Anyone over the age of 30 will undoubtedly recall many happy hours sitting with a group of friends hunched over the dining room table playing boardgames.  An all-time favourite is real-estate game Monopoly, where players buy and rent properties,trying to win all of the money in the game.  Another classic is the whodunnit crime game, Clue where players have to decide just who did kill the murder victim in the drawing room with the candlestick.

More abstract games involve moving coloured pieces around boards laid out in different formations.  An ancient favourite is the game of draughts, or checkers where players compete to knock each other’s pieces off the board by jumping over them.

One of the most popular board games of them all is backgammon.  This game, whose origins date back many thousands of years, involves a race to the finish to remove your pieces off the backgammon board before your opponent.  The game is full of cunning maneuvers where players must be on their guard at all times, simultaneously using attacking and defensive strategies to outsmart their opponents.

With the explosion of computer use one might have thought that boardgames would now be a thing of the past.  Quite the opposite is the case, and computer versions of all classic board games have made them even more popular than ever.  Now a new generation of mouse-clicking youngsters is sampling the same fun and excitement of these gambling games on their laptops and cell phones as did their parents and grandparents before them.  One thing is quite apparent – the best board games are here to stay!