Cairo

Dating back from 2002, copies of Cairo still pop up online and for a deceptively silly party game – one where your flick cubes around with various fingers and thumbs – it’s a worthy diversion.

The board is split into sections through which the Nile River runs through. Each player places their boat at the bottom of the board and takes pieces of their own colour: a bunch of small cubes, one big cube, and a single die. The theme is that we are building pyramids, but as builders we are both lazy and haphazard and our methodology is hurling the required stones from our boats towards the building sites: get them there, and we’ll score points… as long as nobody knocks them out again.

On your turn, you roll a die and move your boat that many spaces, ignoring any occupied by other boats in the way. Once your boat stops moving you choose what you’ll flick from the top of your boat towards a building site – any building site, it doesn’t have to be the one your boat is closest to – choosing from your large cube, your die, or three small cubes. The goal, as stated above, is to land them in the building site, and the significant catch here is that the dice roll for movement also decides which finger you use to flick with: 1 is the thumb, 2 is the index and so on down to 5 being your pinky (-a 6 lets you use any finger). As well as flicking your own stuff in, you can also use this opportunity to knock others out, or potentially form pyramids: if your cube lands in a building site and it’s the third, fifth or sixth, you can pause your turn and build a pyramid there out of all the cubes – which will come in handy for scoring (see below).

Your boat can also gather pieces – if you stop in a section of the board where you have cubes or your dice not sitting in a building site, you can pick them up again, which means you get to flick them again (there’s a lot of missing in this game!). As soon as all but one player runs out of things to flick, that player gets one last turn and then the game is over and you score each building site.

The sites reward points for first and second places, and this is worked out by how many cubes you have present. By default, the player with the most cubes scores the first place, and the player with the second-most scores the second place. But a large cube is worth 3 small cubes, and a die is worth whatever side if showing face-up. Additionally, any pyramids still standing will score the height of the cubes in it: each cube at the bottom is still worth one, but the next level are worth two and the third level are worth three and so on. So pyramids can be good – but they also make an easy target to knock down!