Preview: Dexterity and spatial games

Not every game is about deep strategy, mind-churning depth of play and moving bits of coloured wood about the the board. No, some of them are about stacking, shifting, prodding and balancing things on top of other things. We'll be running a session of games where a good eye and steady hand will see you right:

Villa Paletti

A game for 2 - 4 budding architects, but we'd be horrified if any of you actually went on to make real buildings after this.

The story is that old man Paletti wanted to finish his castle but had run out of money. Then he had an idea: why buy new columns when he could re-use the old ones holding up the lower floors? And this is where you come in. The Villa is initially one floor supported by many columns and you have to steadily take columns from the first floor, add them to the second until a roof can be put on that. Then you start building the third floor by cannibalizing the columns from the second floor ...

Villa Paletti is the winner of the 2001 Tric Trac d'Or (Best Children's Game) and the 2002 Spiel des Jahres. More information can be found here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2596/villa-paletti

The Climbers

Die Aufsteiger is a deceptively simple 3D strategy game. There's a stack of coloured wooden blocks and each player starts their piece down the bottom and tries to move to the top. But your pawn can only move up a single step to an adjoining block of the same colour as you. To help yourself, you can move and rotate the blocks. To hinder other players, you can move and rotate blocks. The winner is whoever gets to the highest point first when no one can go higher for one round.

More information about The Climbers can be found here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/34297/the-climbers