necessarily. I personally should be disastrous at it as I am not exactly famed for my organisational tactics, luck or strategic thinking. However, I am the Risk Master and never has anything made me feel quite so warm and fuzzy inside. Warm and fuzzy, however, is NOT how you will feel when you are actually in the clutches of the game which turns even the meekest of people into ghastly greedy monsters. Don’t play on return from a booze-filled night out if you want to keep your friends.

How it can help your degree: Anybody studying politics or history will easily see parallels between the German Blitzkrieg and the run of luck with the dice that their opponent across the table is enjoying. But how do people deal with having or lacking power? Does absolute power corrupt absolutely? It’s a sociology student’s dream. Plus, it does teach tactical thinking. Okay, so hopefully you’re not required to carry out an actual war as part of your coursework, but the benefits of knowing how to fight on two fronts at once may be helpful when finals are looming and you haven’t done nearly enough revision. Of course maybe if you’d done more revision and played less Risk, you wouldn’t be in this situation, but it’s best not to think about that.

Other old favourites to dig out:

Scrabble:

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