GAME -- Pass The Pigs Party

Pass The Pigs is one of those games you return to time and again, especially when you don’t have a whole evening for Monopoly or Scrabble.

It’s like a dice game but more fun than the likes of Yahtzee – instead you throw rubber pigs on the table, scoring depending how they land, on their sides, backs, snouts or trotters.

We always take the little pack on holiday with us, playing it several times through the week, seeing how far we can get before the wrong combination means we’re ‘pigged out’ and lose all our points.

So we came to this new spin-off with great interest, especially since there are four pairs of pigs in the box rather than one, meaning each player gets their own pair.

In the original game you throw your pair of pigs as many times as you dare, scoring for every combination until you decide to stop.

In the Party version you turn over a card to reveal one combination, and players take turns throwing their pigs until one of them matches the picture on the card.

Get the right combination first time and you get another throw, this time using all eight pigs to see if you can match one of the combinations on a bonus card.

It took us a few minutes to master the rules, then we were happy as pigs in blankets chucking these multi-coloured creatures around.

We’ll certainly play this version of the classic game again and again – and by adding the pigs from our original game we have enough pairs for five players.

Just one complaint, though – on the table in our living room, under normal room-lighting, it was difficult to make out the difference between the orange and pink pigs.

David Knights