Pit
Not a game for quiet spaces. Everyone is yelling at the same time, trying to trade their commodities with each other as quickly as they can. The idea is that you are dealt a hand of wheat, oats, fruit bats, breakfast cereals, etc, and you must trade sets of items for other sets of items to make a hand of all one type of good. There’s no turn structure, the fastest trades the mostest. Is this the first real-time board game? It came out in 1904, so I imagine it’s a contender.
Year of Release: 1904
Number of Players: 3-8
Playing Time: 30-90 min
Listed Age: 7+
Mechanics: Trading, Set Collection, Hand Management
Theme in a Nutshell: Commodity Trading
What I like:
For a simple game, it has the capacity to create lasting memories. 25 or so years ago, we were playing this game on-tour in a hotel room. I had collected a full set and went to slam the board, as one does, to find that Sweats (that’s his nickname, as with most of our nicknames it made no sense) had just beat me with his hand under mine. He had ust learnt the game not 20 minutes earlier. He turns to me with a poop-eating grin says, “Oh sorry, did I get my hand in there in front of yours? I can’t tell.”
It’s easy to craft the game to suite your family’s dynamic. Queen’s family have a variant that adds pennies on the table (1 less than the number of players). Instead of slapping a board or ringing a bell once you’ve won, you grab one of the pennies. First to grab a penny wins the round. Once the first penny goes, everyone else must grab the remaining pennies ASAP, PDQ, and RFN. There’s one less penny than people, so someone has a sad and doesn’t get a penny and loses 20 points in the process. Being sneaky people, the winner when we play often tries to take the penny as surreptitiously as possible to create even more chaos. They’ll even yell out fake trades to keep the action going. Devious to be sure.
My Rating: 7/10
What I don’t like:
Not good at 3 people. I would say you should play with no less than 4, and it’s really good at 6 or more.
It’s very loud, so you have to make sure you’re playing in an area that’s ok with your noise level.
Is it good for kids and families?
Good game for families as kids can really get in to the action with the yelling and the carrying on. Smaller kids might get left behind with the speed of the thing, so parents might have to back off a bit to even the playing field. This is a fun one with grandparents as well.
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