Board Game Remix Kit

The folks behind Board Game Remix Kit and its Valentine’s Day Expansion have released the kits for free to help people find enjoyable ways to play board games while stuck at home. The kit presents new rules to make classic games Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly, Clue and Scrabble fresh and ways to mash up different games together for even more variety. I’m not a big fan of any of those games, but if you’re stuck with the classics but bored of them, this kit can breath enough life into them to have an enjoyable games night.

The Board Game Remix Kit is a collection of games that you can play using the boards and pieces from games you might already own: Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly, Cluedo (Clue to Americans) and Scrabble. A few of the games also use pens, paper and other household objects.

There are 26 different suggestions for ways to play, plus another four in the Valentine’s Day Expansion. The simplest ideas are just tweaks to the original games, to make them differently fun: a more intensely strategic Scrabble, a faster Trivial Pursuit.

Then there are the new games: use lead piping to defend yourself from zombies in the Cluedo mansion; listen to the answer from a Trivial Pursuit card, and compete to come up with the most plausible question.

Finally there are mash-ups, combining pieces from more than one game: auction off individual Scrabble tiles with your Monopoly money; solve a murder mystery with Scrabble tile anagrams.

The Board Game Remix Kit came out as an app and a set of cards in 2010, developed by the company Hide&Seek (which closed at the start of 2014). We’re putting the cards online for free now, in March 2020, in the hope that some of the game ideas might be useful for people who are staying inside due to quarantine, lockdown or social distancing. (If you enjoy the Kit and can afford it, please consider a donation to the World Health Organisation’s COVID-19 Response Fund.)

The Board Game Remix Kit