Below are seven of my favorite less-obvious British board games, all of which offer a taste of how we like to play on this side of the pond, and some of which might feel more familiar than you think.It’s poker night again! Your friends are coming over and you are getting ready to sit around, have a few drinks, and play poker all night. I also like the drama inherent in games where everyone has the potential to win right up until the last minute, and prefer games that allow everyone to play at once, so you’re not waiting for six other people to take their turn before you’re up again.

I’m generally drawn to games that nod to the traditional but offer a modern twist, and aren’t too intensely competitive - you don’t want to get too focused that it gets in the way of chatting, laughing, or (heaven forbid) drinking. Of course, a lot of what makes a game good or not (wherever it’s made) comes down to personal taste. Brits are also often drawn to outward-looking games that reflect the world around us (a detail I’m particularly proud of when it comes to British board gaming). Riddles, tongue-twisters, and wordplay are also inherent we are the land of Dickens and Shakespeare, after all. We excel at light-hearted, performance-based concepts - an idea that dates all the way back to the parlor games our Victorian ancestors played.

When it comes to designing board games, what I think we Brits do best is infuse them with a quirky, at times surrealist, sense of humor (imagine Monopoly, but created by Monty Python). I would bring that prototype to the office with me, in addition to refining it on evenings and on weekends, before ultimately quitting my day job to start my own company Clarendon Games, where I’ve since turned that prototype into a real game called Perigon - and launched 11 other board and card games that we sell in the U.K. Back in 2012, while working at a high-end skin-care brand in London, I started to set aside some of my salary to invest in my first board-game prototype.

Popular british card games