Ra Ra ah-ah-ah

Ro-ma, ro-ma-ma. Well, I expect that reference to split the audience.

This week - possibly in a fit of indecision about what to play - we had the old school and noted giant of euro gaming Ra in the house, a classic title by a classic designer Reiner Knizia. If you're into your board gaming and haven't been in the gaming wilderness for the last 20 years then you're very likely to know who Reiner Knizia is, and if you have your proper board gaming chops, have at least heard of, if not played Ra.

Ra, Ra, ooh la la. A classic Knizia game.

If you don't know who Reiner Knizia, then suffice to say he is a prolific game designer of the euro type , and is part of a stable of game designers that cemented the term "euro" into the gaming dictionary in the first place.

If you want to get fancy about it, then maybe you could consider Reiner Knizia a crucial fuelling part of the Renaissance era of gaming ( where pre 70's ish would be antiquity, 80's and prior are medieval and say, post late 90's are modern ).

Ra is a simple Egyptian themed auction game, where players compete to out bid their opponents to pick up auction lots of tiles. Tiles are scored on some simple rules, set collection, bonus points, penalty points, and with the game split across three rounds ( or epochs ), scoring is performed three times, with a bit of overlap between rounds as some tiles stick around for the whole game. So the whole art of the game is in assessing whether a group of tiles is something you'd like to bid on, getting your scoring sorted out into some semblance of brilliance, and a bit of jockeying for position in timing of bids, availability of tiles and what exactly your bid strength is. The game despite being known as an auction game, and talking about auctions, and bids, and yada, isn't really anything of the sort - it's a trick taking game where your bids are fixed amounts determined by the tokens you are holding ( effectively everyone is playing with a single-ish suit from a deck of cards, and playing highest card wins, which kinda is an auction, but in the same way that playing Top Trumps is kinda an auction - IE no one ever refers to playing card trumping games as an auction . Oh you nicely outbid me there with your King of Hearts on top of my Jack of Hearts... this is never said. ).

Ra is a classic beloved by many of the gaming cognoscenti, but for my money, it's too dry, too simple, the theme makes me want to stab my eyes out, and I'd rather be playing something other than Ra. Not that it's bad by any means. Inoffensive. Like porridge. With no sugar. Or salt. Or anything in it. That makes you sit up straight before you eat it. And recite your 12 times table. Just. Yeah. Next ! Ra combined with Tigris and Euphrates - another well beloved Reiner Knizia game - are enough to make me throw up my hands in despair and go and find other things to do, such as beat my head against a wall.

Planet Norwich in the Norfolk System.

The clans have returned from distant stars to invade the Inner Sphere, the til now peaceful Commonwealth planet of Norwich suddenly finding itself the target of a rapid and brutal clan assault. Clan Ghost Bear landing advance forces onto the planet have already decisively engaged with the defenders, where despite being outnumbered have succeeded in pushing through defences and leaving a trail of destroyed enemies behind them.

Having broken through Inner Sphere lines, roving Clan scout forces now fan out in a rapid advance seeking to strike directly at the enemies capability to conduct and supply a war - ending the fight before it can really begin. Commonwealth forces in the form of the Davion Guards scramble to close the breach in the front lines whilst simultaneously reinforcing all strategic points behind the breach in danger of being overrun. But the task is a difficult one - the clans with superior mobility and firepower can strike at will and fade before a significant defence force can be assembled.

Reorganising the reserves into fast response defence lances, Davion Guard forces are distributed widely across the breach pocket with a hope of forming an anvil to delay Clan raiders caught in the act, before landing the hammer blow of a fast response.

Sector QF, just south of the Dereham lowlands - a call distorts across counter measure disrupted frequencies. Clan forces spotted, heading inbound towards the Unthank industrial zone. The Guards force on point scramble to their mechs, the brave pilots prepared to face the onslaught of the clans and provide the anvil. Meanwhile 60 klicks away, turbines spool up and thrusters ignite as the fast response drop ships pick up their mechs and prepare to speed to the battle to support their defences and deliver the hammer blow.

 Elsewhere I got to suffer play through another session of the even older than Ra - Battletech ( a game from the medieval period of gaming if we are keeping up the analogy, so, similar-ish to modern games, except no plumbing or toilets, other than a hole in the wall to stick your arse out of, giving rise to odd smells, suspicious lumps of matter loitering in odd places, and a certain air of unwashed, inelegant, grime about it all ) , Sean was dead keen on giving this a go being a bit of a Battlemech fan ( and who doesn't like big stompy robot things.. ), and having watched it being played a few weeks back.

Battletech, the filthy Clanners hug the edge of the map.

And that was cool, I found it pretty riveting, the time whisked by, a fair bit of analysis paralysis, a lot of thinking, a bit of taunting, and a good deal of ineffective fire. Highlights included a jumping mech making a bad landing and falling over in the river, and then me deciding to jump on top of their sorry ass to try and kick their head in, followed by a graceful pirouetting jump out of a cauldron of fire into a back flopping landing in a lake. All performed in a 55 ton mech. There was also lots of gratuitous use of the laser line of sight checker.

Everyone enjoyed themselves, albeit, such is the way of things, it was a harrowing session, and I think it's fair to say everyone felt like they'd gone ten rounds in the ring with a heavyweight champion by the time we called halt to the game.

For the record, the clan pushed up to the edges of the industrial zone, then were perturbed by my jumping shenanigans and some supporting fire from Andy ( notably Sean spent all game waltzing around without firing a shot until the last rounds - we had assumed until the very end of the game that he was some kind of pacifist handing out leaflets.. albeit in a 50 ton walking mech ) .

Battletech - in the distance the clan raiders pull into sight

The clan advance crunched into a confused rabble, sidled along the edge of the map in comedic hand holding fashion ( Sean did a very good spontaneous mime impression of this which you had to be there to appreciate ), before just getting into the industrial zone as the reinforcements arrived and the hammer blow dropped. We stopped one turn after that. But it was fair to say that things were looking grim indeed for the Clan, although Andy's Warhammer had by then had both it's arms blown off. Just a flesh wound. I'm invincible !

More miniatures and dice rolling were going on on the table across from us, where David hosted his quasi regular Imperial Assault game, with his Empire once again facing off against the heroic rag tag Rebel team. Pete playing as ever the wookie reports that he had great fun charging into the fray,

Imperial Assault. One of the monsters seems to have
had an unfortunate incident with it's knicker elastic.

running screaming down corridors in the way only wookies can, and laid about cleaving stand in bad guy extras left and right. Causing chaos and confusion the hairy hero bleeding profusely stumbled to the macguffin console, only to fumble through the blood and tears the activation sequence and fail the mission.

There is a reason they don't give wookies medals. At the end of Star Wars watch closely. There's Han. Here's a medal. There's Luke. Have a medal. There's Chewie... screw you buddy, we're fresh out of medals ! You and your hairy ass can just stand in the back being generally unappreciated ! Harsh. And it's all Pete's fault. They've never forgotten the time he fumbled that console roll. Do you know how many Bothans died for that ? Many Bothans ! Many !

As this is the second failure in a row for the Rebel team I have come to the conclusion that David is facing off against the B Team of the Rebel Alliance. These are the guys that you never see in the films, the one's they don't tell tales of derring-do about, the ones that generally screwed something up in the first place that then made the presence of the A Team Rebels a necessity. The Death Star ? Yeah. The B Team screwed that up by failing the mission to steal all supplies of Imperial hammers to deny the building work from ever starting. Resulting in one blown up planet. And a last minute emergency mission to blow the completed Death Star up. That's why there's no medals for Wookies. A failure to delete the hammer invoice order from the death star construction console. Peeettteee ! Or in character. "aaarrrrarrarrr-arr-arrrarr-arrrrr".

Moving on from Rebel debacles, Sam got to try out the excellent Colt Express with the new stagecoach expansion, which brings hostages, whiskey, and victory points for getting shot ! It all sounded pretty cool, and I absolutely have to give this a go when I get a chance and am not playing

Thunderbirds are go ! F.A.B !

Battletech until midnight. Prior to this Sam busted out the FAB game - ah ha ha - Thunderbirds, a brand new spanky offering of this now 50 year old... we'll go with classic. To be honest I have no idea what goes on in this game. It's co-operative. It has miniature depictions of the Thunderbird vehicles. One can only presume you go around the world saving people whilst displaying very little face movement and refusing to walk anywhere where you could instead build an unfeasibly complex mechanical system to ferry your sorry ass around in an automated chair, thus avoiding the burdensome necessity of actually getting up. International rescue is one thing. Being bothered to get your ass out of your armchair is a whole other ballgame. I'm with you there buddy !

Who knows if Sam's intrepid team won or lost ? But really, playing Thunderbirds the Game in your automated chairs, I think we can all agree that everyone is a winner, regardless of game outcome. I'm not sure, but I could swear at some point I saw Sam with serene face gliding past in an automated chair headed for the bar. FAB !

Another old school classic was also on show at the Tun in the form of Alhambra. They played a pretty full six handed game of this I think, with I'm going to take a guess at a pure vanilla setup. So none of the bazillion expansions on offer.

Elsewise the lovely Suburbia got a turn on the boards, Lewis got vanilla Smash up out and Codenames and a host of other fillers also got a play through. I had my head buried in Battletech so I probably missed a lot.

For those counting, 43, another quiet night.

The Gallery...

Smash Up

Codenames

Suburbia

Quantum Flux

Quantum theory states that you can never know a thing for certain until you observe it - and once observed you've changed it forever. In practical terms this sounds like utter bollocks. But without the boring details the science is sound ( kind of ).

That leads you onto the hilarity of Schrödinger and his cat. Schrödinger also thought the whole quantum state thing was bollocks too, and came up with a thought experiment where a cat in a box with some radioactive triggered poison could be both alive and dead simultaneously until you open the box and observe it to show how absurd it all was. It turns out however that the joke was on him as Schrödinger's cat is now probably the most famous quantum example in popular circulation.

At this point you're probably scratching your head wondering why you're reading a physics journal when you came here to read about the goings on of this weeks NoBoG.

Ah ha !

Counting heads at NoBoG is odd. I can do a rough count up of heads before we kick off and come up with numbers like 36, or 42 and think ah, a quieter week. After the games are sorted, everyone is seated and beginning to battle with their cubes, dice or accusations, I count up again and get... 57.

How does that work ? I blame quantum theory. NoBoG is in a state of quantum flux and it's only when everyone is seated does the superstate collapse.

You see. That quantum waffle was relevant.

*cough*

This week for the fourth week running we had a record turnout, with an epic 57 people which included a whole slew of new people. Truly at this rate half the population of Norwich will have turned up to NoBoG at least once. The council will have to start putting us on the tourist map. There's the castle. There's the cathedral. And there's NoBoG.

Alchemists. Alina seems to be having a brain meltdown.

We welcomed back Matt and Alina who haven't been down to NoBoG in quite some time - and they got stuck in with the excellent Alchemists with its potion deduction malarkey and its smart phone interactivity. Like everyone they had a minor grumble about the dingy lighting as the evening wore on. The lower level of the Tuna has lighting that is "ambient". Good for snuggling, drinking yourself into a daze, making out, but not so great for reading tiny text on dubiously coloured boards. Adequate lighting is to be found on any of the mezzanine floors of the Tuna.

Alongside Alchemists, Descent 2 was brought to table - and one thing I love about the two long

Descent 2. Beer expansion not part of the game.

tables at the Tuna is that you get to observe close up two games at once - it's really quite a cool thing if you have some downtime you can look at what they're doing next to you. After much gaming was done, some of the groups collapsed and merged to play a very raucous game of Avalon Resistance with a triumphant Sam ( IV ? ) bellowing out he was the king and you would all follow his lead or greatness or something. I think that probably meant he had duped everyone as an evil doer.

Lewis cracked out the crowd pleasing King of Tokyo and hoovered up some newcomers plus some old hands - Sam admitted he had never played it, despite being one of our solid veterans. Sam and Lewis played nicely with the newcomers, Davey on

King of Tokyo ! Give us a wave Davey.

the other hand was having none of it, and destroyed the newbies because it just happened that way. I believe Lewis might have ended up winning this. They played Other Stuff afterwards, including Love Letter batman which descended into nothing but Bane impressions. I successfully guessed Lewis was Bane when he looked at his card and started doing another Bane impression. Helpful.

Darren brought along the much subscribed Marco Polo - this seems to have generated a fair level of interest and has a line of people wanting to play. It does look like a fun Euro, so I can see why - I want a play of this at some point too. Not sure who won that.

Marco... Polo ! Looking spiffy.

Pete had a very full game of Steam which was lovely in the summer sun, but as the light faded the board become a dingy soup of similar colours. One can only imagine that by the time Autumn rolls around we will probably need to do Something about getting some better lighting in. It's not terrible, and indeed is on par with the upstairs dinge of The Ribs, but, it would be a heap better with some good light. Portable, unobtrusive, rechargeable lights that last 5 hours are what is required.

Scoville, Ewan takes some newcomers through the game

Round the corner, Scoville and Caverna hit the wood, with rather oddly the beginner variant of Caverna getting a play - probably quite serendipitous as all at the table had either a single play, or no plays at all of that beast of dwarven farming. Ewan also got to take some new gamers through Scoville - whilst Scoville isn't anything like heavy euro territory, the game is challenging enough, particularly for new gamers, that it took them a good playthrough to get the gist of what the hell was going on.

Round t'other corner we had Classic Corner with Alhambra busting out alongside Settlers of Catan for some real old school but modern gaming. Elliott was pleased to note a win at Alhambra, apparently his first win in over a year at NoBoG. Competition

Alhambra, a lovely classic.

man. It's harsh at NoBoG. Don't let the laid back, easy going, non competitive friendly players fool you, the standard of play can be brutal. Also. RNG - random number generator. The more players there are, the less RNG shines upon you alone.

I had a couple of rounds of Dark Moon which was splendiferous, not as harsh as the other week, but still ended in some wins for the infected - I have yet to see the uninfected win this. The lovely Mr Bond was back with us this week and decided to get in on the Dark Moon action.

At some point during the first game I was rather rudely thrown into quarantine as infected despite not having done - much - wrong. At least not observably. No one liked me stealing a dice from good guy Bondy however. I explained it was a good move. They weren't having it. Jacob and Bondy voted me into quarantine. Martin abstained, but only because he didn't have the right dice to also send me into quarantine. ( I was indeed infected, but, bah. My logic was sound. )

Dark Moon. Best table in the house. Martin and Jacob
sitting on some damn comfy armchairs.

We then got to play Bring out Yer Dead and Get Bit, although I bailed out of Get Bit at the last minute.

I'll also let you into a secret here - we used the new table for Dark Moon, and without a doubt, on the upper floor, with good lighting, acres of space, swish seating, and a wonderful breeze coming through the nearby door... it was the best table in the house. But I didn't tell you that. It's a secret.

Lastly we have James who took some newcomers in hand to play some Robinson Crusoe and wrote up some speaky words for it with a submission ( keep those submissions coming people ! ). Settle back with some snacks and let James paint you a picture...

Whilst i had myself down on the marco polo list this week (with our trial, sign up to things) i realised i was essentially the 5th person subscribing to a 4 player game, so expected to be a reserve of sorts. Glee then when Pete said he was playing something else and i went down as a player.  Glee then turned to, well, more glee as it became apparent that three other people actually wanted to play Robinson Crusoe! And as this rarely happens i ditched MP (which i still really want to play btw..) and set up Crusoe with three new members (i think all three were new anyway).  Now, as people will attest to i am utterly rubbish with peoples’ names and forget them about 2mins after i have been told.  so i shall go with ‘carpenter’, ‘chef’ and ‘explorer’ after the roles they were dealt in Crusoe.  i, being the only experienced crusoe player, took the role of soldier.

Robinson Crusoe

For those of you that don't know Crusoe, it is a co-op game with six different scenarios (and a number of fan created ones online). The general gist of the game is survival on an island that seems intent on killing you, starving you, battering you with terrible weather..  I assured the group that NEARLY everything that the game would throw at us would be negative, but there are a few nice things that might happen along the way. 

Anyway, at the start of each round some event happens; as far as i know, every single one hates you. for our scenario (#1, the easiest) there are 12 cards. as its the easiest scenario, where the only aim (other than staying alive) is escaping the island by building a big pile of wood and setting it on fire, half the cards are toned down a little bit. in other scenarios the cards hate you even more, and in addition to stuff like reducing moral, food or making the weather worse, things like heavy fog makes it harder to do anything.

after the rounds first attempt to kill you, we all decide on who’s doing what for the day. everyone has two actions (morning and afternoon) that they can spread around the various actions.  you can go hunting, try to build something (good luck having the right materials though), you can gather food or wood, or you can explore.  you can use two actions to do one thing to (generally, not always) auto succeed (except hunting), or one action to have a bash at doing it, at which point dice are rolled. needless to say, the different characters are better at certain things.

each type of action (except hunting) has its own set of three dice that TRY TO KILL YOU!.  ok, well, one of the dice is a pass/fail dice with are 5:1 success for gathering/exploring, and 4:2 for building. one of the dice tells you if you wound yourself in the process, and one tells you if you have to take a card from an appropriate deck, and guess what; they mostly try to kill you.

Anyway, things got off to a crappy start and stayed pretty crappy throughout; but that's how this game rolls.  our chef decided to go out and salt all the earth around us in the first few rounds; by the end of the game there was hardly anything left.  our explorer kept hurting herself while exploring, and our carpenter kept building stuff that didn't look safe.  but a few lucky draws in the early game meant we got some bonuses every time we explored, and those kept us alive.  combined with a lucky find of some biscuits we scraped through to a point where we had build our wood pile and just needed to survive. 

the close call of the game went to our intrepid explorer.  During the very last explore action possible she managed to get stuck away from camp for the night. Being stuck out of camp is a bad bad thing in RC, and can easily lose the game if you are not lucky.  So the weather first hit the explorer hard, forcing her to ‘discard’ three wood and three food. being out of camp of course meant she had no access to the wood and food that we were discarding to avoid the same weather effects, and she took a wound for every one she couldn't discard. Then of course everyone needs to eat during the night or take two wounds.. again, no food outside camp. 

by pure luck this left our explorer one step away from death.  unfortunately this meant the next two rounds were spent with our explorer in bed, reading a bible to recover, while the rest of us collected wood, starved at night so she could eat, and built the wood pile.

by the time a ship came by and spotted our massive bonfire, all players were exhausted; but we had survived..   that takes my win ratio for the first scenario to 7:3 (winning).  and it is by far the easiest scenario.. im pretty sure everyone enjoyed it; and it reminded me why i need to bring it along more often as it’s a pretty good game.

i will need to print out some of my own scenarios next time.. they seem to be doing quite well on BGG now..

You can go check out some of James' custom Crusoe scenarios over at bgg
https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/98763/encounter-rlyeh-playtesting
https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/98806/hms-raika-bayou-playtesting

Cthulu. With Crusoe. On an island ? What a fantastic idea. That smells like an entire campaign !

Final thought of the day. We have too many people with the same name. I know in the past we have had things like Richard IV which is rather Kingly. But tbh, I am losing track of whether someone is Sam III, Sam IV, or who knows. I think we should start assigning nicknames to people. Perhaps they can be randomly assigned as you walk through the door. Your muppet name. Jedi name. Porn star  name. Wawa Skittletits.

As ever I leave you with the gallery.

Classic Settlers, Egyptian style.

Classic Steam.

Caverna. Everyone looks worriedly at me as I tell them they are playing the beginner variant.

The First Rule of NoBoG is...

This week the Ribs of Beef was full to the rafters as an epic 44 people turned up to partake of the NoBoG extravaganza. Personally I blame the inflated numbers on Mr Bond who advertised NoBoG Tuesday as #InternationalTableTopTuesdayEvening and offered free swag. On the other hand, if #InternationalTableTopTuesdayEvening isn't a thing, then it should be a thing.

Bondys promoted SWAG

The elevated numbers caused Pete to slightly panic* and give out the advice to newcomers that if they enjoyed themselves to remember not to tell their friends.

All very fight club if you ask me. The first rule of which is to not talk about it. If you haven't a clue what I am talking about, then your homework this week is to immediately go watch the 1999 film Fight Club.

Aside from Pete's comedy advice, it was great to see so many people down the pub playing games, and personally I had a great night, playing some new things, some old things, and introducing The Cow Game to those who had never heard of such a thing before - and were suitably delighted by it.

Chloe also pointed out that this week quite a number of gaming ladies turned up, by her count as many as ten of them, which marks another record for NoBoG. Back in the day, ten people would have been the whole of NoBoG, male or female.

Gah, a blurry shot of Mysterium and its screen.
Super low light level and a long exposure are to blame.

The G Man was in the house on Tuesday, and being the collector of the sometimes whimsical, he brought along a game called Mysterium, which after some wrangling, I ended up joining in to play. Mysterium - and I'm just going to go right ahead and assume you've never heard of it before - is a game best summed up as a cross between Dixit and Cluedo.

Funny vague artsy picture cards ? Check.

A murderer in Some Place with Some Murder Weapon ? Check.

Guessing who was where doing what to whom ? Check.

Unlike Cluedo however the game is a co-operative affair where everyone is trying to work together to solve the puzzles you are given - namely murder suspects. One player takes on the role of The Ghost, or, if you like, The Murdered, and it's their job to communicate to everyone else just who killed them and how.

Which would be lovely if the Ghost could just send you an SMS with the murderer's contact details.

Predictably things aren't so easy however, and instead the ghost must rely on sending dreams to the other players - who are allegedly psychics and sensitive to such things. Either that or they just have really vivid imaginations and a habit of eating cheese past midnight ( my mom always used to say eating cheese late at night would make you dream. Science ! ).

The dreams come in the form of cards with a lovingly artsy illustration, albeit random and often surreal. Spread on the table are another bunch of lovingly illustrated cards and it's up to the player(s) to make a guess as to what refers to what. Every player gets their own card to think about, with the end result being that the Ghost is going to tell you about X number of suspects, X number of murder scenes and X number of murder weapons, where X is the player number.

So you get into Dixit territory. A boy riding a bicycle through some woods ? Well clearly that

Mysterium ! It was.. the ghost boy with the candlestick !

indicates this magician chap over here. What ? The whole effort is further complicated by the Ghost only have a limited selection of cards to choose from each turn. So. The clues could be super vague.

The game is won if everyone manages to solve their person, location, murder weapon in a given number of nights, and after that, if everyone then manages to select the right person, location and weapon out of those that have been highlighted.

An interesting game. All about getting into the head of the person playing the ghost. And trying to find some connecting particular that links one series of pictures to another.

We failed for the record. The G Man kept apologising to me whilst handing me my clues. In the end a wolf was filling in for a unicorn, and most of the other clues were pointing at a small picture on the wall of one of the choices. As it was I actually did succeed in getting all my details right, but Pete and Sam failed. And so the ghost was not avenged.

Note to future murdered ghosts. Learn how to use email.

Small World, Chloe and David with some new NoBoGers

Meanwhile on the table over, a group of new NoBoGers learned to play Small World which came down to a very tight finish again, relying on a tie breaker to actually determine who had won. The game was given a thumbs up, and they liked the way that the races and traits made the game variable - they could see good replayability in it.

Behind them, an excited Jay Van Zee ( his newly annointed NoBoG street rap name, formerly known as JJ ) busted out a fresh from the kickstarter presses game of Shadow of the Elder Gods.

Given which name is a game that is contractually obliged to be about Cthulu type shenanigans.

Anytime you use Shadow and Elder God in some combination, you have to be talking about Lovecraftian Shnubbling, and Shoggotholling.

The Elder Gods of the Shadow Supermarket. See ? It's a game about a Cthulu infested supermarket. Easy.

Shadow of the Elder Gods. Aka Pocket Arkham Horror aka
James Mapp's Punch Yourself In the Face !

So what's the game all about... A co-operative game, players take the role of investigators, or just plain schmucks, who are wandering about the city of Arkham in a game of tentacle whack a mole.

Along the way you get to pick up things to help you fight off the nasties that keep cropping up, and hopefully by the end you will have enough experience to see off the Elder nasty himself. If this sounds remarkably like Arkham Horror, then you'd be right, it sort of is.

But it's condensed down into something that doesn't take between 3 and 6 hours to crank out and has wayyyy less of a footprint in terms of endless decks of crap. I like Arkham Horror, but it does suffer from early FFG designs of "Lets just make another deck of cards / pile of tokens / endless crap for that mechanic, and then we can big it up on the box how much crap is in here, and how much crap your money is buying - bargain !" which typically end up with you playing the Setup The Crap game for longer than you actually play the game.

I'm not sure how the game went down, it sounds pretty cool, albeit James who did play it spotted some dubious flaws he was less than happy with. A key component of the game is the Ring of Shadows, an item which allows you to tackle the unseen enemies that lurk beneath the seen ones and is the key to winning the game. The price of using this item however is a hit in sanity ( of course, no self respecting Cthulu game leaves out a Sanity mechanic ), and here's the issue. Certain random cards in the game will deal 5 sanity damage to the wielder of the Ring of Shadows. Which is enough for insta death. So. Draw a card. Die. Game Over ?

Are there mitigations to this ? No idea. But James was not a fan and stated that at least the game was short, and therefore wasn't too much of a pain to put up with before inevitably dying from the RNG insta death. On thinking about it more deeply he related the experience to be like punching yourself in the face. "Draw a Card, Punch yourself in the face that many times". I dunno. Sounds like a winning party game to me. COPYRIGHT !

Alhambra - vanilla style. Circa 2003

Away from the Cthulian Horror, Stu guided some people through the ways of Kingdom Builder, whilst the table over enjoyed a blast of classic Alhambra which I think was just the pure vanilla version - no expansions ( I tend to always play with the treasures and markets and yada these days... )

Downstairs Martin took some newcomers through the halls of Betrayal at House on the Hill, Hal gave a group a zip around Powerboats - which to my eye looked really cool ( I think its all those lovely hexes lighting the wargaming gene in me ) - and apparently played really nicely - a game all about managing your speed dice and trying not to ram into things from going too fast.

Power boats. Race around the islands and manage your speed.

Lastly, Darren got the new and sexy Xenoshyft Onslaught to table, yet another co-operative type game ( there were three and a half co-ops played this week - I am counting Betrayal as a half co-op ) which is a deck builder horror survival malarkey that sees your group of swaggering future troops defending your base from the evil alien Hive.

Marines versus Aliens you say ?

Yes. In co-operative deck builder format.

The very nice looking Xenoshyft Onslaught.

Which sounds in theory like a cool idea. What's not to like about the familiar Marines versus Aliens trope ( although I have to say, a bit like the whole zombie malarkey, it's probably getting a bit too done at this point ) ? No idea how this panned out. Tim noted it was very difficult to win. The game certainly looked gorgeous on the table - and surprisingly for a Cool Mini or Not game did not come with a bazillion miniatures.

After all that gaming a horde of smaller fillier games descended.

Artificium

I got to try out Artificium on my table - a highly rated light euro resource manager filler, all about turning one thing into another for points. Sam languished in last for the first half of the game before showing off outrageously to overtake everyone and fall off the edge of the scoring because he was just scoring so damn well with an army of wizards.

We declared him loser for running off the edge of the score board and therefore having no score.


After this we changed tables up and busted out The Cow Game to some newcomers - where there were some interesting aberrant plays going on.

Sechs Nimmt. Well. The next move is certainly tricky...

Firstly, one of the newcomers managed to score an enormous 50 points in his single first round. 50. That has to be a record of some sort. It makes Tim's previous week Cow collecting extravaganza look positively amateurish in comparison. Also. We had a full board situation occur. Which I can't remember ever seeing.

Too many fillers to mention. Pickomino, flaschenteufel, yet more Cows, werewolf. Gosh.

Thanks to those who submitted something, David, Chloe, James, short or long !


*our veteran members can be a fragile bunch that are sometimes to be heard muttering about how it was all different in their day, when there was just chess, counting the leaves that floated down the River Wensum, picking peanuts off the floor and flicking them at Crocker and Settlers of Catan.

The Greed of Med "Shoot 'em til they stop twitching and then shoot em some more" Ed

This week we counted 22 NoBoG souls ready for gaming. Which turned out to be a wildly inaccurate count as eventually 31 people were playing at tables. I'm not naming any names *cough* Ewan *cough*, but I feel as if the counting was slightly wonky. This may not have been helped by a slow trickle of stragglers entering the pub. Excuses.

But no matter ! With a bit of patience everyone - even the latecomers - can be accommodated. If you turn up late, you might have to wait a bit for someone to lose horribly with an incompetent playstyle win with a clever strategy and start something else.

First up this week Pete got to give his prototype now in its second printing a go with a full table of six. Pete nobly took a small handicap given all five other players were completely new to the game - and as far as I know had not even played Race for the Galaxy which helps a lot when it comes to Pete's game - and proceeded to bamboozle everyone with rules.

Pete's prototype Galaxy M101
or as I call it, Chink In the Galaxy

Heads were swimming by the end of the rules explanation. It seems few had managed to grasp the finer points and all just wanted to get on and play to get a grip of it by playing a few rounds. The game is pretty straightforward, play systems for a cost ( cards also serve as currency ), deliver goods, put developments into play and creep influence into other systems in much of a cross between Race for the Galaxy and Steam, but if you haven't played either, then it could all be a bit alien at first.

Tom II won this with a triumphant 78 points and a hardcore deliver strategy ( pick cubes up, deliver them where they are needed ) with joint second limping in at 58 points. No one opted for military. A pity. Most enjoyed it thoroughly and thought it was an excellent game, whilst a couple were more on the fence with their experience. Six player is a pretty tough shark infested count for the game, and with all new players at the table it's likely that not everyone is going to have a happy clappy easy existence. Four players with new people would probably have been a good sweet spot.

Stu was back with us this week and gave Kingdom Builder - a Stu firm favourite - another bash. He followed this up with Camel C/Up ( annoying goddamn name that refuses to be one or the other ) which seemed to go down better than Kingdom Builder. Camel Cup is certainly a barrelful of fun and tends to leave the more serious, analytical and buttoned down Euros standing alone in a corner wondering where everyone has gone.

Lewis busted out Lords of Waterdeep at the final table downstairs, with Tom the First mixing it up and showing all the young 'uns ( technically everyone is a young 'un to Tom.... ) how to play with a solid victory. Quest finishes were at an all time high, the deck being one card away from exhaustion. No fillers for them this week as Lords played the whole evening.

Upstairs, Alhambra got a play, and if I have my facts right, Chris won this, with Kittens in a Blender being played afterwards. Kittens in a Blender according to Lauren was tense. Incredibly tense if you were one of the kittens I imagine. No idea who won this, but really, what does it matter who wins when you have a chance to stuff kittens in a blender ?

Elsewhere Darren brought Legendary Encounters - another card game in the Legendary family that this time sees you working your way through the Aliens franchise. We've already seen the Legendary Marvel game at NoBoG a couple of times, but the Encounters game is new this year and new to NoBoG. The rules are the same, but the theme is switched, no super heroes here, you get to play characters such as Ripley or Hicks ( not sure whether Hudson is in it... Game Over Man, Game Over ! ) and have to survive and engage with the acidic horrors from Geigers imagination. I didn't pay any attention to this as it was played but I suspect the theme is probably a good fit for the game, even though as a whole the Aliens Franchise has generally produced some awful games based on its IP - bewildering given that many knock off Alien copies are great games.

Dead of Winter got another bash. Everyone lost. Again. Two betrayers. But they didn't stink up the crises, they played nice. We played with an objective of too many mouths to feed, and started the game with 8 useless helpless survivors. The game seemed to be on punishing mode however, as helpless survivors sky rocketed - we ended up with an utterly bonkers 15 helpless survivors eating 8 food a turn - zero weapons were found, and much to the annoyance of all players, there were absolutely no options to eat any of the helpless survivors. Or leave them out in the cold. Or accidentally move base and forget to give them a forwarding address.

Despite the colony devouring 12 food a turn by game end, a heroic effort to salvage food saw us easily swing the food in the third round, only to be woefully betrayed by rampant resource burning which saw a flurry of zombie attacks eat people and plunge morale to a game ending -5.

Tough was an understatement.

Moving on we had a shot at Cash and Guns second edition and joined up with the Legendary table. Second edition Cash and guns makes a few changes to the original, notably it removes the Bang Bang Bang card ( which gives precedence over Bang cards ), changed loot division - it's now round robin instead of evenly split, and finally introduced the Boss who gets to pick loot first and also gets to change a single shooters target in the shooting round.

Adjustments have also been made to the player powers - simplifying them and making them all visible at game start - and the loot now has some set collection mechanics, with art and diamonds giving bonuses for who has what at the end.

Cash & Guns 2nd Edition. Ed toys with his gun...

Med Ed won the first round of this in his nice, easy mannered, I am not a threat, under the radar kinda way, and then proceeded to state that back to back wins in such a game were almost impossible. Little did we know he was just seeding the group think at the table for his shenanigans.

Darren got shot to bits in the second game with an astounding four out of four guns being loaded with bullets and pointing at him - and being brave or foolhardy he attempted to brash it out - but despite being dead and out of the game, this didn't stop Ed from later attempting to shoot Darren again. Because you know. Keep shooting them until they stop twitching. Or perhaps playing zombie filled Dead of Winter had trained Ed to double tap his victims. Just in case.

Admitting his incompetence - which may have just been another smokescreen ruse to lower his apparent threat - and having directed Ed not to shoot dead people in future turns, or anyone else at the bar / Norwich in general who weren't in the game, Ed cheerfully kept on sucking up double loot with his greedy character power and by game end had an impressive lead and had indeed won back to back at Cash and Guns.

The morale of the story is, don't be suckered in by Med Ed's nice ways. And also, never pretend to be dead. He'll still shoot you.

Winter Fireworks

Such was the breadth and depth of gaming this week that I am hard pressed to keep all of it in my head. It could be something to do with the fact that we had another record busting week of 24 attendees spread over five tables.

Takenoko and it's greedy panda once more saw the light of day, and once more was followed by Betrayal at House on the Hill - but with a completely different group to last week. Glass Road made a tasteful and much appreciated second visit - this really is a cool shorter euro game with some clever mechanics going on, and no less than two concurrent games of Skull and Roses were also being played - one upstairs and one downstairs enabling you to take your pick of seating.

Pete's prototype got another airing in the pub with some discussion afterwards - not sure what the feeling was about it. I suspect Pete being Pete, then managed to encourage everyone to jump into a fast game of Hansa Teutonica - they were still playing when I left and the barmaid hovered locking up.

Alhambra and Lords of Waterdeep rounded out the other initial plays.

New to me this week was Hanabi - a co-operative card game all about fireworks. Although what the game has to do with fireworks - apart from having pretty pictures - is beyond me. It could be a game about collecting sets of goats. Or teapots. Or goat teapots. Or just about anything. Fireworks are cool I guess. Cooler than goat teapots anyway. Unless you're really into esoteric teapots. Perhaps the artist for the game couldn't draw goat teapots but could draw firework blasts. Who knows.

If you haven't played Hanabi the game is all about trying to finish colour sets of fireworks. Five sets in the basic game, six in the advanced game. Sets are laid down in the middle of the table according to their colour and on a strict numerical basis from low to high. Card values start at one and end at five, with there being only *one* five value card for each set in the deck.

So far so good. Except. You can't see any of your cards. Because everyone in the game is holding their cards with the backs pointing at themselves and their faces pointing at everyone else. And you need to play one of these backwards cards you can't see. Or spend a token to give a "clue" to someone else about some of their cards. You can tell someone what colour a bunch of cards are, or what numerical value they have. Failing that, you can discard one of your own cards to get a clue token back for someone in the group to spend later.

The art in the game then is to communicate enough information between all players such that they - 1) don't discard a card that's really needed, 2) don't try to play a card that doesn't fit and thus lose a life, 3) build a set of each colour of firework.

Just why you would be tampering with fireworks blindly in the first place, with three failures making the entire firework factory / display / anarchist centre blow up is a mystery. Seems excessively risky to me.

In any case the game plays very nicely and is something of a breath of fresh air. I feel the game could probably become too simple with a few plays, as a group really begins to read between the lines of clues that are given and understand the mindset of individual players. It's not so much what you say - which is helpful - as to when you say it - and who is saying it to who. And of course making sure that everyone has a 'safe' known action to take. The advanced game probably helps with this, bringing in a very difficult multicolour set to make, but eh, as it's not technically a requirement to complete, those that don't desire utter perfection could just ignore it.

Depends on the players I suspect. With a wrong group, this game could be a tortuous exercise in frustration / comedy.

Resistance finished the evening. The bad guys won three straight missions in a row. Despicable. Even after I had spotted two of the three spies, and had a probable line on the third ( which Merlin already knew to be true ). We'll blame it on short time. And King 'Reliable' Phil picking a well known spy for his mission. But nevertheless, it marks a welcome return to victory for the bad guys. Luke got his first try at being a bad guy. And gave himself up turn one. And then squirmed with some dubious made up stories as to his innocence. Ha. Never mind. It can be tricky with your first attempts at outright in your face lies. Resistance. A game about teaching you how to be a better liar / sociopath. When everyone has mastered it - be afraid.

Navegador: A Beekeeper's Tale.

Cuba finally made it to the table. It has been on the brink of play for well over a month since Rich sold his spare copy to Phil, but this week we had the numbers and Rich was willing to teach it. I say teach it, I'm not sure if he actually did as he walked to an easy victory over Phil and Nicky. Alhambra was then given a rare outing and saw Phil claim the win.

Meanwhile Jimmy, Mike, Tom and I sailed east with the game Navegador. The game is inspired by the Portuguese Age of Discoveries in the 15th & 16th centuries. Players take actions such as contracting workers, acquiring ships and buildings, exploring the seas, establishing colonies in discovered lands and trading goods on the market. For some reason the box lid depicts Jimmy dressed as a beekeeper.

Jimmy won a fairly comfortable victory by specialising in factories and workers, I came in second by also concentrating on workers, but opting for colonies. Mike came third with what looked like a balanced strategy and Tom, who to be fair hadn't played before, languished in fourth by not really doing enough of anything.

There was debate as to whether Navegador is the best of Mac Gerdt's Rondel Games; Jimmy thought that it clearly was, and while I still favour the slightly flawed Imperial - mostly because of the theme - I think Navegador is probably the more accomplished design.

We finished off the night with a few hands of the Chinese card game Tichu, which has become a favourite closer with some of NoBoG. A good win for myself and Jimmy over Tom and Mike.

Beer: Blakemere's Bobby Dazzler. It has the tagline Blonde, Spicy, Arresting - alluding to the blonde woman on the pump clip, who I doubt is a real enforcer of the law, especially in the skirt she was wearing. It was certainly blonde in colour. Not really spicy, but it did have a little bite. Arresting? Once again going a bit far, but this is certainly a very good golden ale, with a good head, a hint of wheat, a hint of citrus and a bitter finish. I rate it an 8 and compare it to 7 Wonders as it's a great session beer, which you can keep going back to all night.