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In Guillotine, each of the players is a French revolutionary executioner, competing to have the honor of executing the highest-value nobles. At the beginning of play, twelve noble cards are laid out; this is the line of those waiting for execution.

Illuminati is the classic Steve Jackson Games boxed set of conspiracy and high weirdness, inspired by the equally classic Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. The game won the Origins Award when it was first released in 1982, and inspired a trading card version in 1995 called Illuminati: New World Order, which plays similarly. In all honesty, I think no other boardgame has had such an influence in my life as this one –- both in terms of my admiration for its tight yet expressive game mechanics, and also for introducing me to the work of Robert Anton Wilson, and ultimately to the Discordian Society, of which I am a key member (I could tell you why, but then I’d have to scramble your brains with a spoon).

Are you a megalomaniac who gets pleasure from the misfortune of others? Would you love to steer people into a direction that will cause their lives to come tumbling down? Then Gloom is the game for you. The object of the game, in fact, is to make your characters as miserable as you possibly can. Each player has a family, a group of characters that they then play event cards on. There are both good and bad event cards in your hand. The good events are played on your opponent’s characters to heighten their over-all self-worth points; the bad event cards are played on your own characters to lower their self-esteem. In your hand, there are also death cards and action cards. The death cards are very important, because at the end of the game, only your dead characters self-worth scores are added to your final score, and the player with the lowest score wins.

Looney Labs claims to have sold more than 350,000 copies of Fluxx, which is a truly remarkable number for a hobby game from a tiny publisher -- remarkable also because Fluxx is in some ways a game designer's game, exploring the nature of "the rule."

In a sense, Fluxx is a stripped down version of Nomic -- a self-modifying game with a small initial set of rules and the ability to change them. Nomic depends on player voting; Fluxx depends on card-play.

Time travel would seem to be a fairly intractable subject for a game. After all, paradoxes are a major issue, and the sheer variety of potential outcomes are a challenge, at least if you posit that changing the time stream is at all feasible (and if you don't, then time travel is nothing more than historical tourism). That's one reason that Chrononauts is such a clever design; it tackles the problem head-on, producing something quite satisfying (and even instructional for younger players without much knowledge of history) with what is, when you come down to it, a remarkably simple and quite clever system.

It is my considered opinion that whenever a person has the chance be a zombie, briefly, she should do so; in the universe of Cheapass Games, zombies may not have more fun than blondes (mostly, they have less hair) but they definitely have a better time than you'd think. Happily, Lord of the Fries offers 3 to 8 players the opportunity to have fun with fast food and enjoy the delights of the undead workforce.

Reiner Knizia is a boardgame god. While the German-born designer has lived in England for many years, he comes from a culture that reveres the form far more than we do in this country; in Germany, as in much of Europe, playing tabletop games remains a mainstream form of social interaction. Knizia, who holds a Ph.D. in mathematics, has designed more than 30 games, including Lord of the Rings, which requires players to adopt a cooperative strategy, and Tigris and Euphrates. Most of his games reward abstract strategies, and many, like Ra and Modern Art have an auction or bidding mechanic. Modern Art is my favorite of these games.

The wickedness of little girls has been well documented both in classic literature and in modern games, from Great Expectations to Rule of Rose -– and straight into the memories of our own high school days, when we moved in clandestine societies governed by unspoken laws. This theme gets a Roaring Twenties kind of patina to delectably twisted effect in Mousechief’s Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble, a pleasingly innovative hybrid between an RPG and a stat-based card game.

Pit is as much fun as you can have with your clothes on in a group of 3-8 people, and it has been since 1904, when the box proclaimed that it was "The greatest of all party games." They were right.

Pit is a card game, with different suits representing different commodities: wheat, oats, barley, coffee, oranges, corn, sugar and soybeans, in most versions, each with a different point value. Originally flax was represented and some modern versions have oil and cattle. You have to corner the market by getting all nine cards of a single commodity. Quickly. While yelling. Sound simple? Basically, it is.