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My floor was never made of lava.

Usually my floor was made of quicksand. This was partly because of that one scene in The Princess Bride, but mostly because of going to the beach and feeling the wet grainy sand shift under my bare feet, wiggling my toes into it, imagining that this time—this time—it might suddenly give way. This time I might finally get to use all of my eagerly-acquired expertise in how to escape (throw away anything you’re carrying; sit or lie down to increase your surface area; free your trapped limbs slo-o-o-o-wly and clamber towards safety).

When my floor wasn’t quicksand, it was often water filled with sharks—it may not be a surprise at this point to learn that I grew up in Australia. (Though my floor was never spiders, which were too immediate a fear to have fun with.)

Way back in 2010, an actual decade ago, I was working for a company called Hide&Seek, and we teamed up with Kevan Davis and James Wallis to make something called The Board Game Remix Kit: a set of games you could play using the pieces from games you might already have lying around the house: Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly, Cluedo (or Clue to Americans) and Scrabble.

Hide&Seek closed in 2014, and the Board Game Remix Kit kind-of fell out of existence. Last week someone emailed me asking if it was still available anywhere, and I had to go logging into old email accounts and searching for attachments to find it. But once we’d found it again, we thought: well, might as well put it online, just in case anyone’s staying at home with a pile of old board games and wants to try something new.

So here it is! Available for free under a creative commons license, both the original version and a small Valentine’s-themed expansion. All in all that’s 30 new ideas for games to play with the pieces from these four almost-omnipresent games.

1. MINIT is a game in which you set off on an adventure and pick up a cursed sword and then immediately find yourself stuck in a one-minute time loop. Whatever you do from that point, wherever you go next, you find yourself - after one minute - returned to your home. You wake on unpolished floorboards and you start all over again: fences that you smashed through have regrown, neighbours have

2. In 2018’s adventure game MINIT, a cursed sword sends you into a time loop. A counter counts down from sixty; once it hits ten, each passing second reverberates with an ominous tick through the land. When the counter hits zero, the world dissolves around you, and you wake up again where you started a minute ago, the vase you smashed last time just in case it had a coin inside it miraculously refo

3. When you try something in MINIT and fail, you don't have time to try again. You are - as the game’s name gently hints - trapped, perhaps for eternity, in a 60-second time loop. So instead, every time you fail, you start back at the beginning. You strike out in, perhaps, the same direction you just tried, and you aim to do a little better, get just a little further. And when

So, my household has a small and poorly-thought-through Brexit stockpile.

This is mostly food we ordered back in January, at what was - worried friends and I reassured each other - the "ethical time" to stockpile. We could buy from supermarkets; then those supermarkets would restock before the anticipated Brexit date of late March. Really, by stockpiling we were helping free up storage space in warehouses across the country. How moral we were! How filled with forethought!

If everything turned out okay, great: I wouldn't have to buy beans for a while.

And if everything went badly, well: at least I'd have anchovies, tomato paste, red wine, coffee, and plenty of cumin to add flavour to the turnips and rhubarb and whatever else there is that actually grows in England. A load of artists were meant to be coming to the UK to take part in an event I was running, with Brexit scheduled right in the middle: if they all got stuck here in some sort of airport deadlock, at least I could make them a big stew.

Over the last six months, every now and then, I’ve been doing a little bit of writing and story development for Dicey Dungeons. Dicey Dungeons is a videogame from Terry Cavanagh and Marlowe Dobbe and Chipzel and Justo Delgado Baudí, plus a bunch of other people (like me) doing other bits of work around the edges.

This is the first time I’ve written for a full-on videogame! I’ve made my own little text-based games, I’ve written prototypes for clients, I’ve written about games - but this is the first time I’ve done the thing of coming into an existing project and having a look at the bunch of stuff that’s slowly accreting into a videogame, and sitting down and trying to answer questions like “what is this ABOUT” and “who ARE these characters” and “how do the players even KNOW what’s GOING ON” and “how long can this sentence go on before people JUST STOP READING” and “wait WHAT do you mean the game mechanics have changed completely and our earlier cutscenes don’t make sense any more”.