Blue pill, red pill

>

You take the blue pill, the story ends.

You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. 

You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

> Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus in The Matrix

Col. Jessep: You want answers? 

Kaffee: I think I'm entitled 

Col. Jessep: *You want answers?* 

Kaffee: *I want the truth!* 

Col. Jessep: *You can't handle the truth!*

Tom Cruise & Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men 

The search for truth - some objective perfection - as so eloquently implied above is often as much about the truth as it is about the person doing the searching. .

What, you might ask yourself not unreasonably, has this got to do with what went on down t'pub this week.

Ah ha !

This week I got to partake in not one but two playtests of as yet un-released games, and ( here's the payoff ! ), like a search for the truth, playtesting games can be as much about finding an answer to an open mechanics question as it is about capturing the mood, mindset or otherwise of the designer.

A blue pill, red pill moment for the designer in a universe of their own crafting, if you will.

First up was Elliot with his new prototype ( Mausoleums of Umiat ) about building the fanciest resting place for your soon to be dead self. A bit like some Pharaoh competition to see who can build the swankiest pyramid and bury the most of their still living staff with them. Sharing is caring.

Elliots prototype game - Mausoleums of Umiat

Set in Elliots own world of Umiat and Kenai ( which you can go buy a book about here ), the game has a fantasy theme of orcs, pyromancers and Krakens amongst other things, and combines classic worker placement mechanics with some basic resource engine capabilities.

Players compete to out resource gather and manage each other with an ultimate aim to earn Vanity points - the main thrust of which is to be gained by building your mausoleum with said gathered resources. Some twists on the familar light euro mechanics include apocalyptic style resource collapse - over fishing, over hunting and complete deforestation are a real ( and depending on players almost guaranteed ) threat, and a tactile mausoleum build, where you don't just get to pickup tokens for your tomb, you get to build the tomb in 3d with blocks and decorate its surfaces with fanciness. You could imagine that with some lavish spending on production for the game beyond its humble prototype origins, the mausoleum building could be a thing of wonderful gimmicky goodness ( it cries out for some lego building imo ! ).

MoU has already had a few playtests, but this was its first visit to NoBoG and the game itself is in its early days of balance and feedback, with some hairy rough spots of probability wackiness, pacing, length and choices made, but overall looks promising. Elliot was taking notes throughout the evening and was interested in what everyone had to say about the balance of the game - even though he confessed to finding the undertaking somewhat harrowing. He seemed particularly downcast when I mentioned the game needed a "shit ton of balancing". Mmm. Maybe I should have given Elliot the option of the blue pill.

My second playtest of the evening was with Pete and Galaxy M101 which has had... what must be over a years worth of playtesting by now. In its latest tweak Pete has imo managed to break one of his key game mechanics, and whilst the final game scoring was close - we managed to zip through a full game - I commented that the balance was now kinda fubar and a non event for one of the action selections. Alas, I was only offering red pills again. Pete's stated aim with this iteration was however to push the mechanics until they broke and then dial it back some ( in a bid to encourage an under used part of the game ). So. Perhaps design goal met - action broken. Fix it.

Mice & Mystics - Joe is trapped awaiting rescue

Mice and Mystics graced the Mash Tun again this week to continue the ongoing diminutive adventures, and much like the first week, the team of gallant rodents aced the chapter and whisked their way to a complacent easy victory. After Joe had been talking up how difficult M & M could be, it seems that either it's not so hard after all, or the assembled players are some red hot mice tacticians. Joe was incredulous at how easy it all was - I think he secretly wants more pain and woe to befall the intrepid group.

David got La Granja to table for the third week (?) running, Pete trying it for the first time gave it a hearty thumbs up and noted there were some interesting multi use card mechanic malarkeys going on in this properly crunchy euro. And at the complete opposite end of the scale we also had ameritrash Risk in the house - in the form of a walking dead variant - delighting a table of three.

King of New York

Lewis committed the etiquette sin of introducing a whole bunch of new to NoBoG and new to game people to the wonders of King of New York, before roundly beating them at his own game. He then further added to the problem by slicing everyone up at Secret Hitler and triumphantly riding the win home as a Fascist. Thus teaching the newcomers in proper barbarian style that weakness is not to be tolerated, for as Conan says, the best thing in life is to "Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their women.". Harsh.

Kingdom Builder made a return after several months of hiatus - mainly because Stu stopped bringing it - Champions of Midgard of course was played ( with relative NoBoG newcomer Halvor teaching everyone the correct pronunciation of the nordicness ) and there were outbreaks of epic spell wars of the battle wizards, Resistance, Bang !, Love Letter and a whole bunch besides.

La Granja

The Tun was busy this week - an unfortunate somewhat busy spread of regular punters in the pub conspired to make tables ultra short, and a number of small player count pre-arranged games exacerbated a difficult situation into almost breaking point - we nearly had to leave the Tun and split across site. This is the second time in a handful of weeks that space has been critical - and this week with only around 43 gamers in the house it wasn't even particularly gamer busy. Lack of available extra space is beginning to bite, and the issue is on my radar as A Problem that may need some work. A chat with the Tun about what other days or solutions are available, or talking nicely to Jamie and Athena to offer a split solution may be in order - or possibly even floating the so far elusive second NoBoG day to spread numbers across two days instead of just one.

No Monopoly this week. Boo. Although I really shouldn't talk these things up. We all know what happens when I talk things up, even in jest.

Ok, that's it. Cue up the gallery music and take it away...

Risk, Walking Dead Style

Champions of Midgard. With added Halvor authenticity * ( Halvor is not included with the game )

The excellent Istanbul

Bang !

Epic spell wars of the battle wizards

Avalon Resistance

Sharks in the Water

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this week, the blog is the size of a small novel.

What happened to May ? May was a blur of gaming - for those of you who attended NoBoG, you will already know this. For those of you that didn't then you can imagine that parts of Norwich slipped into a gap in the space time continuum, only to finally reappear several weeks later, beer drunk, bar snacks consumed and games played.

First off some possibly important news. The Ribs has declared that there may very well be a darts farrago kicking off in the near future held every other week on a Tuesday night and laying claim to the front half of the pub.

On busy NoBoG nights this will straight up mean there is no space in the Ribs for some of us. As we have trialled the overflow of Take 5 before, another pub like establishment a very short walk down the road and they seem to be amenable to us turning up, I propose that we just do that on Darts nights. This may mean you want to think twice about ordering an early pint at the Ribs if it turns out you have turned up only to then decamp to another pub.

It's not certain if the darts extravaganza will be a thing, but if it is, I or someone will make sure to warn people which week is dart week so you can be prepared for downing a pint in 10 minutes or just not bothering until you know where you are sitting.

Enough of that. Onto an admittedly highlights version of what has been going on down the pub in the last three weeks. We'll start with Ewan.

This week I was the table for A New Dawn; which is the follow up to Among the Stars.

In a New Dawn you play an alien alliance officer charged with exploring, researching new tech and sending out ambassadors. Hoping to colonise abandoned space stations or planets in a very 4X'y way. Competing against other players over limited resources.
 
Overall the game was enjoyable and the different aliens you can play all have their own unique feel. Not only in their special powers but in the tech available to them. As we found through our play through there are some power combos.

I can't remember who won but throughout a hard fought game In which I felt i wasn't doing well and at least I ended up not finishing in last place. Was so involved with the game I forgot to take a picture or more notes. But New Dawn is definitely worth a play if you are into 4X space themed games.

I've got you covered Ewan - New Dawn in action.

Looked cool when I walked past it. I'd like to give it a go myself. Then we have some words from Tim.

For our fist game we played Smash Up. On the night, I took to describing Smash Up as a Deck Builder without any building during the actual gameplay. Players start by choosing two teams (or races) from the selection, and combining their separate decks of cards. Our group became a four way battle between Ewan’s Time Lord-Zombies, Adam’s Dino-Ninjas, Guillame’s Super-Ape-Plants and my own band of Steam Punk-Robots.  Each turn sees the players playing one Minion Card and one Action to one of the five open ‘Bases’. Each base has a different Break point, and scores differently dependent on how much power each player contributes. What eventually transpired was a situation where it looked impossible for anyone to best Ewan and his really annoying, they just wont leave you alone, Time Lord Zombies. I had the last turn of the round, was closest to Ewan on points, but could see a way to get over the line without feeding him what he needed to win. I took quite a while (sorry) to figure out if I could do anything, eventually just playing a ‘Draw Cards’ action out of desperation. Who should I draw, none other that the female mechanic, hence forth known as Kaylee from Firefly. She allowed me to rummage in my trash for a steam-punk minigun with which to power-up my bots and  surge to Victory!

After Smash Up, Rich IV joined us fro a game of Get Bit, which sees Robots desperately swimming away from a shark in order to avoid getting eaten. Needless to say, Kaylee worked her magic and my bot emerged as the last Robot Swimming, narrowly getting away whilst Guillame’s poor mechanoid was crunched to pieces.

To end the night, we played a few rounds wild-west dice shoot-em’-up Bang! The Dice Game. I was one of the Outlaws both times, and died quickly both times, having revealed myself to be a little too eager to kill the Sherif. What can I say, Kaylee never did like guns.

Power boats !

Myself over the weeks I've got to play Power boats an *almost* old school family game with it's dice to move mechanic which was funny, cool and mildly infuriating all in one ( Punk Rich won this despite failing spectacularly in the first race and instead of actually competing managed to go off on a Broads Cruise with Hazel in a leisurely exploration of the map ),  and a good few hands of the classic Tichu, which doesn't get played enough anymore now that Jimmy disappeared from our midst years ago.

Tichu is great. If you've never played it, it's a bit like a chinese version of bridge with tricks played reminscent to poker hands. If that makes any sense. Groovy, but the kind of strict four player limit ( to play the proper Tichu ) makes it surprisingly tricky to get to table.

The very nice Machi Koro. Martin won from nowhere.

Stu also kindly taught a bunch of us Machi Koro which is a game I have wanted to try for a while but never quite got round to. Everyone agreed it was a fun simple card game, and as Stu initially described it, a bit like Settlers of Catan without the board. Buy cards. Roll dice. Earn money from the cards with a matching dice roll. First player to build all their special cards wins. Simple.

I'd give this one a big thumbs up personally, and definitely a great gateway type game for those board game shy types. Despite me urging Martin not to calculate his turn as it was just "far too complicated" and better to just roll the dice again, he calculated his turn and ended up the winner. My

Machi Koro Aerial Shot

feeble social engineering had failed to net me an opposition mistake.

Libertalia also made it to table having recently aired on Tabletop. Libertalia has made it down the Ribs on a number of occasions in the past, and it's a pretty solid fun game. Rather surprisingly everyone at the table knew the rules - either having played it before or watched the tabletop episode - so we got off to a quick start where it has to be said I was picked on relentlessly and came in a very comfortable last. Guillame was first pursued hotly by the treacherous Sam who after assuring me he wouldn't pick on me then killed a valued member of my pirate team. You were the only one worth killing he lamely defended. Curses to ye scurvy dogs the lot of you.

You can check out Tabletops own playthrough here, complete with outrageous pirate talk.

Keeping a nautical theme we also played Lifeboats, the game of sinking lifeboats and voting to see who goes in the water. Getting tipped out of the boat into the water is instant death for the poor sailor so chosen, there being presumably sharks in the water. Myself and newcomer Heather forged a very strong alliance at the start and did really well, with poor James found in a boat on his own receiving most of the "bad luck" dished out by everyone else. He had a very glum face at one point. I cheered him up by saying he'd probably go onto win it - a prescient call as it turns out.

Midway through the game I had no choice but to turf my erstwhile bestie Heather out of the boat and from that point on things went positively tits up, the great allegiance breaking and Heather swearing vengeance forever.

Uh huh.

I ended up with a reasonable score, but James was the winner, although he was picked on at the start he came through in a triumph.

Finished with Cheaty Mages. I won by an embarassingly large amount. It was all rather spectacular.

Hal flexes his game design muscles and brings along his own game.

Hal apart from bringing such cool things as Powerboats also brought along a game of his own invention. Off the top of my head this brings the number of game designers in our midsts to half a dozen. I didn't stick around to get much of a gist of the game, but it seemed to be a deduction thing, working out where or what something was.





And finally, a beer report. It's been too long. Ewan reports...

Had a nice pint from Wolfs Brewery called For Fox Sake. A beer with a witty name, dark and fruity and very easy to drink.

Thanks to the lovely Monika for the pictures. The decidedly less lovely me supplied some pictures too. I'll leave you with the Gallery.

Six player Caverna. Hardcore !

Cas$h n Gun$ - Lauren ended winner as this I think

Batman Love Letter. Possibly the best Love Letter variant ??

Wherry Room at the Ribs

Bamboo ? Gardener ? Panda ? Must be Takenoko

Lords of Vegas

"Jazz Hands !"

Lords of Waterdeep

David Chloe Tim and Ewan playing what looks like a Legendary variant

Lifeboats, the vengeful Heather pouts

Punk Rich, Hazel, Pete, Rich IV and Hal partake of Hal's game