We introduced two new games at our Adult Board Games Club. The first was Foxy (MB, 1977). There is a 6 x 6 board, with 32 shallow holes (the corners do not have holes). There are 11 purple wooden discs, which are randomly distributed across the board. Each player has a tube which they fill with 11 wooden discs (one player has blue, the other yellow) and position on opposite corners. Players take it in turns to move their tube in any direction, over any number of spaces, but they cannot turn direction mid-move. As the tube moves over an empty hole a disc drops down. The first player to empty their tube is the winner. A good strategy is to try and block the other player’s tube with your own tube, limiting their options on their next turn. Our members enjoyed the mechanism of moving the tube across the board: this was quite different to any other game they had played.

The other new game was Push (Spears, 1977). This is another game about trying to work out the effect of moving a row. One player has the yellow balls, and the other player has the black balls. The winner is the first to make a 3×3 square of their colour. Players push the balls a row at a time, and they keep pushing rows as long as the ball that comes out is their colour; if not, the other player takes a turn. The same player won both the games we played, with their 3×3 square in the same position both times: what are the odds of that happening?