This was our first Adult Board Games Club after our Christmas break. We started with Uno (Mattel, 1971). We noted the similarity with the boneyard in Dominoes i.e. having to keep taking a card from the pile until you have one you can play. I find some of the special cards a little confusing so we introduced them gradually. On our first game we used the wildcards and the reverse direction card; on our next game we added in the skip card. We enjoyed working out the strategy of using the reverse and skip cards to miss out a player who has less cards than you and keep them in the game longer.

Our second game was Rainbow Rage (Big Potato, 2016) (which I prefer to call Rainbow Race). The first thing to do is set aside the colours of the rainbow you learnt as a child (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) as this game uses purple and pink instead of indigo and violet. Once you have got over this annoyance, this is a good game of visual perception. A card is turned over and players race to shout out the two colours that have swapped places. They win a block of each colour. Some cards are a perfect rainbow with all the colours in the correct order: the first to shout “rainbow” gets to choose which coloured block to add to their collection. Players can trade three spare blocks for a colour of their choice. The first player to collect a block of every colour and build their own rainbow is the winner. I do enjoy these games which are easy to explain and quick to start playing, and which can be enjoyed by all ages.