5 portable board games to keep in your holiday backpack

Here are the best light and pocket-sized boardgames to take with you, between the beach and the mountains

All ready to go for the summer, between the sea and the mountains, with a backpack on your back and a light and pocket-sized board game. take with you everywhere, to have fun with friends and relatives in the hottest hours of the day or in the dead moments between an ice cream and an aperitif.

1. The Crew: mission into the abyss

Created with GIMP Let's start with the hottest news of the summer, at least among the paperback titles. The sequel to The Crew has just been released, last year's blockbuster card game, winner of several awards including the prestigious Kennerspiel des Jahres 2020, one of the most coveted awards in the world of board games. In English-speaking countries they are called “trick taking games”, for us Italians they are more simply variants of tressette and tressette: card games in which you have to play from your hand to make tricks, typically without being able to communicate with the players. The Crew: Mission in the Abyss is part of this genre, but just like its predecessor it manages to give a brilliant twist to a mechanism that is perhaps less innovative for us than abroad.

The heart of the game is in fact collaborative and not competitive; players interpret the crew of a submarine called to perform missions, such as taking a certain number of cards in a specific order, having a specific ally take exactly that card and no other, ending a turn without a player has taken even cards, and so on.

Compared to the original, Mission in the Abyss changes the setting (from space to oceans) and also introduces some new features, in particular a specific difficulty level for each mission that allows you to fish a number of objectives that can be scaled according to how many players sit at the table (Thomas Sing game, Giochi Uniti editions, 2-5 players, 20 minutes, 10+ years, € 16.90).

Wired: a revised and improved version of a great success recent.

Tired: Certain combinations of objectives can be very easy or nearly impossible to achieve, regardless of your progress in the game.

2. Throw Throw Burrito

A card game? A busy business? A "table sport"? What does the definition matter: Throw Throw Burrito is one of the titles that best embodies the somewhat caciarone spirit and the desire to move of the beach summer.

On the other hand, what to expect from a game the whose goal is, literally, to pull on two soft and succulent rubbery sponge burritos? Before each game, players place card decks full of surreal illustrations in front of them, with the same humorous spirit of Exploding Kittens, and take five cards in hand. When the game begins, the action gets frantic. In real time, without waiting for turns, you have to draw a card from the deck in front of you, and discard another one in the deck of the player on your left.

Continue in this way until you get a set of the same color. By doing this, points are scored most of the time. But there are also combinations that trigger a "burrito fight", in which two players have to grab one of the two burritos in the middle of the table as quickly as possible and throw them at him; a "burrito war", which instead involves all the participants (except those who activated the trio); or the mythical "burrito duel", a challenge from the far west in which two contenders get back to back and, after counting three steps, turn around throwing sponge burritos at each other (game by Matthew Inman, Elan Lee, Brian S. Spence , Asmodee editions, 2-6 players, 15 min, 7+ years, € 24.90).

Wired: a game for many (if not everyone), from friends who want to mess with children who will not wait to hit their parents and siblings.

Tired: it is definitely not suitable for places that are too crowded or where you can't be noisy.

3. Bananagrams

From burritos to bananas, the step isn't that long. This time we enter the field of letter and word games with an "emulator" of the famous Scarabeo, reinterpreted, however, in a more portable and rapid version, with no scoreboard or downtime.

In a nice banana-shaped package there are the classic white cards on the front of which a letter is printed. Starting with an initial set of letters, players will have to hurry to create words by arranging them in a crossword-like pattern of vertical and horizontal intersections.

When completing combinations, “letter! ”And all players must draw a new tile. Alternatively, if you are stuck or in trouble, you can make a change, discarding one of your letters and drawing three at random. When the pool of tiles is almost exhausted (that is, when there are fewer than the number of players left), the first player to place all their letters and shout “banana! "Is declared the winner - provided, however, that he has not made any spelling mistakes or written non-existent words (game by Rena and Abe Nathanson, dV games editions, 1-8 players, 15 min, 7+ years, € 19.90) .

For those with even less space in their backpack or traveling as a couple, there is also the Bananagrams Duel version (€ 14.90) designed specifically for two players. The real difference, besides the smaller size, is that the tiles are replaced by dice, each of which has 6 letters - one for each face. In a frantic head-to-head, the player who first uses all the cubes to create a complete pattern wins. There are also some fun variations where you have to find words on specific topics, compose kissing rhymes, or roll the dice instead of choosing which face to use.

Wired: a fast, portable game for small or large groups, which it is explained in a few seconds and in which one match leads to another.

Tired: each player has his own personal scheme; words cannot be linked to other people's crosswords, so interaction is limited.

4. The game is drawn

How many days, at school, do you spend playing tic-tac-toe, come on four, dots and lines - anything you could organize with a sheet of squared paper and a pencil, just to overcome boredom. The game is drawn is a box that takes you back to those times, collecting ten games from as many board game designers, such as the famous Hjalmar Hach (author of King's Dilemma and Similo).

The games are all based on simple and repeatable mechanisms: there is Yavalath, by Ludi & Cameron Browne, in which you win by aligning four identical symbols, as in force four, but you lose if you align three, thus making it mandatory to create spaces to fill before get to the goal. O Dieter Stein's neighborhoods in which, by means of crosses and dots on a squared sheet, the players build houses, blocks of flats and neighborhoods, with very precise placement rules.

All games are presented with a sheet of instructions and, above all, the relative plasticized board and an erasable marker, so as to be repeatable indefinitely (AA. VV., Studio Supernova editions, 2-4 players, 15-20 min., 10+ years, 14.90 euros ).

Wired: a series of puzzle-challenges for fans of logical placements.

Tired: Spartan graphics and instructions sometimes not very clear at first reading (luckily there are some examples ).

5. Friday

We close with a perfect game for solo travelers, new Robinson Crusoe. As a friendly Friday, a player must help the famous castaway survive for years on a desert island, overcoming a series of challenges and accomplishing feats ranging from hunting wild beasts to building makeshift rafts. Only those who finally manage to survive two pirate attacks will be able to declare themselves the winner - or simply survive. Otherwise, defeat will be inevitable.

The game is based on a deck building mechanism, ie the construction and enhancement of a deck of cards. In each round, two challenge cards are revealed and one is chosen to pass. To do this, you have to overcome a minimum score (which increases as the game progresses) by blindly drawing cards from a skill deck.

At the beginning of the game, however, Robinson is a naive rookie, easily distracted and must still get the bones: the values ​​of the cards in the deck will go from +1 to -1, with many zeros and little hope of success. Overcoming the challenges you will get stronger cards to put in the deck; when you are defeated you lose precious life points, but at least you learn from your own and it is possible to eliminate the worst cards.

By doing this Robinson becomes stronger and stronger, until he is able to challenge the pirates : two particularly demanding challenges that require a very high score and often have more complex additional conditions (game by Friedman Friese, Uplay editions, 1 player, 30 min., 13+ years, € 16.95).

Wired: one of the best non-narrative solitaire card games.

Tired: the illustrations have a naive and functional style, but a little behind the quality of other modern games.


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