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The Lighter Side: Card & Board Games

Dogs Playing Poker

Slightly Subtle Technology brings C.M. Coolidge's kitschy classic posters to life in what turns out to be a great (though silly) game for idling away the time.

Forget wasting an hour playing solitaire on a PC: Play a bit of poker with a pack of dogs instead (and the occasional cat, incognito). Don't take these pooches lightly: they know how to bet, bluff, and psyche you out.

With great 3D graphics and a cool soundtrack, you'll find yourself the alpha dog in no time. A great goof-off game--it will even show you how to play, and win, five-card Stud and Draw, Omaha and Texas Hold 'Em, and seven-card Stud.

--Ramon G. McLeod

Genre: Card

Price: $10

Dogs Playing Poker

Scrabble Complete

Test your vocabulary mettle against up to three human or digital opponents with Scrabble Complete, a meticulous reproduction of the classic word game from Infogrames.

The game's charm lies in the faithful rendering of Scrabble's familiar board and wooden tiles. Scrabble fans can avail themselves of the included online dictionary, Q-without-U listings, and canny play suggestions. This latest incarnation of the game includes an online play component, but we had some difficulty running it: Our testers experienced game-killing black screens when attempting to launch Scrabble from GameSpy Arcade.

Aside from the online difficulties, however, the game played well; and the package includes several additional minigames and a CD of another classic word game, Boggle--all good stuff to add to the Scrabble fan's stocking.

--Laura Blackwell

Genre: Board games

Price: $20

Scrabble Complete

Jeopardy 2003

Alex Trebek fans (or foes) will love this latest, greatest PC incarnation of the popular TV game show.

Infogrames might as well have called the game Trebek 2003: He's all over the thing, from the beginning (where he welcomes players and reveals categories for the first board), to the Final Jeopardy round (where he invites you to place your wager) and the announcement of winners. And of course, after every answer to a question (whether entered by human contestants or spoken aloud by the computer-generated ones), Alex is there--in video--to tell you whether you're right ("Pree-cisely!" "Exactly!" "That's the critter we were looking for!") or wrong ("I'm sorry, that's incorrect").

The game itself is about as close as you can get to being on the show, right down to Johnny Gilbert's voice-over during the pregame preliminaries. I found the mix of questions reasonably challenging, if perhaps not always as tough as many of the TV ones: I got most, but not all, of them right. And when I played against computer-generated opponents, they beat me to the buzzer more than a few times. All in all, an amusing diversion for aficionados of the durable TV fixture.

--Yardena Arar

Genre: Quiz

Price: $20; check latest prices

Jeopardy 2003

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