Worms: The Board Game

Worms: The Board Game is not here to offer a quiet lesson in coexistence. It arrives with bazookas, super sheep, and a direct invitation to take every unresolved grievance out on the person opposite. As an adaptation of the old computer game, it gets the essential flavour right: the table becomes a small battlefield, and the old internet-café instincts come back quickly.

You move your worms around looking for ways to hurt everyone else, using the game's weapons and absurd tools rather than tending a polite little economy. The bazooka and the super sheep are not decorative touches; they are reasons to start an argument. Take-that here is not “lose a resource.” It is the whole point.

It does become more thinky than I want a Worms game to be, which takes a little of the videogame's instant madness away. Still, it has the right yolo moments: you line up a shot, the dice and the wind decide that somebody else gets the laugh, and suddenly the whole table has something to shout about. You will betray your friends. You will probably enjoy it.

The collector edition I played is painfully expensive for what it gives you, padded out with a pile of miniatures for no particularly useful reason. If there is a cheaper edition, that is where it begins to look like honest value. It is not the neatest possible translation of Worms, but it preserves enough of its gleeful nastiness to earn a place with groups that enjoy knocking one another into the dirt. Easy as a pie for Smidge.