In Which Cakes were Consumed

HEEYYYYOOOOOOOO it's NoBloG time! I'm afraid it's going to be another weedy one, but I swear it's not my fault. It's all Hannah and Lewis' fault for getting me to play Epic Spell Wars, from which I couldn't escape. It's not me, it's them! Oh well, I'm sure you'll cope. So the two tables I got to were playing Lords of Waterdeep and Orléans.

But before we come to that I must, in a minor plot-twist, forgive Hannah for her part in distracting me from my interrogations interviews, because she brought us DELICIOUS CAKE that wasn't even a lie. Not just any cakes — dice cakes! Like rice cakes except they taste of something. Thanks Hannah! We can definitely tolerate more.

See how delicious and moist it looks

Going quickly

Die close-up

But that's enough of my uncharacteristically forgiving streak — now to the Loire Valley and Orléans! Guillaume was subjecting people to the very lovely but fairly complicated romp through the French countryside. At the time I came in for a snoop-about, monks were being taken (it's always the celibate ones that enjoy that kind of thing, is it not?) and books were being bought. But what exactly is the point of taking books and buying monks? Or, err, whichever.

Orléans is not a simple game, nor a small game!

In medieval France, everyone wants food and books and stuff, but everyone needs lackeys to help them acquire them. You start out with a few such misbegottens, but must place them (it feels a bit worker-placer-y but you can't block other people's actions) on your board to acquire more minions and do everything else that gets you points. There's a hierarchy of sorts in that the second tier of workers, like lords, who unlock further classes like knights and so on, and a pool-building/management aspect as you only get to draw a selection of your guys each turn, and you can banish your unwanted farmers to the town council, giving you some points in return for losing your pair of hands. You can purchase buildings that give you extra actions, make others easier and give you various bonuses, and you can acquire "technology" which means you require fewer workers to perform a given action. In the end you hope to get a nice little engine going and run away with all the point-giving items. Don't be tardy though, because there are hefty bonuses for advancing up some tracks quickly. To answer the original question, then, monks are some kind of supreme worker being, able to perform any task, and books are one of the several things that gets you points.

Guillaume is sending people away. Poor people.

So how was it all going down this Tuesday? Well, at the time I peeked in, it was still early stages: not much of the goods available on the map of the countryside had been snapped up, and the players were mainly acquiring more guys and building up to rake in the points later. Mike was finding it all a bit bewildering, this being only his second time at NoBoG! Pretty crunchy stuff for a newcomer. But he was enjoying jumping in at the deep end, so hopefully we'll be seeing him + company (whose name I confess to not writing down) again soon. In the end he decided to go to the village in order to take a cratsman and a technology token. Seeing the game played reminded me that I still need to have another go and hopefully do better now I have some kind of idea of how it works. Though I fear I am still just rubbish at engine-builders and might fail once more, but we shall see!

Mike has already got some tech and is getting more!

Next up, to a soggy dominion whose rulers are the Lords of Waterdeep (with the Scoundrels of Skullport expansion — all sounds a bit grim if you ask me.) The first thing that occurred on my arrival was that I received a thorough admonishment for never having played it — OK, OK, I'm sorry, alright! My own deficiencies notwithstanding, I will give you a brief rundown of the principles just in case you the reader, like me the author, have never played this perennial of NoBoG.

Elliot makes some kind of move
in Lords of Waterdeep

The rudiments are that it's a worker placement game in which you have to perform actions first to obtain resources and then to complete quests from the available pool — doing so requires both the resources and placing a worker in the right spot. A player who completes a quest swipes the card representing it, so you can snipe them if someone else would benefit too greatly. New actions can be opened up by purchasing buildings — after which players have to pay Elliot the owner (which in this case was... pretty much always Elliot) of the building for the privilege of using them. Skullport introduces the corruption resource which you want to get rid of as it counts negative at the end. Once the game does end, you get bonus points for various things like which kinds of quests you've completed based on which Lord you are.

Action shot. With beer.

So as I arrived (after being roundly told off for not having played) I asked-him-knowingly if Elliot was trouncing everyone, but apparently it was pretty close. The game was in its final round or two, and eyebrows were waggled as John gains a last minute point in this, his first time playing. Tabby meanwhile is feeling actual, physical pain at other people's slowness, manifested in ululating vocalisations when David finally plumps for a move which nets him a massive 40 points, this presumably being obvious enough to do immediately. David maintains an air of mystery about what he might otherwise have done, and unfortunately I never find out what it might have been. Victor does something but I fail to catch what it is because we're too busy discussing how to spell his name (it does not have a "k", we determine.) Tabby (or "Muggins" as she dubs herself) feels that everyone has been dicking on her in a blatant display of sexism as she is not doing so well, and is simultaneously the only lady at a table occupied otherwise by what might be described, if viewed in a good light, as gentlemen. Plus Elliot. Jamie tosses aside the accusation with a laugh, but it is perhaps mere bravado in anticipation of some kind of lawsuit, while Tabby describes what she would write in the blog at this juncture as "it will just say 'fuck all of you' over and over in all different languages!" While I can't comment on whether such ire was deserved (having observed only a tiny sliver of the game) I do revel in other people's suffering and anger. John took what I believe was his final move and divested himself of some corruption (presumably acquired as a consequence of all that dicking... shudder) and I was whisked away to duel with wizards. Only later did I discover that Elliot, playing coy all along, actually had the Lord which received bonus points for each building, and so thoroughly cleaned up when the points were eventually tallied.

See that swathe of buildings on the right of the board?
All Elliot's.

And what of my own game, Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards? Well if I tell you that each round can take quite a while (in no small part due to my own inability to make decisions, though this did improve somewhat as the game went on) due to the winner needing to eliminate all other players twice (and thereafter being a little weaker and a much larger target) you can imagine that LONG might well be the, erm, short answer. Each turn every player assembles a spell using (ideally) one of each card category (Source, Quality and Delivery or beginning, middle and end.) After working out who goes first using a couple of rules to determine priority, you read each component in turn to deal damage to your fellow battle wizards (more like warlocks I'm sure you'll agree! Hhhehehe.) There are also various other effects, like healing, giving you bonus cards, adding more cards to the spell and so on. You have to pick carefully because certain effects can be much more powerful if you add more of certain types of cards to the spell.

Zanzabeast has not much blood, but
even more worrying is his lack of health.
You'd thing the two would be one and the same...

The whole game is decked in a colourful and extremely silly skin, so you tend to be throwing spells out that might be called, "Haggatha the Heffer's Motherforking Testi-kill." (The terrible things they're doing with genetically modified cattle nowadays...) You're encouraged to yell your spell names aloud, especially if you include the "Wild Magic" wildcard, which draws from the deck until you find a suitable one to slot in, which all adds to the overall ridiculousness. Spell effects can be a bit random — the more powerful ones rely on dice rolls, and the order of execution means your target may end up different to what you anticipated so you can't get too tactical. The game also suffers by having a lot of cards and some mechanics which only show up on a few cards. Thus it's all very well acquiring "blood" from a spell, but you may then literally never get another card which allows you to use it. This mechanic and some similar ones come from version 2 of the game, so I do wonder if this is a symptom of playing the combined version which mixes in a whole load of cards from before "blood" was a concept (a game-concept, that is, it already existed as, you know, life-giving liquid.)

Hannah's array of treasure (bonus ability) cards

In the end we agreed to end the game early as time was running out — in the last round we decided that either someone would win for the second time (thus winning outright) or there would only be one person who hadn't won a single round, who would be "crowned" the loser. So, ALL HAIL JD, KING OF THE LOSERS! In the end it would have been far more fun if it had just lasted an hour, but the game is a bit stuck because it's trying to come up with a way to have it be a fight to the death without kicking dead players out until the end of the game.

And that's it. Hopefully one of these days I'll get around the pub properly, more thoroughly quenching the thirst I know you all have for more gaming session writeups. But until then, good byyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

In which NoBoG nicknames get a little more ridiculous.

Happy Lententide, board gamers! What awaits us in this divulsion of board-based diversions? I'll tell you what: a veritable trove of tabletop treats. And speaking of treats, Lewis gave me a rolled up chocolate crepe thingy to celebrate pancake day. What a time to be alive! And what a time to be attending NoBoG! I was tardy to the Tun — not, this time, because of any pancake-related procrastination but due to the rather mundane delay involved in waiting in a queue to get cash, and then typing my PIN in wrong. I'm not good with numbers, OK?! But this was not enough to stop me getting in on a game — oh no! — I arrived to the main room, pint in hand (I had to put that cash to good use, after all) and immediately bagsied a spot in Dicenstein. I then discovered that all the spots had been bagsied already so I sort of dithered a bit, but then two other people un-bagsied their places and the resulting polite-off culminated in my playing it. But more on that later — read on to find out to what everyone else was getting up.

 

My first excursion was to a game I can't think of a decent pun for because it's called bloody Tash Kalar which just doesn't lend itself to jokes in the English language. All I've got is something weak to do with moustaches, so leave your suggestions in the comments. Anyway, my first impression of this game was that it looked pretty complicated. This was confirmed by Sam whose first words to me were "I'm enjoying it but it's fucking hard." The basic gameplay consists of what he described as "combat Othello" — placing tokens in certain patterns which allow you to activate cards, each of which requires a certain pattern of tokens, summons something special and potentially has some special effects. The more powerful the effect and summon, the more complicated the pattern is that you need to have already. Sam wasn't feeling to confident about the game because Alex already had a fire elemental out which had wiped out a whole bunch of stuff all at once — the potential for chaining things together and wreaking destruction seems quite high.

A rather unclear shot of Tash Kalar. In the
middle is the grid on which you put your tokens.

I checked back just after the game had ended and now Sam was rather enamoured with it as "it went brilliantly because I fucking won!" Monika accidentally took victory from the other two players and handed it to Sam. They both insist that she would never do anything nice to Sam on purpose so this was not a deliberate coronation, but kingmaking is obviously a possibility. It seems like it could be a bit of a mind-bender — "You feel you could do a lot better if you were a lot smarter because you have to think so many jumps ahead."
The game looked really interesting as well as the card designs being gorgeous and I'd quite like a go at some future NoBoG (hint!)

 

Next I was off to spectate a race where the prize is the whole galaxy! Quite high stakes. I've played a couple of times before but apparently I've forgotten all the symbology of it, which is (famously) intense. I should be ashamed of myself really — we mathematicians are supposed to be good at memorising and understanding crazy abstract symbols. The players had an embarrassing situation of their own though; Joe — a first timer! — looked set to win! "If he's developing, I'm definitely developing, said one nervous player.

It's a race! Newbie Joe is middle-left with
more developments than everyone else.

J-Dawg (the nickname has apparently stuck!) revealed "for the record" though, that "this is not the real game" and was just a practice. Why? "Because there are new players" — like Joe — who "might be accidentally succeeding." Well that's a new euphemism for beginner's luck! And a very cruel slander to someone who could already articulate a clear strategy of "build cards. Game." He did seem to have about ten times as many cards as any of the other players, which even I can remember is a good sign.

In front of the bar the mild week was nevertheless experiencing the Dead of Winter, a game which I still have not played (they tried to convince me this week, but I wanted something a bit more duck-outable.) They'd already experienced one unpleasant eventuality in which one character found insta-death on the exposure die which you have to roll when you go a-wandering. I unsubtly inquired about the existence of any early suspicions, and even though Meltem copped to "always having a suspicious face" they weren't ready to properly finger anyone and thought there might not be one.

Dead of Winter set-up.

Having still not played this perennial favourite I asked for a quick run-down of the gameplay. Apparently the long and short of it is: feed the colony, search piles of equipment, avert crises, do/fail the main objective (delete as applicable depending on whether you're a baddie) and do your secret objective (or skip this part if you're Matt, according to post-game facebookery!) The end — simple! Given the quantity of bits I suspect it's a bit more complicated. The moral dilemma of what to do with the survivor tokens, which represent food consuming babies and old people, had not been resolved — and apparently my suggestion of just letting them die/turning them into Soylent Green was no good as you'd lose morale and then everyone gets sad and you lose. Bleak.

Serried ranks of soldiers in Dead of Winter.

On my return the game was getting close to completion and the survivors were worried about not having enough tool cards to complete the objective. Recent turns had been fairly quiet due to not moving much (staying holed up is safer of course, just sitting in front of your fire fueled by zombie-parts and doing some knitting I guess) but Meltem was still suspecting Adam of being a traitor ("because nine times out of ten he's a traitor!") Unfortunately I didn't catch the very end of the game so I may never know what befell the four!

Things hot up (cool down?) in Dead of Winter

 

At this point I interrupt your regular programming to relate a tale from the Epic Spell Wars table wherein Hannah loudly lamented that, "he had three wild magic and I killed him before he had to use them! I'm so terrible!" For those not in the know such a card requires you to shout "WILD MAGIC!" whenever you activate a spell with them, hence being seen as something of a forfeit. We share your sorrow, Hannah. Though to be fair there was quite a lot of extremely wild magic being flung back and forth!

 

So, to return to the regular schedule, I went exploring! Specifically I explored the little alcove where they were exploring early 19th century America just like Lewis and Clark. In Lewis and Clark you are trying to get from one side of the continent to the other first by river, then over land, then by river then land then river. (If I have correctly remembered the precise sequence of river/land which I may not have...) You do this by acquiring lots of little hexagons. (Actually hexagonal prisms...) Effectively it's a "really complicated race" in which the hexagons represent canoes, horses, logs, meat, tools and skins. They're not really called skins, but these particular players want to sell four of them at once. hehe. The player possessing Lewis from the start was a bit miffed that this didn't confer any advantage, but when I asked what it should give you, he said it should make you automatically win, so I'm not sure he can be trusted to devise balanced house rules. You also have Indians whom you can hire to help you, but they slow you down because when you break camp to actually do some movement, the more Indians the less you move.

Hexagons! More than four skins!

The fundamental means of making progress is paying resources in order to use cards, to do which you actually have to play two cards together — each in a different role, so you have to choose which of the card's sides is best to use. Tim, whom I am now required to quote as Timbelina, said the game was "a bit brain melting" and this effect seemed to already be underway as he was already talking to himself, asking why he was only playing a one-power card when he had something that needed more power! Goey Joey (what have I got myself into with these nicknames, seriously?!) was the only one who'd ever played before but wasn't exactly racing ahead as when I looked in for a second time they were all stuck on the mountains. The reason for this is that you tend to grab a load of stuff which is useful for progressing through the river and have a bunch left over when you get to the end of the river section, but it is apparently avoidable if you plan ahead well.

Trying not to let his mind melt onto his hand
and ruin the cards.

I wound my way back around the tables to find a heavenly game of Celestia in the offing. A quite unbelievably cute airship is captained by a new player each turn who may or may not be able to pilot it from its current station to the next one. If you think the captain is capable (which is to say, possesses the right resource cards), you stay aboard in the hope of a far-off land flowing with milk and honey (note: not actually sure what the resources you pick up are; probably not milk or honey.) If successful, you, the captain and the other True Believers move on and the captaincy moves to the next person. But if you are too trusting in your pitiful pilot, you go crashing down with the ship and get nothing, and the ship returns to the start. You do always have the option, though, of expressing your lack of confidence in the captain by simply disembarking. You then get whatever meagre rewards await where you are, which are of course not as delicious as those at loftier destinations. It seemed a neat, simple concept with lovely pieces and cards.

SO CUTE! LOOK AT IT!!

Trying to decide whether to trust the captain.

And that brings me roundly back to the spooky graveyard of malformed cuboids forming the Dicenstein! Now an iniquitous past in Warhammer has given me a love of games with ten trillion dice which is exactly what Dicenstein is. Though as I will explain, there are some missed tricks here, but all those dice, each having little pictures and weird symbols printed on them, make a cool first impression. The figurines, too, are quite nice, though the size seems a bit off — they don't stand up well and laying them down doesn't work well with all the dice that clutter the board at the beginning.

My goodness, that's a lot of dice! Note fallen-over
Dracula-figurine, because trying to keep them
stood up was just too much effort.

The aim of the game is to accrue points by digging up graves containing monster parts (represented by dice) and either cashing them in or using them to create your own, better monster and battering the other beasts with it. You start out as a craven hunchback which will automatically melt into nothingness after three turns, but when you melt, die by being clawed to death by a mantis-creature or return to your lab, your monster disintegrates and you reform it by rolling all your acquired dice and selecting four (one head, one body, one each of arms and legs.) Each die has stats that you add together to make your terrifying hybrid beast of brutality, and then you venture out again. Each type of dice also confers a unique power on your new monster, like being able to move diagonally or to re-roll some of your opponents' attack dice. Before you do this you have the option to return a set of dice — but you have to balance getting cash with having enough dice left to make a good monster.

Lewis tries to serenade a swarmling.
I don't think it's working.

Our game proceeded in two clear phases: in the first, two of us made monsters with huge amounts of "dig" stat which essentially cleared the board of dice. Then we focused on making the most horrifying and deadly mutants of mayhem and went on to clobber each other to death as violently as we could while trying to sneak back to our labs before dying ourselves, in order to regain health and cash in dice.

I acquired quite a lot more dice than this over
the course of the game: you can see why it got
hard to roll them all at once!

So how was it? The game is fundamentally fun but pretty limited. There are clearly quite a few different tactics to explore given the many different powers and stats, but I suspect the majority are dead ends. A simple example is that the dig stat is totally useless once most dice have been dug up. The clown parts seem to have poor stats and a weak special power. If you have a gargoyle part you essentially no longer need to care about your speed because the arena is so tiny (just 4 by 4 squares) that, coupled with the diagonal movement from the gargoyle, you can move anywhere in one turn (and often you can move back in the same turn.) The game might have gone differently if anyone had tried to interrupt the shambling mole-creatures which just dug up the entire graveyard stuffing the invisible man's limbs (how do you see them once you dig them up?!) into their hamster-like cheek-pouches, though in the end this didn't make or break the game. Nevertheless clearing the board of dice severely limited my opponents' options and if I hadn't made a couple of tactical blunders (including forgetting one of my special powers which could have allowed me an extra go at scoring some dice) I suspect it would have got me a win.

Once mostly cleared of dice, the pokey size of
the 4x4 game-board is revealed.

My main gripe though is with the dice — for starters you just don't spend enough time rolling them! This surely is the most satisfying part of any dice-rolling game but you only do it when re-forming your monster. They also have tiny symbols and are often hard to differentiate from one another, which you need to do to work out which special power they confer. This means you spend a lot of time sorting and hunting through the dice to work out which of yours you want to put in your creation and which of those on the board are best to snatch up. Though it's undoubtedly cool to form your monster out of the dice, it would perhaps also do more justice to the promise of a name like "Dicenstein" if you could acquire a bunch of dice in different stats which you then had to roll to perform each action. The fact that you can only form your monster out of four dice also seems a bit underwhelming. Imagine if you could create arbitrarily large monsters by laying out dice according to certain rules, but then had to decide when to start dismantling it in order to cash in the points, while still not becoming too much weaker than everybody else so as to avoid becoming fish-man food.
Still, for this first game it was definitely enjoyable — perhaps could have done with some refinement to the mechanics, but we suffered no terrible frustrations. So hurrah! John won, and then only bloody won Port Royal too, continuing a winning streak he said stretched into last week! So your task for next week, NoBoGgers, is clearly to beat him at any game you can. Not that I'm bitter for coming two points behind him in Dicenstein and three in Port Royal. Shush!

Lewis selects from some pirate ships and shipmates
in a final quick round of Port Royal.

In YOUR endo, or, NoBoG shows its true colours (and they are puerile)

Hello, good evening and welcome! Welcome to another exciting instalment of the inimitable NoBloG! Tonight we have a delightful tale of success and failure, tears and laughter, life and, indeed, death. The Mash Tun was pretty full this Tuesday with a lot of games played. Unfortunately my choice of simultaneous-turn fun meant that I couldn't get around all of them, but I can at least relate some of what occurred in the games of Tokaido, Epic Spell Wars, Terra Mystica, Wrath of Asharglon, Small World and the games I played, Seven Wonders and The Bloody Inn.

So let me first take you on a peaceful and spiritually enriching journey through the world of Tokaido, Japan. I'd read about this on the Intertubes and thought that the principle sounded engaging, so I was intrigued to see how it played out in reality. When I arrived, James was in the lead - rather poor but nevertheless chilled out due to having taken a trip to the hot baths.

Tokaido

One thing that stands out about the game to anyone who's seen it is just how pretty it is. In fact it's not merely pretty but "prettyyy" according to the players, though we agreed it would be better with some Japanese music and sushi. As for the actual mechanics, I was given a quick run-down: you have to match up picture cards to make pleasant scenes, visit hot springs, give donations to temples and have encounters. The board itself tracks the players' progress forward. Jen had left a crap-ton of money at the temple and so was also feeling a little light of purse.

The Travellers of Tokaido on
their journey.

The players were having fun and, if I recall correctly, James won in spite of barely doing due diligence by the Gods. And it certainly presents a delightfully different theme than the majority of games we play - there's no conquest, war or death, just your travel and competition to have the best journey you can. I hope to get a play in soon!

Next I took a gander at another game of Epic Spell Wars. I didn't stay for long because the players appeared to be taking the game a little too much to heart - when I complained of poor light, they seemed to think their phones were magic wands and solemnly intoned, "Lumos," while turning the flashes on. I was edging away slowly as they complained about the massive fourteen damage that was flying around, at which point my shuffling turned into a run before I was targeted by the next spell.

"Lumos!"

I shuffled/charged full tilt right into a game of Terra Mystica. When I asked how everything was going, Gareth declared himself to be winning, but conceded that this was likely only briefly, whilst Jacob, who asked specifically to be described as "J-Dawg" (and definitely did not retract this request once he realised that his nom du jeu would be being broadcast to the World Wide Weblog...) described himself as "steaming ahead." I believe already by this point, Gareth was no longer in the lead.

Terra Mystica, nearly finished

The table, which I believe included new players, described it as fairly intuitive once you've played a few rounds, though some people do find being dicked over less fun. When pushed further it was revealed that J-Dawg was indeed one of those likely to be doing the dicking, which perhaps contributed to some animosity towards him, though he put this down to him simply being "too fun." "Oh, fuck you!" says Sinead as, presumably some of the "fun" heads her way.

Making my way onwards lest I also get fun aimed at me, I dropped in on the company battling against the Wrath of Asharglon. This is a board game based on D&D and designed to be played in a single evening. The rules are heavily D&D inspired, so you have abilities and spells you can use once per day, classes, races and so on all from that not-at-all-complicated ruleset. But from what I saw and what I guess, there's far less complexity to deal with in the board game.

Wrath of Asharglon

What it does have in abundance is lots of wonderful and threatening minifigures, replete with tentacles and weapons and limbs and goodness knows what else. When I rocked up the titular Asharglon had already been dispatched (I presume it made a noise like "AshaaRRGHHLGL-gone!") but some other unspeakable horror had already appeared, spawned from some portal into the plane of unspeakable horrors or whatever. In any case, the adventurers set out to try and destroy the portal, but ended up getting stunlocked by all the other beasties that had arrived. Two other monsters were off having a pleasant romp around the dungeon and, each time they explored a new room, found a new monster to join the party.

Kill the beastie!

The game is completely cooperative, with each monster being rolled for and "looked after" by the player on whose turn it spawned - with the exception of boss monsters, which get to have a turn on every adventurer's turn because they're so big and mean. "Who needs helping?" asks one player - in that cooperative spirit - "well, the dead person" comes the rather startling reply.

Tentaclesssss

Leaving the dead person to have either a funeral or resurrection party, I continued to the diminutive Small World. I apologise for the next joke, and request that children avert their eyes. In this game of Smallworld, Rod was "coming up your rear end." I swear Rod is the name of a player, though it sounds like the kind of name you might adopt if you wanted to star in an adult movie. I just hope I don't meet Rod on my way home up St Gregory's Back Alley.

Small world. No rear ends pictured.

Children may resume reading now. This was actually the first time the players had played Small World, and though they all had lots of details to learn they reckoned they'd got the rules down in about twenty minutes. From then on it's an area control and conquest-fest, where each race and area has different bonuses or, as it was described to me, "because it's a thingy I can travel from tunnel to tunnel." I'd write a joke right now, but I just don't think anything I write can do justice to the source material.

Well, one cold shower later and I'm ready to describe my two games of the evening, the first being Seven Wonders which is, appropriately, a wonderful game. Things got off to a peaceful start, with John a) swearing he'd never won agame of Seven Wonders before and b) that he was going to peacefully pursue scientific discovery and eschew the militaristic ambitions of his neighbours.

Age 2 is underway in Seven Wonders.
We don't yet realise John's treachery.

Of course veteran Seven Wonders players know how that goes, and John ended up building (what we veterans know as) "a shit-ton" of military. His policy of building walls followed by fortifications on top of the walls was remarkably current for a game set a few millenia ago, but thankfully there is no mechanic in Seven Wonders by which you can force your neighbour to pay for your projects, so it never got too topical. Colin, who was new to the game ended up with a very respectable score in a closely fought game of tableau tribulations which saw the sneaky John come in and sweep away with victory. I suspect John's policy of buying drinks for his fellow players is a cunning ploy to addle our abilities that on this occasion worked out perfectly.

Seven Wonders nears its conclusion

A fat stack of points

Time to add up the points!

Our gang's second game, after John left drunk on victory, was a stay at The Bloody Inn. This is a delightfully bloodthirsty game which has put me off French taverns for life, as the premise sees you and your partners in crime compete to see who can murder the most and richest guests at your inn. You get cash by successfully murdering and then burying travellers, but if you fail to get them safely inhumed when the police are staying you'll find yourself short a significant chunk of change as you have to get the town gravedigger to do a rush job on the sly.

The peasants at the Bloody Inn
look a bit constipated.

Tension is provided as you are all trying to murder the same pool of people and, when the fuzz are in, perhaps relying on them to help remove (murder) the heat. Come to think of it, it's a good thing John the copper didn't stick around as we were all taking a rather cavalier attitude to the law, to say nothing of our downright dangerous interactions with its officers, which saw piles of them interred in various buildings. The travellers range from the dour baron to the stuffy Representative, looking a little like a portrait of Francis Bacon, to the waifish News boy. "I'd love to have a news boy," said Colin, much to our consternation, after David snapped him up.

The "annexes" where I can bury
bodies, of which you can see three.

Each traveller has a cost which must be paid by discarding travellers you've already bribed: this cost is the same whether you're bribing, killing, burying or using their special ability, so you also have to enlist the help of peasants and other people who are free to hire to work your way up to the bigger and better targets. If you bribe someone you are, having already invested hard earned cash in them, not allowed to off them, but aside from using them to help commit your cursed crimes you can get them to build you something which will provide a place to house the recently-deceased (should such an unfortunate need arise) as well as an ongoing bonus. The winner is whoever has earnt the most money at the end of the game.
Unfortunately I built too much and killed too little, and ended up in last place. Nevertheless it was only by a whisker, with Colin and David edging ahead on the back of the fat stacks of francs they had stashed away. It was a fun if funereal game with lovely, whimsical artwork.

And that's everything! Well, everything which entered my consciousness (which is everything that matters to me) so sorry if I didn't get round to your table to cover your convivialities. Unfortunately the task-master of simultaneous decision making, as well as John's military aggression, kept me tied to the table.

Blood and Cocaine, or, A Regular Night at the Mash Tun

Hello, good evening and welcome to another exciting episode of the NoBloG: the show where, well, I wrote about what happened at NoBoG. I guess you could have anticipated that since you are, after all, at the NoBoG BloG. No BloGs BloG just as much BoG as a NoBloG BloGgeD if a No GoB GloG BloB GllNlooGlBGolGNGGolGNlBlo.. Ahem. So what happened this Tuesday? It was a reasonably busy night with a good variety of games on the go: read on to find out!

The first game I observed, and one which continued for quite a while, too, was Epic Spell Wars. I didn't find out too much about this game though I gather it involves a lot of blood. Indeed, the players seemed almost obsessed by the collection and disbursement of haemoglobin—perhaps Epic Vampire Wars is the alternative title? Blood was found to be a hydrating resource and was thought to be imbibed in the form of a cocktail.

Owen plans a spell. But how is his perfusion?
And O₂ sats? No, this is NoBoG, not Casualty.

A little while in and Sean was getting a bit disheartened and seemed to be close to being effectively out of the game—I guess it has issues with effective elimination. Meanwhile Owen, ever the blood-lusty, had what I considered to be a fairly respectable 7 blood although he characterised it as merely average. A round or two later and he was clearly in contention for the win, so it evidently wasn't too shabby a result. I'd be happy to have that much blood to be honest, I think these days I only have about three—and that's after a rare steak.

Blood changes hands. Or veins. Maybe hand-veins.

My next trip around the tables took me to an entirely foreign city, or at least its suburbs in Suburbia. Various strategies had taken form in the management of these microcosms of circum-metropolitan life. Take for instance the "poison lake" strategy which started with a lake by a factory and, when I returned, had taken an extreme turn with the addition of a landfill and an airport. Perhaps the fluorescent mutated fish make good eating—I'm not sure. The lake-poisoner was not too confident about his secret goals requiring requiring the highest reputation but lowest income—tricky but not impossible to accomplish. Andy, meanwhile, was a newcomer to the game and had no strategy at all. In true NoBoG style, however, he remained hopeful for the win. Strategy is overrated anyway. That's what I always tell myself when I don't have one. I checked on them later and Andy's borough was rather nicely zoned so he seemed to be getting the hang of things.

Mmm-mm! Delicious effluent.

In for a penny, in for a pound:
choke the lakes with toxic waste!

I was very interested to stop by the table where they were playing T.I.M.E. Stories. The game takes place over multiple play-throughs, the idea being that the first play-through you may fail horribly and die, but in doing so you uncover some information which you retain for the next one, meaning you can progress more quickly and without dying so horribly.

Monika sets up T.I.M.E. Stories.

Dying horribly is par for the course, as the time-traveller dudes you play as are actually possessing the minds of the patients of a mental asylum and are surrounded by (indeed they are themselves) the dangerously unhinged. Perhaps not too foreign a concept; Sam seemed to be enjoying his steak-eating cocaine-addict alter-ego a little too much. The aim of the game (while maintaining a sufficient supply of snow) is to prevent a temporal rift from occurring while avoiding being whallopped by monsters or loonies or whatever.

One should always take T.I.M.E. to read the rules carefully

The game certainly seems quite flavourful, though perhaps sometimes without commensurate gameplay effects for all that theme: when I arrived the players had just finished dancing at the behest of a tux-clad eccentric who was himself reacting to them having given him a plunger, but this was basically just flavour text, rather than having in-game ramifications. Still, you end up with a lot of humorous pronouncements and it's certainly not every game where you hear someone ask, "are we going to give the cocaine to the chef?"—"he'll probably just give us cat meat!" Sam the addict was less than keen to give up the coke but thankfully they ended up not having to and received their meat (which appeared to be beef, not cat) without sacrificing any of it. At some point during all of this cocaine-and-meat-fueled excitement he punched a Manticore to death.

The map changes as the game progresses.

The game also looked gorgeously designed with quality artwork and a butt-ton of little tokens. I discovered that the blue ones represented cocaine in this particular game, but that they could be different stuff depending on the scenario. I was told by someone who'd played a few times that the replayability could be a bit lacking because, once you'd done the first play-throughs and worked out what places were necessary to visit and which could be skipped entirely—even in a new game which didn't form part of the same campaign—it became a little trivial. Still, it seems that with the multiple play-through mechanic and a few different scenarios and characters to play, this is perhaps not a major issue.

The Adrenaline junkies were at it for the third week in a row. People were getting shot all over and trying to dodge out of the way wasn't helping too much. This week I learnt a little bit more about the game: when you shoot people you put damage tokens on their health bar which turn into points when they are eventually slain. Thus you don't need to actually get kills in order to gain points. Also when you die, you respawn and are not worth as many points any more, which sounds like a nice way to even things out and prevent anyone from being the punching-bag.

Lewis' Rainbow array of death is displayed top-left.

Passions were running high as Elliot exhorted another player to "blast that fucking shit right away", and Lewis had a veritable rainbow of different-coloured damage tokens, perhaps because his character's colour was itself grey. He claimed everyone else had started beating on him like paper Mario, but he won in the end regardless.

There was a rather toxic environment surrounding the table where Plague, Inc. had just been completed where three rather nasty-looking bacteria had just finished rampaging across the planet and killing most of its population. You don't have to be a bacterium—the base game allows you to play a virus and there is apparently the possibility of other pathogens with expansions/stretch goals. However, the pathogen you start as doesn't affect the game that much—it just gives you plus or minus a couple of stats which you can obtain or buff easily enough during the regular course of the game.
The objective is, as many of you will know or have worked out, to infect and kill as many people as possible. There's a bit of a snowball-effect as you buy traits with points you receive for achieving mass death—the traits being worth the same number of points as they cost at the end of the game. The game rapidly accelerates towards the end, as you need to acquire traits like heat resistance to infect certain countries—as you obtain them, the number of countries you can spread to increases rapidly.

The aftermath of three worldwide epidemics

Unlike in the board game Pandemic or in the computer variant (in the former you are trying to cure a disease, in the latter you are, as in Plague, Inc., playing as the disease) there is no force trying to come up with a cure or lock you out of certain countries. It's just you, your opponent lurgies and 7 billion innocent human beings.

Even the die looks pustulent!

Upstairs there was the vast game of Vast. Well it was a sort of normal-sized game really, but I've decided not to write a complaint to trading standards as it looked very interesting. The game is highly asymmetric: you play as very different roles with completely different rules, abilities and objectives. In this game we had the Dragon, the Knight and the Goblins. The Dragon is trying to wake up from its ancient slumber and escape the confines of the caverns—presumably to then wreak slaughter and misery o'er the land—the Knight is trying to slay the Dragon and the goblins are trying to gobble the Knight. I'm not sure who, if anyone, is trying to kill the goblins. Maybe they kill each other since there are multiple tribes—I can't imagine inter-tribal diplomacy is very amicable with goblins.

Look! Caverns!

The Dragon, in spite of being asleep, can still walk around, which I found very confusing. She must be sleepwalking. As the cavern is explored, tiles are placed surrounding the walkable areas with different tribes' symbols, representing where the respective tribes of goblins can spring from. The Dragon seemed to be suffering from a severe case of the lazybones and wasn't waking up any time soon in spite of the Knight exploding bits of the cave with bombs. The Knight then snuck through and wished to attack the Dragon, sending them scurrying for the rules to see if this was possible before she was awake. I can imagine that playing the game a second time as a different character might require completely re-learning it as the abilities are so different. I left the game as John declared that he needed "another three wotsits to wake up." I personally think Monster Munch would be better food for a dragon.

Awake dragon—so cute!

Then over in medieval England the townsfolk were building a cathedral that, rather self-importantly, was supposed to form the Pillars of the Earth. When I arrived the cathedral was looking a little post-modern in its architecture—on stilts "for flood avoidance" apparently—but it transpired that the game was already over and it had been rearranged that way from its more traditional style. Disappointingly, the rather cute wooden cathedral is just a marker to show the progression of the game—it would be cool if its stages tied in more with the actual events that unfold in the game. The game itself is a little engine-builder where you try to gain resources and produce things that will end up being useful to the building of the cathedral. So Ewan won by building pews. Now don't get me wrong—surely no cathedral would be complete without pews—but it strikes me that there are more critical things in a cathedrals fitting and building than the seats. Perhaps the walls might be more of a pressing matter, or the roof? Or even the stained glass? But it transpired that Ewan's tactics were as underhand as his benches were underbottom: he had a friend in the clergy who'd granted him extra favour in spite of his uncomfortable berths.

Unusual architecture: the cathedral
looks like some kind of gothic-revival sheep.

A wider view of the temple to the sheep-God

Last but not least I will indulge myself with a description of our game of Betrayal at the House on the Hill. I'd been trying to get a game of this for a few weeks, having played it a couple of times a year ago but not having done so since. The premise, for those not in the know, is that you are exploring a haunted house by stepping into empty spaces and placing down a tile, which may result in some kind of awful event transpiring, receiving an item or most spookily, receiving an Omen. These give you often-powerful abilities but progress the game towards the second phase in which one player becomes the traitor and attempts to murderise/eat/curse you all, according to a specific scenario drawn from a large book, providing a lot of replayability when paired with the many house tiles and items.
Poor Jen started the game unluckily by contracting a bad case of what we decided must be "haunted miner's lung" causing her to sustain physical damage every turn until she could find some fresh air. Fresh air was in rather short supply though, and we couldn't find the house's garden or balcony, for example, from which she could finally breathe easy. With her life force ebbing with every rattling breath, the House threw fresh terrors at us as haunted mist poured from the walls, we fell through rotten floors and acquired knives that attached via syringes to our very veins. And I found a teapot.

An explorer moves into a new room to, well, explore it.

The Haunt—the name of the second phase—was narrowly avoided when I foolhardily chose to draw an omen card—but the circumstances dictated a particular scenario which we couldn't do, so the rules told us to play on. Not long after though, it all got too much for the explorers and the Haunt was on. And it was Jen who, though now cured of her consumption was still rather at death's door, was the traitor. Though "traitor" is perhaps the wrong description; in fact it was the rest of us who were Haunting her! We were the ghostly denizens of the devilish dwelling, and, in a twist on the usual types of stories, Jen had to exorcise us. We could no longer actually be killed, but while we could sacrifice our sanity to move through walls, Jen could steal items from us and sacrifice them to destroy our tether to the house, freeing our spirits and herself.

Reading what has befallen the poor—and spectral—explorers
after the Haunt begins.

Unfortunately her efforts were in vain—her earlier run in with the choking dust of the old mansion leaving her weak, and no match for the—magically enhanced with a lucky feather—attack of us ghosts. "Welcome home! Welcome home!" we chanted to our new housemate, joining us for eternity.

"Welcome home!" The final mêlée is concluded outside the bathroom.

Though the game is always fun simply for the spooky stories, it does highlight a recurring problem: the first half of the game contains little to no player interaction, there being essentially no incentive to do anything but explore, unless you can help someone dying of TB or something (which we couldn't.) The second phase can then be over very quickly: just three people had turns from the haunt being declared to the game ending. It might make for some annoying rules, but it seems that if killing the traitor is all that's needed for the others to win, the rules should take account of the possibility that the traitor has only 2 HP remaining and is about to be attacked by 5 overly-friendly fae spirits.

So, kids, what have we learnt? I dunno, this was a night of board-gaming, not a school lesson. Get out of my house! Blood was stolen, cocaine was hoarded, ghosts were spooky, plagues were incorporated (into people's bloodstreams) and lakes were pumped full of toxic garbage. If that's not some kind of lesson, I don't know what is, though that doesn't mean I know what kind of lesson. See you next time!