Personalities range from the annoying Fran Drescher sound-alike to a chatty grizzly bear. The neatest feature involves the widely varied characters pitted against gamers.

Even the main screen can be tailored to an old rustic cabin, a spaceship helm with holographic diagrams of every game, or a standard list. Lots of extra touches keep this title a step above common. The gorgeous backgrounds and effective animations add plenty of atmosphere to the basic games.

The manual contains rulesets for each game. There’s a good mix between the average candidates for compilations of this type, like Backgammon, Chess, Checkers and Dominoes, and more obscure games such as Parcheesi or Chinese Checkers. Even though they don’t bear their original names, every game is perfectly modeled to the exact rules and restrictions. Battling Ships replaces Battleship, Chutes and Ladders becomes Snakes & Ladders, and there’s always Yacht, also known as Yahtzee. Though some of the games are renamed to avoid lawsuits, it’s obvious which board game each one imitates. Parcheesi is one of several more exotic games, supporting a maximum of 4 players. Here you have quite a cool collection of such classics, all in one package, and with just the right amount of added glitz and polish to make them a permanent guest on your hard drive. It might be their intrinsic simplicity or sentimental value (everyone who’s played a real board game has done so with friends or familiy), but they’re all great fun all the same. Some computer games cost millions to make but lack that inherent charm that board games always seem to have.

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