Mars 2.0

After having been talked up for sometime, the sleeper hit of Mission Red Planet which has proven somewhat tricky to get your hands on in the past, has finally returned to shelves with the second edition tweak and reprint that FFG has just released. Did they tweak it and break it ? Improve it ? Or is it the good old Mission Red Planet we know and love.

To answer all those questions, this week Ewan had it fresh off the presses and ready to play in all it's cute chibi astronaut glory. Here's what he had to say about that.

Tonight Tim, Sam, Andy, Rich, Simon, and I put on our space helmets to head to Mars for riches in the second edition of Mission Red Planet.

Mission Red Planet reprint in all its glory

Mission Red Planet has been played a few times in the past at Nobog but I believe this may be the first time that the second edition has been played. I won’t go too much in depth into the rules/gameplay, as previous Noblogs have covered the first edition ( Ed. actually I'm not sure the basic premise ever has made it into a NoBlog.. google search says no ! ) .

However there are some differences with the newer edition. First off there are several cosmetic differences, including some cool astronauts for each player (now plays up to 6 players) as well as the board being circular and feeling a little smaller. Secondly the new addition of Phobos, a moon orbiting Mars, which is an extra zone to send your astronauts too and potentially use (in conjunction with the soldier card) to stage a Mars invasion. Finally the addition of action cards, which can really have an impact on the final phases of scoring.

Mars begins to fill up with eager astronauts

Playing with 6 certainly makes Mars now feel crowded but as everyone plays pretty much simultaneously each round it didn’t add too much to the overall game time, I think we took about 90 min to play after a rules explanation. The crowded board certainly added to the theme as the competition for resources was fierce and the slight change to the rules of counting down rather than up during character resolution made the game feel more thematic.

Phobos is an interesting addition an adding some addition strategies to the game. When you send astronauts there they are pretty much stuck there; however with the change to the soldier card you can move up to 3 to any area on Mars. This makes timing the soldier card even more important if you want to fully utilise him. The action cards have the potential to be a game changer and are brutal. Andy was able to play one entitled space zombies (yes even in a steam punk universe there are zombies) and bring all his dead astronauts back and put them anywhere on Mars; pipping me for control on a key area.

An unexplored Mars ready to be discovered - first turn MRP

Overall the new additions to Mission Red Planet have made this more than a simple reprint and have added a lot to the original game. For those that own the original though I don’t know whether this warrants buying the new edition (unless you want the new astronaut meeples) and it will depend on what you feel about the new rules. For me I really like the new additions and it makes Mission Red Planet feel new again with in a familiar setting. In terms of what went on in our game Tim ran away with the win due to some nice placements of discovery cards, netting him a lot of ice to win the global mission. Definitely worth a play for those who have either played the original or for new players.  

Six players at 90 minutes is a great play time. The board looked like utter chaos at the end - I didn't play it, but I would quibble that the game board is now far too busy - more players, bigger pieces, small board - to my eye it made it a good deal tougher to instantly appraise who was where in what numbers and what needed to be done to massage control. A minor quibble though. The astronauts look kick ass. I think I would possibly be tempted myself to custom print a bigger board for it. In any case, cool stuff, I wanna give this a go to see how the changes stack up.

Ten - hut. MRP Astronauts on parade.

Last weeks inaugural play at NoBoG of the print and play version of Secret Hitler took the house by storm ( and I failed to get a game of it ), so this week I printed out a second set of it just to make very damn sure that I would get to play it.

Which turned out to be wise as both copies ended up in use.

Secret Hitler. Time to out those whose fashion sense is far too
into sharp outfits with black, red and skull motifs.
Liable to be fascists or Dennis the Menace.

My first time playing Secret Hitler I found the game was indeed pretty damn good, and for all its simplified Resistance setup - and is there really enough to think about here, still has enough gas in game to get the usual pointy fingers and accusations going around a table, but dare I say it in more streamlined fashion. The game also feels very inclusive - the roles very quickly zip around the table, and having to exclude players who were previously part of the legislative roles forces play into a wider circle. Some very funny play, including an increasingly obvious Fascist of Lewis, Richard IV real time editing hitler moustaches onto suspects via some cell phone trickery, some discussion about when choosing who to kill whether you could kill yourself in some very apt Hitler suicide type thing and Sam blatantly acting like a Fascist in the first round - vote me, vote me, I'll kill who you like.. possibly the most needy Fascist play ever - but actually turning out to NOT be a fascist, followed by a much more trustworthy and calm game where he turned out in fact to be Hitler and got elected as Chancellor. Dammit. Plus I'm not sure I'll even believe Hal is anything but a liberal when playing Secret Hitler. I just can't see him as a Fascist. Ever. We finished on a five player game of Secret Hitler - and the consensus around the table was that five just doesn't work too well - I think six may be the actual workable minimum number for this game.

Old School Mexica

Hal brought along something of an old school classic in the form of Mexica which at this point is nearly 15 years old, one of a trio of games in the so called "Mask Trilogy" - Mexica, Tikal and Java. Mexica has recently had a reprint and a facelift with more detailed and fancier buildings and overhauled board art. An old school relaxed Euro ( as all the games in the Mask Trilogy are ), Mexica features players constructing buildings around the board in order to gain dominance in a particular district. Districts themselves are not set and are created from players building discrete islands surrounded by canals, meaning no two games will ever quite work out in the same way.

The new (resin?) building / pyramid pieces look great, and the game is quite the eye candy piece - although it has to be said that ALL of the Mask games were pretty nice to look at.

Ich bin ein Hamburgum. I am a donut as Kennedy once said.

Also keeping it Euro and somewhat old school as ever was Stu and Tom and this week Stu was offering Hamburgum (2007) up for play. I've not played this but it looks Eurotastic - and I think is one of the handful of games to have the whole action rondel thing going on ( a wheel of actions ) - of which I remember from the much fancied Navegador (2010).

Lewis tempted fate by playing Cauldron again, and the beast that is Betrayal at House in the Hill seems to be stirring once more and beginning to pop up or be requested with some regularity. I still maintain someone(s) needs to sit down and create a whole new story book for the game to extend past the 50 included. People like Luke have now played Betrayal so often they've done every single story, and a lot of those more than once ( which tells you something about how popular that game is with some people )

No Champions of Midgard this week ( gasp ), but we did have some Lords of Waterdeep instead.

Blood Rage, Ragnarok and the end of the world.
Oblivion. Which came as a relief if I'm honest.

And lastly Blood Rage also made it back to table, and a largely new player base got to go through its Viking delights with Pete teaching and then monster feedback engine-ing through the game ( he blasted to an enormous 200+ point victory by the end ). This is the second time I've played Blood Rage - I didn't like it the first time, I made something of a laundry list of outright mechanical flaws and noted a number of game design decisions that were personally unfun and eye rolling to me but gave it the benefit of the doubt - and this second time around I have to say it just underscored those issues to me and removed the benefit of the doubt to outright no thanks. Made worse this time around by my effective player elimination two thirds through the game. Ragnarok couldn't come quickly enough for me.

Lovely miniatures though.

A few shots for the gallery. Thanks go to Tim this week, who was snapping away with a fancy new phone to get you most of the shots of Mission Red Planet that you see. For me, I had time to snap extra shots of Blood Rage. It's not like I was doing anything else ...
 

Blood Rage - I had time to titivate with the camera

If this is the kind of game the Vikings play, I can see why they are all Blood Ragey. They're probably not enjoying Eric M Langs unique sense of questionable game design either.

Cauldron

Betrayal at House on the Hill. More stories required.

More Mission Red Planet

Pandemic. Contagion lurked in the corner with Voitek and Monika.

This is my rifle, this is my gun.

Christmas is done, the New Year is over and the NoBlog catches up with the last couple of sessions of December.

On the week before Christmas Tuesday, NoBoG saw the Vietnam war era COIN series game Fire in the Lake have its debut at the Mash Tun.

If you've never played a COIN ( COunter INsurgency) game - or even heard about them - then they are fairly simple area control wargames with a very heavy semi random scripted event theme going on available via a deck of cards. Despite being simple area control games, COIN games are definitely not for the casual gamer and constitute some of the heavier, if not the heaviest of Euro-ish games, and some of the COIN games can take a considerable time investment ( the earlier Andean Abyss COIN game has had sessions that have rolled on past 9 hours in length ).

The conflict that COIN games depict are very much of the modern zeitgeist and in one way or another are pretty much a ubiquitous background noise these days from the 24 hour news empire. Given the relative strengths of well funded and armed combatants against rag tag outfits it's a no brainer that these kind of asymmetric conflicts have become the norm.

The COIN series of games attempts to capture the nature of this asymmetric warfare and also the oh so important political/terror fight for the hearts and minds of the populace that goes hand in hand with it. Previous games have visited the utter chaos of Colombia in the 1990s ( Andean Abyss ) and its druglords, the turbulent Cuban uprising of the 50's ( Cuba Libre ) of Fidel Castro et al,he more recent Afghanistan quagmire ( A Distant Plain ) of a US led coalition force and for the most recent game, the Vietnam war - Fire in the Lake.

Fire in the Lake-the red forces of Hal's NVA amass in the North

Fire in the Lake somewhat controversially pits four competing sides of the North Vietnamese Army, Viet Cong, US and the South Vietnamese republic forces ARVN against each other in a fight for domination of Vietnam. There are a number of team permutations you can play with - depending on number of players and political sensibilities - as well as what is probably one of the most complex AI scripts in a game for any of the factions should you wish to have the game control a player.

Asymmetric player capabilities tend to come down to outright displays of firepower with army units sweeping in and airstrikes, versus more subtle opinion influence, terror operations and sabotage. The goals in particular are setup in a clever way - the NVA and ARVN forces are rewarded for controlling areas through military domination, whereas the US and the VC are rewarded for having support from the general population. So whilst in theory the US and ARVN are fighting on the same team, the US are interested in getting everyone to be happy - and commit as few as troops as possible to do so - whilst ARVN is interested in projecting force into regions and making sure their corrupt friends are getting plenty of US aid money fed into their pockets. There is some - you might almost say accidental - overlap in goal alignment between allies, but it can be tenuous and at certain times even entirely unwanted ( the US for instance can help militarily dominate a region, even though the US in theory has no actual gain in doing so, and may in fact be hurting their own chances of winning )

This setup leads to some great emergent gameplay and very interesting choices about what to do in a given situation and something of a shaky ambivalent nature to the alliance of communists versus non communists. Some debate and "shit stirring" is definitely part of this game as play unfolds and each of the various factions bubbles up to dominate.

Enough of the theory. What happened with our game ? I took the VC - the only faction solely committed to unconventional guerrilla warfare, Hal took the NVA, Darren the US and Pete the morally bankrupt ARVN. We played the short scenario which is played over some 29 ish event cards / turns and means in practice that each player probably has around 12 turns in which they get to do something. As it turned out in our game, the corrupt leadership of the ARVN was highly resistant to change, meaning that funneling US aid out to ARVN cronies was extremely effective, and meant that Pete was doing his utmost to shove as much cash out the door to his mates, pushing his victory points way up.

Hal as NVA and Darren as US struggled to make much headway in their own VP fields, and for myself I had managed to get a crucial opinion shifter into play from the very start that punished anyone targeting me by awarding me with victory points.

Pete breached his VP goal by the middle of the game and was set for a win, only a self sacrificing move by Hal as NVA and then a wave of terror operations by myself ( and not a little outright killing of police by the NVA, and convincing other police to join my team ) saw his VPs shifted down enough for him not to win and continue on the game.

With the NVA struggling militarily, and the US having spent a buttload of money to influence popular opinion in their favour, Darren with it has to be said a fair amount of ( good ) advice from Team Communist of me and Hal decided take the opportunity to enact a massive withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam, wildly boosting his Victory points as the yanks were suddenly happy at not having to fight such a punishing war.

End game, blue VC enjoy support, the NVA marches
and the US have gone home... but win the day.
ARVN are reduced to a few key cities and locations.
Historically... accurate ?

With US ground support reduced to a skeleton force, and some painful anti corruption events played against Pete, the ARVN faction saw their control collapse, whilst myself as VC undid all the US good will work in Central and Southern Vietnam with only the cities now not being openly communist, and Hal pushed into Southern Vietnam to finally dominate areas in the South.

Despite the communist advances the happy vibes inspired by having such a low commitment to the war meant that Darren ended up the winner, having breached his VP goal and ending some 8 or so above it. However myself as the VC had also breached their VP goal in getting a decent majority of Vietnam to buy into the communist ideal, but crucially not enough to erode Darren's lead - indeed it was the US withdrawal that had bagged the win, just going by popular support the win would have been mine. Hal was very close to breaching his own VP goal of military control, whilst poor Pete ended up firmly fourth as his corrupt shenanigans caught up with him and the US withdrew.

Great game all in all, and once everyone was down pat with what was going on, the game moved on at a brisk pace. The medium length scenario would definitely be achievable within a pub evening with players that were kinda familiar with what was going on. Highly recommended to anyone looking for a game with a bit of a deeper bite to sink your teeth into and high player interaction.

Darren enjoyed the game so much he listed it as one of his favourite plays of 2015 ! High praise indeed.

Moving away from Vietnam, we had another first at NoBoG as Kingdom Death Monster turned up to put a bunch of players through their paces. Kingdom Death Monster has the dubious title as Most Expensive Board Game Ever as its absolutely top notch and arguably unmatched quality miniatures command ridiculous prices. ( I believe the base Kingdom Death Monster set with all the bits was some 300 post colonial dollars ). Kingdom Death Monster is almost a two part kind of game - with one part being a tactical combat game with an emphasis on boss monster kind of takedowns ( if you've ever played an MMO with a raid boss, you'll know the score here ), and the second part of the game being a colony planning and building campaign with an emphasis on a rogue like level of brutal difficulty and sudden random unfair hideous death.

Kingdom Death : Monster. Nothing's going on here....

Despite having gorgeous miniatures, I singularly failed at taking a good shot of them. So. Yeah. Sucks to be you. In my defence I was busy terrorising convincing the Vietnamese peasants to join the glorious communist uprising and caught the KDM'ers in one of their town planning sessions.

KDM went down very well with some interesting tales being told in the aftermath like Sean's character Carol - a hard hitting monster bashing type - having a crucial weakness of fainting at the sight of blood and having to be continually roused by team mates to get up and finish the job. I think Carol ended up losing limbs and eventually dying, not before managing to have a child - which then became Sean's character.

Although I haven't looked hard at KDM it continues to surprise me about just how positive people are when they play it - I think the whole colony planning phase and story element is the secret sauce that lifts this tactical melee game with work of art miniatures above what it would otherwise be.

Two Rooms and a Boom also made its NoBoG debut, which must somewhat annoy Lewis as he had been keen to play this but due to Christmas type responsibilities had skipped NoBoG. I can't say much about Two Rooms except that it involved an awful lot of people milling around the pub - at one point I thought just about the entire NoBoG playerbase was involved. There were some excited high fives, a good deal of chatting, and Sam slipped me a look of his role card. Suffice to say I hadn't a clue what it meant - except he apparently wasn't allowed to talk to a group of people. Sounds a bit harsh to me. Your role is to sit in a corner and have no fun. Sam seemed to be enjoying it however.

Blood Rage turned up again - Pete has waded in and bought this, so with both Nicky and Pete having copies, expect this to turn up even more at NoBoG. Champions of Midgard was also present during the Christmas period and I think is going to end up being the early 2016 popular game of NoBoG with several people now having bought copies of it and eager to give it a bash. Given that CoM is not a million miles away from Lords of Waterdeep - and Lords of Waterdeep was one of the top 10 games of 2015 at NoBoG, it's a reasonable bet that CoM is going to be a shoe in for 2016.

Finally, Sean who has been a recent regular NoBoGer - and particularly untrustworthy werewolfer/resistancer/spyfaller/mafioso - is leaving us for a year to go do university type things with embedded electronics and wifi devices. Spy devices then. He's going to advance the field of spy devices. Good luck in his studies, and his loud and dubious traitor antics will be missed !

As ever I leave you with the gallery.

Terra Mystica. Sam would like to confirm again that this is better than GoT. He made sure to tell me. Again.

Resistance. With an animated Luke who is odds on probably undermining his own team at this point.

A fine hand of cows there Adam. Sechs Nimmt.

Champions of Midgard with Ewan, Tim, Heather and home from Uni Kaya (sp?!)

The Shy Persons Christmas Approval Meeting. Everyone closes their eyes before interacting to avoid embarrassment.
Either that or it's Resistance. I guess it could be Resistance.

The lovely Divinare. Which I am turning into something of a Savant at. Needless to say I won.

The much fancied Lords of Waterdeep. One of NoBoGs Top 10 of 2015.

Cauldron. Still haven't played this. Still need to play this.

More Lords of Waterdeep. Popular. Apparently.

More Champions of Midgard. If you accept CoM = LoW, then it was played four times in two weeks !

Blood Rage ! It's like Chaos in the Old World but with only 3 turns. And more scoring volatility.

7 Wonders

32 and 33 respectively for those who are counting. 33 during the period between Christmas and New Years is crazily up.

Random Number Generator - RNG

Random Number Generator. A device, process or action that can generate a "random" number, or at least close enough to random so as to be indistinguishable from true random to a human observer, used for encryption, scientific study, games, and upsetting certain gamers with it's non deterministic bullshit. See reference Roll to Move is a travesty, Monopoly blows, and This Game makes no Sense. Most popular physical incarnation - dice.

A quiet week at the Mash Tun last week, possibly due to Halo 5 releasing on the very same day, or possibly just those random fluctuations, in any case a very Douglas Adams 42 turned up to get their gaming on. And yes. 42 is now officially a quiet number. Previously this same number may have been viewed as "bonkers busy", but context is everything. 42 for the population of your bathroom would be "unacceptably busy and there's no bloody hot water left"*. 42 for the population of China would be "there's no one here".

Cthulu and friends go on a world tour.

Pete had Cthulu Wars out on table for a second week running with Richard IV also joining in again declaring he knew what was going on now and would fare much better. With the heady scent of chinese plastic permeating the air ( it really was very apparent... that's what you get for having all that plastic ) Richard was the man to beat, getting into a strong position and fending off attacks from all comers. The game went on considerably longer than it's first outing, mostly due to a good deal of trepidation about deploying gates for fear of having them stolen. I think Richard won this in the end, clearly he did know what was going on.

Whilst Cthulu and his chums were devouring the world, on another table a whole different kind of

Zombicide -A sim for teaching you the basics of the Zapocalypse

devouring was going on with Zombicide, a game all about tooling up and killing zombies B movie horror style. Mechanically there is not much to look at here and it follows all the other point shoot, roll a dice type games, but thematically does a great job of having nice miniatures and an attractive modular board setup which really looks the part. If you ask me this is about typical for many of those kind of kickstarter games. Long on the eye candy. Short on everything else. Perhaps I am getting kickstarter fatigue. Nevertheless Zombicide looks good fun, and who doesn't like gunning zombies down !

Last week I got to partake of the Francis Drake euro board game ( another kickstarter ), which pits the players into a competition of exploiting the West Indies in the 16th century of gems, goods and uhh looting towns and castles and sinking ships. It was an ambivalent age, what can you say. The game runs for three identical rounds, so you get three cracks at the Euro puzzle, where first you pick up "stuff" which amounts to fuel for your upcoming worker placement, with things such as guns, crew, trade goods and barrels, and after everyone is done loading their ship you get to place your actions out - up to four of them by default. Actions are then resolved in player order and action number order, with a competitive edge of the first person getting to act in a place gets the bonus rewards.

There are the usual spread of Euro things going on here - points for set collection, points for action set collection - as well as just plain outright points for doing things.

Nothing we haven't seen before, and packaged and themed in a nice way.

Except.

One huge bugbear for me.

The game has a small RNG contained within it that determines whether you'll actually be able to afford the actions you are selecting or not - they'll vary in "price" from 0 - 6 resources ( and on average you'll probably pick up 3-4  resources of a particular type, less in some, more in others ) And you won't know if you can afford it until it's too late - you've already collected your resources, and picked your actions. And therein lies the rub.

For all the usual careful euro calculation and plotting of X actions, and Y points ultimately your game can hinge on whether you've luckily or unluckily hit a roadblock. And this isn't trivial, a full fat 10 bonus points await someone who can get all their planned actions swinging correctly, 4 points if you can half do it, and a single point if you limp across the line. This unfortunate RNG to see whether your plans work this turn tends to make everything else a bit of a sideshow.

And god forbid you actually have bad luck to foul of this two turns in a row ( out of three ).

Which is exactly what happened to me. You can only look on and watch as someone else picks up mucho victory points whilst expending ass all, and your own action cripples you for half as many victory points.

Blah. In our game, my third turn was spectacularly good as I managed to get into an area uncontested, and then sat back and let the turn play itself. I literally had no choices to make - and earned big points from doing so.

Nevertheless, it's an enjoyable game, nicely turned out, and if you can avoid or just plain ignore the lurking RNG devil waiting for you in the background, then it's a nice race to see who can grab the most things.

Agricola however, it ain't. Perhaps Agricola should put an RNG on each of its action spots for extra excitement. On a 4+ sorry pal, you trip on the way to plough a field. No ploughing for you this turn. And on that day, a thousand Euro gameplayers cried out as if in pain. . .

We finished with Isle of Skye which went down very well. Darren and Dave got locked in some mental high priced bidding war between the two of them, and switched lands on just about every round for outrageous prices.

BSG. In a surprise to no one move, Monika was the cylon.

There was also some fantabulous Battlestar Galaticaing, which rather confusedly went from four players to six, to five, to four. But through all this. The inevitable. The perpetual. The predictable. Monika was a cylon. It's amazing she still plays the game to be fair. Anyone with any experience would just push her out of the air lock. But you just... can't... quite... tell... I mean. Surely. SURELY. No one can be the Cylon that often. You're a good guy this time, right ? Wrong. Pete suggested she rigs the cards to always be a cylon.

7 Wonders. This table is a wonder in itself.

We also had the most epically large table 7 wonders on the go. It was fantastic. With a crazy seven people. There were so many players that some were in different weather systems and time zones to other players. Amazing. You couldn't even tell - or care - what the player on the other side of the table was doing. Lots of military ? Who cares ! I am 3 neighbours removed from that filthy warmonger ! Good stuff.

Elliott brought along Cauldron again, and on the front tables some Lords of Waterdeep got a bash. It's been a while since Waterdeep was out. Once upon a time that was almost a permanent fixture on one table of the ribs. That and Betrayal at House on the Hill.

Some end of night Resistancing went on. And Lewis complained that there wasn't enough time left in the evening to play fillers. Despite this, Lewis left early, and played his own main game til late. I noted he was actually just complaining about himself rather than anything else . . . .

The gallery...

* making the assumption that you do not have Roman Emperor levels of bathroom space and aren't in the habit of inviting 50 of your closest allies, senators, their partners, their offspring and assorted livestock around for a bath.

Show me your war face !

Here's what the iconic Timber Wolf Clan Mech thinks of your neatly optimised Caverna farm. 11.6m tall and 75 tons of bad assery conflict resolution management. I see your Room for a sixth dwarf, and raise you double Long Range Missile 20's and a searing blast of lasery death. Eat it dwarf !

*cue stirring sci-fi movie music and ubiquitous deep gravelly voice narration man*

It is the year 3050 and mankinds brightly burning golden age of technology and mass colonisation of the stars has faded into distant memory. The stars of the Inner Sphere of human colonisation now burn with a different fire, that of constant punishing internecine warfare, giant death dealing machines dropped from the sky to burn rival factions to the ground, the spiralling chaos and destruction eroding knowledge and progress and threatening to plunge humanity into a new dark age of ignorance.

Enter into this cauldron of conflict, interlopers, the Clans, genetically engineered super men, children of a long forgotten exodus past the boundaries of known space, returning from the depths of the void to bring with them technology and an art of war, kept, maintained and pushed far beyond that of the Inner Sphere. Like a searing knife through an underbelly of fat, the Clans and their awe inspiring battlemechs push into the worlds of the Inner Sphere, planet after planet falling to their ferocity and their militaristic culture of the single minded dedication to the honour of combat.

Nothing it seems can stop the advance of the Clans onslaught, and on a world which suddenly finds itself on a new and unexpected frontline of a clash of cultures, a double lance of desperate Inner Sphere mechs prepares to hold the line at any cost against the initial probes of the invaders. . . . . . . .

Woo ! So with that said, this week I dusted off some serious old school clunkery in the form of Battletech - which god help me is now some 30 years old - and brought it along to NoBoG to grind some people into the dust and make them appreciate all those new and funky elegant game mechanics and not having to perform constant to hit math in your head. Ah yes. 80's game design.

It's been forever and an age since I took Battletech out for a run, and wasn't entirely sure how a five six player game of it would fare. For sure Battletech can take in its stride almost any number of players ( the box boasts 2 - 20 players, but tbh, there's no reason to stop at 20, I think they just picked that as some random arbitrary number to print ) and scale up to the ridiculous, but the question comes down to how much of your life do you want to dedicate to this particular play session. Old school games, particularly old school war type games do not care for your suggestions of keeping play times under 12 hours.

Given all that, I decided to pre-cook a scenario, pre print out all the sheets required, only leaving the players to decide which side they wanted to be on and which of the mechs they were personally going to pilot. 7 IS mechs would take on the might of four clan mechs in a breakthrough scenario - the clans looking to bloody the nose of the IS and then dismissively push on through into enemy lines and off the opposing table edge.

Old school Battletech. Very shortly that Warhammer
is going to lose it's head.

And so to the game. Clunky. Chewy. Laden with math. But somehow... compelling... and interesting... and narrative. The two hour mark sailed past, and finally the mechs were beginning to properly kick each other. A hapless Inner Sphere Warhammer rolled into view, fired off it's two impressive Particle Projection Cannons only to then suffer a withering round of return fire as most of the Clan Mechs targeted it and proceeded to melt its armour off. In a final coup de grace as the firing round finished, my Timber Wolf after unleashing a barrage of missiles, levelled it's ER Large Laser at the IS Warhammer and in a single shot blew its head clean off - leaving the pilot nothing more than a dissipating red mist. First blood - mech down !

Over on the left flank, the impressively heavy and weapon laden IS Battlemaster in command of the IS forces failed in successive rounds to get a lock on the fast light Clan Mech circling it and was left out manoeuvred and out classed by a mech a third its weight. An apt lesson in the dangers of leaving your big heavy weights isolated and at the mercy of agile foes. One of it's few successes was in shooting the light mech in the face with its "ass gun" which in the words of the IS team was not so much an actual hurt as a hurt to ones pride - no one likes taking a shot in the face from an ass gun.

As time wore on and everyone decided to call it a day, a final effort by the IS team to nail down the annoying mech chewing on the ass of the Battlemaster failed, and Joe wading hip deep through a lake decided to unleash hell, fire off every weapon on his Blackhawk, and proceeded to sear through arms, legs, and torso of a nearby IS mech, literally melting one side of it down to scrap in a single turn. Second Blood - mech down !

The game ended, the clan mechs with an array of damage, but nothing too alarming, and the IS mechs, two down, and others battered. A victory for the Clans. Good stuff. Richard IV came over to watch the last part of the session - just as the Warhammer lost its head -  and declared it a great spectator game.

Enough of stupid robots. What else was going on in the more traditional modern board gaming haven of the Mash Tun ?

The charming kickstarter Cauldron.

Elliot had just received a kickstarter goodie in the form of Cauldron, and set about giving the game it's inaugural playthrough in a group of five. It looks like a cool game, one I entirely missed seeing on Kickstarter, although Elliot implied that it seemed to be a little slow to get going as there was much effort, but little scoring. The game is certainly very nicely presented, and it's theme seems strong. Looks like a fairly simple gather resources and spend affair, but sometimes simplicity makes for a great game. I definitely want to give this one a go.

Downstairs on the long tables we had not one, but two groups of Dead of Winter, with at least one group ending in a win for the survivors as American James failed to sink the colony as a traitor, and could only stand back and somehow unwittingly aid the camp in surviving the zombie apocalypse.

Dead of Winter. No Sparky ? Pfft. For shame !

You can't trust James in a game of One Night Werewolf - he's usually a play acting Tanner - but it seems regardless of role you can actually trust him in Dead of Winter. I was nice and kept helping them along he confessed in a confused tone.

Hal brought along the rather fetching Inkognito once again - it's been quite a while, and got a returned Mr Bond to join in and ponder whether he was in fact Lord Fiddlebottom.

Could I be Lord Fiddlebottom? Playing Inkognito. pic.twitter.com/yFbeEZeQmK

— Norwich Board Gamers (@NoBoG) October 20, 2015

A ponder about whether he was a general Lord Fiddlebottom, or whether he was Lord Fiddlebottom in the context of the game remains unclear. It seems wise then given such lack of clarity that it is best to avoid having Mr Bond stand behind you whilst for instance waiting in a queue - better safe than sorry. We'll have no Lord Fiddlebottoming here !

The visually intriguing and mentally deductive Inkognito

After that, in an alarming sign of game breeding, TWO games of the fox game that is actually a cat game were played simultaneously, no doubt the nefarious work of having Tom and Stu split onto different tables to spread their foxy catty card game ways to the masses. And yet still I can't remember the name of it. Lukando. Lukado. Or something. FOXCAT game. Whatever. We once again agreed to disagree whether the game was about foxes or cats, but could entirely agree that it was a game about something that liked lurking around your garden at night. Reassuring ? Not really. Putting it that way it now seems like a game about stalkers....

A very full Machi Koro setup

Mark and Maya also returned to the Tun for some gaming, with the ever delightful Machi Koro, the game of simple sim city-esque synergy building. If you haven't played Machi Koro then you should - it's a great little Euro game with bundles of character and a nice laid back no hassles no high stress optimisations required kind of game. A bit like if Agricola was actually fun to play instead of being some stressy angst filled journey of feeding your family and deciding when and how to expand. I love Agric. But then again I also love dark miserable things. And Agric, if you squint, could be some bleak Ingmar Bergman film about the pointlessness of existence and the struggles of life on a - swedish - farm. Machi Koro is the opposite of that. Like if Disney remade the Seventh Seal. You just know that Death would end up breaking into a cute song and dance routine - probably revolving around how much he liked Chess*. But I digress. Machi Koro. Play it. It's cool.

Lewis and Clark go exploring.

What else. Lewis and Clark was in the house. Monika wanted a go of this, and David obliged, always happy to get his Lewis and Clark exploring on the go. No idea how that panned out. We also had some Suburbia, some Avalon Resistancing and some Divinaring plus Kingsburg and Ticket to Ride !

Last but not least, Pete brought along the wildly extravagant, debatably unnecessary and visually unbelievable Cthulu Wars. Cthulu Wars is something of a famous, or perhaps infamous game for many reasons. One is its cost. It costs a fortune. Relatively speaking. There are some small countries in the world that have gone to war, sued for peace, and made war reparation payments and still haven't gone to the expense of the cost of Cthulu Wars. Secondly, and no doubt related, is the nature of some of the miniatures in the game. To say that they are large is like saying that the universe is "quite big". Indeed if you didn't know better and happened to walk past the game, you might be forgiven for thinking it was not some miniature game, but instead some bizarre childs play set, albeit one that had far too many tentacles, gnashing teeth and questionable orifices. Fisher Price My First Cthulu Playset. The third thing Cthulu Wars is famous for is its ridiculous premise. Cthulu. Wars. It's like some mad marketing group think session where they slam some popular things together in the hope that it will be randomly popular and sell like hotcakes based on some ridiculous search engine zeitgeist. Like. Ferrari doughnuts. Or possibly. Steampunk Dogs ( actually, that's kind of good... goddammit, maybe they have something after all ).

The mighty Cthulu Wars !!

But is the game any good ? That's the question. Or indeed, does it even have to try to be any good having transcended such silly things as game mechanics and entered in a Plan 9 From Outer Space zone where it could be so bad, it's actually good. You can hide a lot of problems in a game by giving it 9 inch high Cthulu "miniatures". I use the word miniature tentatively there. They are anything but miniature.

Well the good news is that the game is pretty good. At least that's the feedback that Rich IV gave, and Pete was also pleased with the evenings game session. Richard explained it as somewhere between Risk and Chaos in the Old World. With some weird ass power shenanigans going on. Such as. Having to decide in one minute what power penalties everyone would take, otherwise Pete got to take all the power. So. Some weird ass kitchen sink mechanics thrown into the game. And it has a mild case of slippery slope runaway mechanisms. But we can probably forgive it that. A lot of classics do that too.

The mind boggles all in all. But this game, Cthulu Wars, demands to be played. It cannot be ignored. It is the superlative of over produced miniature games. A touchstone, an icon, an event all in its own right. At the very least, when someone starts talking about, have you seen that ridiculous game with the enormous miniatures you can say, seen it, I've played it ! And bask in the awe of your gaming peers.

With a bit of luck I'll get to have a go of Cthulu Wars next week. I'm pretty sure my painting nervous tick will start to twitch, and I'll surreptitiously look at how you could lovingly paint the wee beasties up.

Right. Enough of my blathering. Off with you. Go do something productive. Or look at the very short gallery first, then go do something productive.

Ticket to Ride. Samantha was very pleased with herself and her green train domination.

Kingsburg !

Suburbia, and some pretty hefty water development. A good few water goals on offer.

* Apologies if you a) don't know who Ingmar Bergman is or b) know what the hell the Seventh Seal is. The imagery in that case made no sense whatsoever. Suffice to say then that Ingmar Bergman was a Swedish film director that made lots of films about being miserable. Or more precisely, being miserable in Sweden. And ended up being quite famous for being a miserable bastard**. And the iconic bit of Death playing a game of chess originally comes from the Seventh Seal. You can imagine Disney completely dropping the misery and gloom of that film and replacing it with some snappy Tim Rice song and dance number. Chess, chess, ooh, I love it *jazz hands*, I can't wait, to make the final move, the killing blow, ooh ooh, *flourishing dance kick*. Uh huh. Hopefully never coming to a cinema near you. Unless you subscribe to the infinite realities quantum tosh, in which case, somewhere out there, in the infinite reaches of the multiverse, someone is eating popcorn and watching death do a song and dance number about chess. Gah !

** Don't get me wrong. I highly rate Ingmar Bergman. And Seventh Seal is one of my top ten favourite films.