The hardest part of putting Army Of Zero together was building the puzzles.  There are a number of interactions between the various puzzle elements, and indeed between the puzzles and the game, which meant that different parts of the card designs had to link together without disrupting other relationships.  At times it felt like I was compiling a five-dimensional crossword (that’s not a clue, by the way).

All in all, it took about five months to decide exactly how it was all going to fit together, and to build the prototypes and test them.

I am a total lightweight.

Just go and read about the effort put in by Jason Smith at Puzzle Forge to build his own Petaminx. Designed by Andrew Cormier, the Petaminx is like a Rubik’s Cube in the same way that the Space Shuttle is like a Sopwith Camel.

So, yes. We’ve been playing Lego Minotaurus this week. Minotaurus is part of a range of games, which includes Ramses Pyramid, Lunar Command and Creationary, as well as a few smaller, lower cost games. Creationary seems a bit different from the rest, in that it’s basically Pictionary-with-LEGO. and I think that this game, along with the other games that LEGO has released this year, is potentially very significant for the perception of board games amongst the wider public.

Award-winning Eurogame designer Reiner Knizia has been involved to some extent with the design of the games. Even though it’s not clear how much he’s actually contributed to the games’ design, or whether it’s more of a PR thing, it’s an interesting development that LEGO clearly think it’s beneficial to have a name designer on board.

These aren’t the first games that Lego has published. A few years ago, my youngest and I played game after game after game of LEGO Racers, in which you built a racetrack out of interlocking cardboard pieces, then raced your LEGO cars around the track. Movement was determined by a spinner, and you could pick up various power-ups as you progressed around the track.

Good fun, but it didn’t really need to be LEGO. What’s different, and very interesting, about this new batch of games is that they are much closer to the brand values of LEGO, in particular its appeal to creativity and interchange.

Briefly, here’s how Minotaurus works. It’s a game for two to four players, and each has to navigate three pieces from one corner of the board to the centre. The board is a LEGO base with a simple labyrinth, constructed out of more LEGO pieces. The design of the initial labyrinth is set out in the rules (but more about that in a moment).

There’s a piece called the Minotaurus, which starts in the middle, and can be moved around by the players. If the Minotaurus catches a player’s piece, that piece has to return to the corner where it started.

The dice - also made of LEGO - has the numbers three to six on it, plus a grey face and a black face. Throw a number, and you get to move one of your pieces. Throw a grey face, and instead of moving you get to reconfigure a wall, either to block an opponent or to clear your own route to the centre. Throw black and you get to move the Minotaurus piece eight spaces, hopefully to catch or at least block an opponent.

So it’s really straightforward, and kids should have no difficulty picking it up. What’s interesting from a gamer’s perspective is that the rules actively encourage mucking about with the game. There are suggested tweaks, including changing the labyrinth layout, making the Minotaurus faster, or allowing players to jump walls if they throw a certain number, but implicitly the rules say: MAKE UP ANY RULES YOU LIKE. GO NUTS!

And this is what should make the LEGO games interesting to the specialist game community. It’s not that the game mechanics are particularly innovative, it’s that the game actively encourages variants and modifications, and because it’s LEGO, there’s no shortage of extra bits and pieces that can be filched from the toybox to make new pieces for the game.

From there, it’s only a short leap for kids to start using LEGO to make up their own games. What a wonderful opportunity for children - and their parents - to realise that they don’t need to be confined to the published rules. This approach to gaming is, of course, already recognised in the hardcore gamers’ world, but when a toy company with the reach of LEGO gets behind it, things could really get interesting.

The newspapers carry the sad news today that Hasbro has acquired the film rights to world-domination boardgame Risk.  Furthermore, it’s not just Risk: films are already in development based on Monopoly, Cluedo (known as Clue in North America) and, if you can believe it, Battleship.  Ridley “Blade Runner” Scott is being touted as a possible director of the Monopoly film, and has been quoted as saying that a Monopoly Movie would be “hysterically amusing”.

He may be right, but perhaps not in the way he intended.  Here are Stephen Colbert and Jeff Golblum “auditioning” for the Battleship movie:

The problem is that there’s no narrative in most of these games, the exception probably being Clue/Cluedo.  Clue/Cluedo has at least the potential to work as a narrative, but only because its format is based on a narrative genre: the 1930’s country house murder.  OK, that’s a literary genre first, but also exists as a film genre.  In fact, Clue/Cluedo has already been made into a movie once , directed by Jonathan Lynn of “Yes Minister” fame and starring Tim Curry.  It’s played for laughs and it’s actually rather good.

But what can we expect from a movie based on Risk, for goodness sake? This? Probably not…

There’s no dramatic story arc in a boardgame.  Videogames ought to be easier to adapt, but Hollywood has had years of failing to deliver a decent film based on a videogame.  Boardgames are much harder to turn into a satisfying narrative - unless you don’t even try, and instead make a genre movie and just slap the name of the boadgame on top of it.  In the case of Risk, you can imagine an epic war film, maybe, with a load of enormous CGI battle scenes, Lord Of The Rings style, but there’s no artistic reason at all for an epic war film to be a Risk spin-off.  Exactly the same holds true for Battleship.  Expect a generic hunt-and-destroy submarine movie (though it would be great if they made a really good sub movie, of which there have been none for literally decades), but again, why not just make a really good submarine movie?

Well, there’s one obvious reason, of course.  The movie will sell a few more tickets based on brand recognition from people who play (or used to play) whatever game it’s based on, and Hasbro will sell an enormous number of extra copies of Risk and Battleship.  And you can’t blame game companies or film companies for trying to make money, because that’s what they’re for, but it’s hard to feel totally comfortable sitting in the cinema when it all looks so blatantly cynical.

The Monopoly film is going to raise a feeling of slight unease outside the US, because all the properties have different names in different territories.  Fair enough if they stick to the American names, which they surely will - it’s an American film, and Monopoly is an American game, after all.  But here in the UK we all know what Old Kent Road and Mayfair represent, and most people won’t know the difference between Boardwalk (which actually sounds a bit cheap and vulgar, doesn’t it?) and Mediterranean Avenue (which sounds kind of upmarket).

Having said all that, if there’s anyone from Sony or Paramount reading this who’s interested in the film rights for Army Of Zero - call us!  (We suggest Kenneth Branagh for Lord Icclestone).