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.

Raining Stars

Our second week at the Mash Tun brought fifty two into the pub for NoBoG, which needless to say is a new attendance record. This worked out to 12 tables of games - which is almost all the gaming table space that the Tun has. With half a dozen newcomers turning up, but a good deal more than that veterans not present. So fifty two is by no means a high water mark. Pete has jokingly suggested that newcomers are welcome to join in future, but must all bring a table with them as their one off joining deposit.

Longer games are definitely creeping into NoBoG now we have a bit more time and a bit more space, and this week we saw a double play of Forbidden Stars, the new hot game from FFG.

Forbidden Stars. And some very non grimdark happy commanders.
You're ruining the theme guys ! It's nothing but war !

Forbidden Stars is a 3X (?) game where you command a faction of military bad asses to go forth and expand your space empire, exploit resources and ultimately exterminate your foes whilst trying to grab your game winning objectives. So, collecting income from your territory, churning out armies and throwing dice at each other to eliminate those armies is the order of the day, like a lot of the more modern deeper rehashes of Risk ( or Risk itself if you insist ) have you do.

Forbidden Stars in very many ways - if not all - is simply a refinement and re-release of an earlier FFG game - Starcraft, and a lot of the mechanisms are exactly the same in both games. Something of a tidy up has occurred in the design of Forbidden Stars over Starcraft and of course aesthetically the theme has changed from Blizzards universe to that of Games Workshops Warhammer 40,000 universe of Eldar, Chaos and all the other grimdark gothicness. ( Ironically Starcraft the original video game started its life as a Games Workshop game, but Blizzard failing to come to an agreement with GW over IP dropped references to GW's 40k universe and came up with their own eye wateringly close, but not close enough to get sued variant. It's all the same. Dudes in power armour. Hungry aliens. Enigmatic other aliens in fancier power armour. Lots of space pew pew. )

More Forbidden Stars. Pete is lost in thought.

For my money, one of the fairly unique, elegant ( gasp ) and interesting mechanics that both games have is the issuing of orders to Do Stuff. A limited number of orders are placed on the board round robin style, indicating something is happening in a given area - however, the neat thing about this is that any number of orders can be stacked in an area, and the order they are stacked in is the order they are executed in - so player turn order if you like is determined by who placed what when. This means care has to be given about what order you play orders in - you'll need to do them back to front if you are chaining them - and beware others then putting on order on top of yours effectively getting the jump on whatever evil play you had in mind.

The game has some lovely production values and comes with a metric ton of plastic, bits, cards, dice and yada, enough to make any materialist board gamer very happy.

Both tables of this as the Tun said they enjoyed it, although David noted that there was some downtime for combat, and the game does run long - both tables managed to finish, but took the better part of 4 hours to do so for 3 player games. There is also some questions about its viability with four players ( the game supports 2 - 4 players ) as this would make it play very long and incur even more downtime for others. But it was a thumbs up from all involved.

I haven't played this so can't really comment wholly objectively ( I do own Starcraft however ), but to my eye despite it being overhauled from the unwieldy Starcraft, it still retains a lot of clunky inelegance evidenced in multiple decks of cards, dice, chits and the kitchen sink being brought in to realise what is in essence a fancy Risk - culminating in the sharp pointy end of combat having dice thrown, cards played against those dice, reinforcement chits thrown on top, and then working out the relative strengths of the models involved to get a result. The critical question for me remains whether any of that is really necessary to get you a deep and nuanced combat game, or whether its just a case of throwing more crap on the pile to muddy the waters ( and if you want to see an elegant but horribly deep and complex combat system, then look no further than old school heavy wargame ASL which proves far much more depth without half the crap - although it's no innocent itself ).

I would actually say something like Axis and Allies is a much better variant of this kind of game - less fiddly, more elegant and delivers the same kind of experience, resource earning, army building, territory conquering, tech upgrading, albeit you are stuck with WW2 - no fancy space pew pew.

Yeah that's right. I went there. I rained on the parade of the new game. But seriously, Starcraft itself was a cool game - if you could handle the endless fiddly crap of it - and Forbidden Stars has improved on this, and is no doubt a good game itself. Just some patience with fiddliness required I suspect, so it's probably much more down to the preferences of the players as to whether it's a great game than the actual design of it itself.

Betrayal at house on the hill !

Elsewhere in the Tun we had two simultaneous games of Betrayal at House on the Hill. You thought Betrayal was popular before. Oh boy. With fifty people it gets played with MORE THAN ONE COPY. It's a pity there wasn't a third copy to play really. Luke related his epic 3.5 hour game of Betrayal in which he narrowly pipped a win securing his victory where I think everyone else had failed. He was very chuffed ( they were playing against the doppleganger ).

Lewis played Smash Up and utilised some overpowered robot malarkeys to thrash his way to a win - helped by top decking a card at the last moment to secure the win. Ah. Top decking. The 'skillful' art

Lewis and Davey head up International NoBoG with Smash Up

of pulling the exact card you need from a deck of cards at the exact moment you need it - a great phenomenon in things like Magic and *cough* Netrunner. Yeah that's right. I'm raining on your parade too Netrunners. Lewis also had the honour of playing with our most far flung newcomers - a couple all the way from Australia. This seems rather a long way to commute for a weekly board game session, but clearly NoBoG is the place to be. Lewis thinks we should start pitching some International version of NoBoG. Well. We did have International Tuesday Tabletop Day.

Marvel Legendary. Heroic failure is nothing to smile about.

Ewan brought along Marvel Legendary, the deck building super hero capering co-operative game. Apparently it was on Tabletop this week, always a good move to bring a game along that's recently done the rounds on Tabletop as there is usually interest from some in playing what they see Wheaton playing. I think they had a quick success game of this, followed by an abject defeat.

I got to play the relatively new Bring Out Yer Dead, which is a lightweight euro that sees players competing to be the best buried family in the city. Uh huh. The game revolves around a very simple simultaneous hidden action selection which allows you to bury coffins into scored plots. Along the way you'll get to utilise special actions that mix the play up, get up to various shenanigans by bribing gravediggers to shift coffins, switch places, and also gain point riffing cards to get you in game scoring or end game bonuses. This is no brain burner by any means, but there is high player

Bring out yer dead. The finger pointing was not staged !

interaction, just about perfect information, and therefore a some planning and backstabbing that can be done. An easy inoffensive game, some think it could be garnering some awards attention, but I don't think it's quite at that level.

Other games - lots of them, too many to go into detail, but Dean brought along Myrmes, a much award nominated game from a few years ago all about leading your colony of ants to better... ant-ing than all the other ant colonies. Looked cool, missed playing it by a hair. Stu played the excellent Machi Koro followed by Camel Up, Hal got Spectre Ops to table ( which rather bizarrely had James seemingly doing a crossword whilst everyone else actually played the board game ) and before that Hal played his prototype, Luke got China to table, but

Ant action with Myrmes

lamented people didn't seem to be into its old school charm and vanilla Resistance had a couple of super noisy big sessions. I also caught a glimpse of Le Petit Prince - which I assume is based on the very cool book of the same name, the game of which seemed to revolve around building a planet ? There's a few other games in there I know I missed too.

Despite our high numbers everyone fit in nicely with room to spare, it didn't feel cramped at all, and everyone seemed content with the space, although Tom was ambivalent and noted it wasn't as cosy as the Ribs. Very true. But then fifty is hard to consolidate with cosy. Whatchagonnado. Although I think a few areas of the Tun are very cosy - it depends where you sit.

I will leave you with the gallery.

Roll Call - what games ya got ?

Hal's prototype, Unfeeling Creatures

Ankh Morpork

Nations

Machi Koro