Description

This book of games is 30 pages long, and is a hardback. The dimensions are 250mm (10") by 355mm (14"). There are fifteen separate boards, including a Chess / Checkers board in the front papers and a Backgammon board in the end papers

John Astrop has written a short introduction, outlining the games he has chosen for this book and categorizing them in four groups:
Easy Race Games (for small kids)- Ludo, Fire! Fire! (Snakes and Ladders), Steeplechase and Dragon.
Harder Race Games (for older games) - Palm Tree, Shunting, Jackpot and Space Race.
Position Games (dependent on strategy alone)- Checkers, Chess, Nine Men's morris, Five Field Kono, Asalto
Wargames (strategy, imagination and luck) - Chess, Spychase, Warlord and Backgammon.

Palm Tree is a combination of Ludo and Snakes and Ladders, with a nice art deco board.

Space Race, Shunting, Warlord, Spychase and Jackpot appear to be original games. The others are either classic games or re-themed roll-and-move games.

Space Race is a bigger scale version of Ludo, requiring the players to roll the right numbers to build their rockets before starting on the trip to the Green Planet. There are various squares on the way that give different results as you land on them. The only strategy comes in deciding which piece to move.

In Shunting players again roll and move, but have to pick up four trucks before returning to the start. Players have only one train each, and can only move in one direction in a turn, but can then change direction on the next direction, as if they were trains passing through points. Trains block each other, although they do not get bigger with extra trucks on.

Warlord is a capture game with a pre-Raphaelite design. Players have 4 pieces starting at castles on the corners on the board, and can move any one of these 4 in turn. Landing exactly on an enemy piece captures it, and the captured piece can then be moved back to the castle and imprisoned. Players can release captive pieces through the enchanted forest or lake. A single piece can capture more than one enemy piece, but if that pile is recaptured, all friendly pieces go free.

Spychase is similar to Scotland Yard, with no hidden movement. The spy player attempts to steal a set of plans by rolling and landing on them, then escaping to the airport or docks. The police players cannot capture the spy until he has taken the plans. At that point the police player then tries to block in the spy player so that he cannot move his full roll.

In Jackpot, the 2 players move their pieces up a fruit machine the full number rolled, but can only move a piece when the fruit under the piece moved is shown on the row of 6 fruit that the piece arrives on. If no forward moves can be made, a piece must be moved down the dice roll instead. Once all three pieces are at the final squares, a player wins.