I HAVE just spent the morning with Devon and Cornwall Police traffic officers in an unprepossessing Truro side road, watching drivers pulled up to blow into a breathalyser. The message: “Don’t drink and drive – even the morning after.”

It’s very sound advice. The first half has been hammered home for decades, so it’s surprising it still needs to be said: but sadly, it does, especially with drugs now thrown into the mix.

Truro readers will have seen this on their front page this week; the rest of you can read a colour piece on New Year’s Eve. In the meantime, my inbox is awash with emails offering me festive pearls of wisdom, some useful, others considerably less so.

Always a reliable source of info, the NHS recommends you make sure you order enough medication, in plenty of time, to avoid running out over Christmas (excuse me while I check my HRT stash), and be sure of your local pharmacy’s opening hours over the festive season. Remember, NHS 111 (online or by phone) is always available for urgent health advice and mental health support.

But my favourite tips came courtesy of digital game store Loaded, which has teamed up with café chain Snakes & Lattes on a cheat sheet for the kind of board game dominance that comes in handy on wet winter afternoons in the Christmas holidays.

I am regularly thrashed at Monopoly by Daughter, who learned the secrets of real estate at an alarmingly young age. But the experts have let me into a little secret.

The orange properties - Bow Street, Marlborough Street and Vine Street - are the most landed-on spaces mathematically due to their position relative to Jail and Chance cards. Players who secure these early have a 40 per cent higher win rate. Yet most people chase Mayfair and Park Lane (guilty as charged), which are actually the worst investment in the game (damn).

Apparently, it’s best to stay in jail if you’re stuck. “You can keep earning rent income without the risk of stepping on someone else’s property,” says Anaïs Guilbert from Snakes & Lattes.

In addition, players should avoid building hotels altogether: “Owning three houses on a property is more cost-effective than building a fourth and upgrading them into a hotel. It also helps create a housing shortage for the other players by not returning house tokens to the limited supply.” Devious.

Next up: Scrabble. My travel set is almost as old as me, and I like to think I play a mean game, although I’m easily matched by Daughter these days.

The key lies in obscure two-letter words. “You don’t have to know what they mean - just how to spell them,” says Anais. There are 124 two-letter words accepted in tournament play – including QI, ZA, XU, and JO. These can increase your average game score by 30 per cent, and allow players to create multiple words in single turns while accessing premium squares with high-scoring letters.

On that note, it’s worth learning words with Q but no U (QI, QOPH, QADI, QAT, QAID); and hang onto those S tiles, which are more valuable for extending existing words than creating plurals.

Daughter is also a dab hand at Cluedo, often naming the murderer early doors by sheer luck. The Snakes & Lattes team suggests users make false suggestions based on the cards in your hand - a perfectly valid move that not only flushes out the specific information you need, but also sows seeds of doubt that other players will waste time disproving.

Mind you, they also recommend the contradictory strategy of watching what others suggest as “it reveals what they don't have”. They should take some pointers from the Other Half, who makes the kind of noises you might hear from a Christie-esque detective on Christmas telly: an explosive “Aha!” or a chin-stroking “Hmmmmm, I see…”.

Onto Trivial Pursuit. I’ll give you a tip for free: make sure your board is up to date. We have two: one is a family edition that Daughter has probably outgrown, while the other in all likelihood predates the fall of the Berlin Wall, meaning a good chunk of the questions are best suited to a historian.

The advice here is common sense: namely, collect easy category wedges first to build confidence, and on the final question, choose your opponent’s weakest category.

Snakes and Lattes also suggests preparing for entertainment questions, which are skewed towards American pop culture; and warns of errors and misprints, recommending “checking with other sources if you feel like you have given a correct answer not listed by the game”. Research and arguments - that’s hardcore.

I fully intend to put some of these methods into practice. It remains to be seen whether I reach 2026 as the most competitive and unsporting player in the family, forever banned from the board.

Merry Christmas, one and all!