About this site

I grew up in a game-playing household. Card games such as Canasta or Whist were popular, along with board games like Mahjong, Scrabble and even Monopoly. 

When our sons were small, we naturally introduced them to simple games, through draughts (checkers) and chess as they were older, Mahjong, of course, the inevitable Monopoly, and other games we discovered: Probe (a board game variation on Hangman), Upwords (a three-dimensional form of Scrabble) and some computer games. When we moved to Cyprus we were introduced to Rummikub, which we played almost weekly.

When they left home, we wondered if our game-playing days were finished, at least until grandchildren came along. Happily, we learned about the 'European-style' board games, of which the supreme example, in our opinion, is Settlers of Catan. We were introduced to it by one of our adult sons; they had both learned the game from someone else in Cyprus. But we didn't really follow all the rules until we started playing regularly with some new friends, who moved to Cyprus in January 2009. 

It wasn't many months before we acquired our own copy of the game. We researched the best way of playing with just two of us, when our friends were not available.  And over the next few years we acquired several of the expansions.  We have played through most of the scenarios in 'Seafarers', and 'Traders and Barbarians'. We have played the latest one, 'Explorers and Pirates', working through each of the scenarios in turn, culminating in a huge game that takes rather longer to set up than we like, although it's a good game.

But our favourite remains 'Cities and Knights'. More complex than the other expansions, with some rather different rules - the city expansions, for instance; the pirate ship potentially destroying cities; the different cards - it took us a long time to feel comfortable with it, able to carry on a conversation while playing. But now we play it at least once a week, sometimes twice, and we never tire of it.

This blog, which at first charted almost every game we played, is only updated sporadically now.