Tabletop Terrors

Literal minutes before I sat down to write this review, my daughters ran into the room to ask where their rubber snake had gone. When I professed ignorance, they scrambled from the room while hissing loudly, “Mommy must have hidden it!” That would make my wife the Night Terror from Playthings, the latest board game by design collective Jasper Beatrix. Like the rest of the collective’s catalog, Playthings sits somewhere on a sliding scale between imaginative play and fuzzy rules. When I first tried it with adults, I wasn’t sure it worked. Later, with kids aged twelve and six, it became as magical as leaving a booby trap for Santa Claus, equal parts childlike wonder and childlike mischief. Setting traps for Santa Claus the Night Terror. At heart, Playthings is about becoming a child again. You live in a big house, as large as you remember it from childhood, with ceilings that seem impossibly tall and dark corners that are inky enough to conceal living shadows. One of those shadows is…