Best Holiday Board Games

When you open the Corintho box and set up all the columns on the platform, you feel like your looking at a small part of Roman history. There's no doubt it's a beautiful game to look at and pieces, make of poly-stone, all feel good in the hand.

Using beautifully detailed Corinthian capitals, columns, and bases as the playing pieces, two architects attempt to construct a line of 3 units that share a common top piece by either adding a new piece into play, or by stacking a piece on top of another.

With a restricted choice of moves to make, Corintho is a board game that requires competitive strategy skills and thought.

Fans of Sid Meier's classic video game franchise will find familiar footing in Civilization: The Board Game. Staying true to the foundations of its video game predecessor while creating a new and unique way to play, Civilization: The Board Game and Civilization Fame and Fortune captures the spirit and grandeur of carving out a magnificent empire from modest beginnings.

Players start off with a single city, one army figure, and one scout, and from these meagre origins you must forge through the ages and become the greatest civilisation in the world.

Those unfamiliar with the video game series will find Civilization: The Board Game a great way to enter into the world of Civilisation. The strategy and tactical decisions involved in Civilization: The Board Game will appeal to strategy gamers and war gamers alike, and the ability to win through culture and technological advancement will give those who only wish to focus on their own empire a chance at victory as well.

The Fame and Fortune expansion for Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game provides players with new game options, and brings a host of enhancements.

The Fame and Fortune expansion for Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game provides players with new game options, and brings a host of enhancements.

Four new civilizations: The Arabs, the Spanish, the Greeks, and the Indians. A new deck of "Great Person" cards that allows players to recruit the aid of specific figures from history, such as Joan of Arc, Marco Polo, Hannibal, or Gustavus Adolphus. New map tiles, tech cards, culture event cards, and the introduction of the investment deck, which features cards that allow players to spend hard-earned coin to reap ongoing benefits plus Components for a fifth player.

The players are plantation owners in The Puerto Rico Game in the days when ships had sails.

Growing up to five different kind of crops: corn, indigo, sugar, tobacco, and coffee, they must try to run their business more efficiently than their close competitors: growing crops and storing them efficiently, developing San Juan with useful buildings, deploying their colonists to best effect, selling crops at the right time, and, most importantly, shipping their goods back to Europe for maximum benefit.

The game system lets players choose the order of the phases in each turn by allowing each player to choose a role from those remaining when it is their turn. No role can be selected twice in the same round.

One of teh good things about Puerto Rico is the high level of participation and the minimising of down time. Players can act on every turn of the game, allowing them to choose between shipping goods for points or building an impressive city. Players must manage their colonists, erect a variety of buildings, build up their plantation, and sell or ship goods.

In the end, the player with the most victory points (the best plantation) wins the game.

We love co-operative board games and Matt Leacock stands out as one of the best designers of these kinds of Board games. There are so many things we love about Forbidden Island. From the quality artwork to the collaborative nature of the mission, to the creative rules, to the infinite strategies for getting off Forbidden Island as it slowly sinks in to the sea.

Don't be surprised if your pulse starts pounding faster soon after you start playing - it's a game that instantly generates an electrifying atmosphere of tension and excitement! Forbidden Island is one of the best new board games in our collection and you can find it in Australia by wandering over to Games from Everywhere.

The new Dixit Odyssey is both a standalone game and an expansion for Jean-Louis Roubira's Dixit, which won Germany's Spiel des Jahres award in 2010.

One-half expansion and one-half revision, Dixit Odyssey continues the fine quality of Jean-Louis Roubira's award-winning Dixit gameplay. Like the original Dixit and its expansion, Odyssey contains 84 cards depicting dreamlike images, bringing the complete Dixit arsenal to around 250 cards.

Fortunately, Odyssey's box insert was specially designed to hold all of these cards, with three divisions meant to contain each release's stack of cards individually if that's the way you have them organised.

This insert comes at the expense of the idyllic scoreboard of the original, which is a minor loss at best. The new scoreboard is literally more straightforward, just thirty spaces arranged in a row on a simple folding board.

Game play in Dixit Odyssey matches that of Dixit: Each turn one player is the storyteller. This player secretly chooses one card in his hand, then gives a word or sentence to describe this card - but not too obviously. Each other player chooses a card in hand that matches this word/sentence and gives it to the storyteller.

In Dixit Odyssey, the storyteller then lays out the cards, and all other players vote on which card belongs to the storyteller. If no one or everyone guesses the storyteller's card, the storyteller receives no points and all players receive two; otherwise the storyteller and the correct guesser(s) each receive three points.

Players score one point for each vote their image receives.

Players refill their hands, and the next player becomes the storyteller. When the deck runs out, the player with the most points wins.