Boxing Day and the kids (well, young adults!) are demanding entertainment.

What a perfect time to break out a game I first played at school, some forty years ago: Warlord. Although I’m sure that when I first played it, it was called something more nuclear armageddon-y.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, you build your empire through receiving a number of armies (the counters) based on how many cities, urban and rural regions you control.

You attack across a regional border with a simple but fiendishly cunning mechanic involving you committing a number of armies to battle and your opponent having to guess how many armies you’ve sent in. You have to have at least two armies to attack with, and you cannot empty a region you own, so that you can see that if you want to attack, say, four times, your first attack has to commit at least four armies…and it’s calculations like that that make the game so good.

Even better, each time you win a battle you get a one-stage nuclear missile i.e. one that can cross one border. The game rapidly becomes a race to build a nuke big enough to fire at an enemy target far enough away from your own empire and, in terms of action, massive military drives to capture enemy nukes before they can target you.

It’s a brilliant game, and I highly recommend it…providing you can find a way of getting hold of a copy.