Twofer

Two weeks blog for the price of one this week, you lucky lucky people.

Summer has truly arrived in Norwich - you can tell because for the last week or two it has pretty much rained every day. I feel nature is weighing heavily in on my side about the ongoing tosh of East Anglia being reputedly the driest place in the UK. Tell that to the fens !

Two weeks ago we had thirty people turn up, and first quickly subscribed to was the fancied Nations game making its first appearance at t'pub. Nations is an abstract civilization game where each player gets to lead their nation through the ages and attempt to score more victory points than everyone else. The game is pretty much entirely card based, with each player building their own area up by buying in new cards to give them certain capabilities - resource production, military strength etc.

Nations - Another Civ the computer game brought to table.

Unlike say Sid Meier's Civilization The Board Game, there is no map here, the topography and army mechanics are abstracted away into waging wars that require a certain level of military, and taking a limited amount of areas as colonial territories. In fact there is just a tiny pinch of Seven Wonders here, with the values of your military cards indicating how strong you are, and your resource production cards telling you just how much you can produce.

Overall the game is a pretty slick civ game without getting bogged down in map logistics, and instead focusing on building and planning efficiency. Like many civ games, it leans heavily on the Civilization computer games for inspiration, and there's even a cute difficulty factor ( Chieftain, Prince, King and Emperor - just to really hammer home the Civ game link ) that acts as a handicap level for each individual player.

If you like civ type games you need to check this out. Punk Rich was so impressed with this that he went out and bought it right after - always a good sign for a game.

Over on the next table Terra Mystica got a blast, and Tom managed to get his experienced hand into this amongst all the first timers.

Terra Mystica, Pip points at something, Phil glares at me.

Of course he romped to a win in this, being a fairly mean hand at the game and knowing just what to do when. Tom is keen on the game and has played it a fair few times, whilst I think it plays out pretty much the same way every time, Tom thinks its always different. For me, after a few games it's just a bit meh, a bit dry, a bit samey. It's a solid euro, and the asymmetrical races are nice ( although arguably unbalanced in some cases ), but eh, I don't feel it quite has enough going on to be a classic.

Elsewhere Lewis lead another long game of Kingsburg, rolled crap dice all evening, and began to see the flaws of a game that relies singularly on dice to power your decisions.

Kingsburg. Lewis has a sad & laments his inability to roll dice.

Of course, you win some, lose some when the Random Number Generator enters the fray, but I think by and large the odds in Kingsburg even out, and it's unusual to be completely hosed by the hand of fate. I personally quite like Kingsburg, it seems to work quite well, and I like it as a medium length game - not sure about playing with all the expansions and turning it into a 3 hour grind ( particularly if your dice are being crap... )

This might be another case of a fairly solid game becoming slightly fat and wobbly when expansions are added to it - it's not unknown in my experience for expansions to take the streamlined sublime and add clunk.

Upstairs Mr Bond lead a mad full table of Fearsome Floors - the game of running your guys away from terrible logical rule following monsters. Fearsome floors is a fun game, but six people is utter bonkers !

Fearsome Floors. With six players aka
London Tube Rush Hour Simulator. Here a remarkably
accurate looking 3D Ticket Inspector stalks fare dodgers.

There was some shouting and at one point screams of being murdered or somesuch, so, it was emotional if nothing else - but after the game I think everyone exited the pub/table quickly and Mr Bond was left on his own.

Smash up and a bunch of others were played on the table over - I think Got Bit got played again, and finally on my own table, people were keen on playing Mission Red Planet which ending half way through the evening was then followed by Istanbul.

Neither of which I won. In fact I think Sam won both games, with Istanbul coming down to a real close finish of a turn or so difference. I was hopeless at Mission Red Planet, my guys failed to get a good purchase anywhere, I was bumped off early, and I failed to score much of anything. Still fun tho. I really like Mission Red Planet - a game that Tom Vasel in one of his recent top 10 lists has controversially noted has "murdered" Citadels.

Mission Rrreeeddd Planetttttt ! An epic 4 ships blast off.

IE, Mission Red Planet supersedes Citadels to such an extent there's no need to play Citadels ever again. I can see what he means, but Citadels is still cool, for me, I love the victorian Martian steam punk theme in MRP, the lovely card artwork and it just plays so nicely with a lot of player interaction to be had.

It's always fun to see someones astronauts end up being re-routed time and time again, and ending up in some martian armpit of a landing zone. In fact this week, Mission Red Planet got played again, and this time Lewis found that just about all his mustachioed victorian explorers kept landing in the dubiously titled "Utopia" for which he had spiked with a discovery card. In something of a sneaky double buff however, Lewis had actually planted a high scoring card and whilst bemoaning his continual landing in one spot, actually successfully bagged extra points at game end.

So this week, Mission Red Planet was indeed played again - and this time I won, huzzah - and before this we had another go of Kingsburg - but without any of the expansions. With new players and a rule session to fit in, we still managed to buzz through the game in under two hours - which I think is just about right. I won that too in an embarassingly strong kick ass womping ( just about double the points of poor trailing Lewis ), which I feel gives a lie to the statement that Kingsburg is just about who rolls the highest dice ( by and large we all rolled pretty similar ). Whereas we finished with just about the same number of buildings each, I garnered a stomping 33 points in bonuses, and everyone else struggled to get out of the teens.

Snowdonia, battling fog and rain to do something useful.
That'll be a typical Welsh day then.

 Robin brought along Snowdonia, a game about building a railway up a Welsh mountain ( I say mountain with all due respect to actual proper mountains in other places of the world that are impressively massive, rocky and take specialist equipment and possibly days of traversing in appalling conditions - mountains in the UK amount to modest swellings of earth that possibly make you break out in a sweat by the time you reach the summit somewhere around afternoon tea, and my goodness if it gets foggy we might get lost a bit ).


This is the second time Snowdonia has been at NoBoG - it first showed up brand spanking new from Essen in its release year, one of Jimmy's ( long lost NoBoG vet ) many Essen delights. Despite its dubious sounding theme, the game is pretty cool, and if you are an age to remember such things, contains Ivor the Engine ( cue Ivor the Engine impression... chhh chi kuff chi chi kuff... )

Francis Drake was also played - another quickly subscribed game, I have no idea what this is about - something Francis Drakey I presume - sailing ships, taking Spanish treasure and defeating invading armadas. Actually I believe it's the first two and not the latter - you get to explore the Americas and the Caribbean a bit and do some lovely pirating.

Francis Drake Hero of the English. Filthy Pirate to the Spanish.

Making another return to favour, Betrayal at House on the Hill was played ( and no less than two copies turned up at once ), and the usual fun and shenanigans was had there. I wouldn't mind betting that Betrayal is now possibly one of the more well owned games amongst NoBoGers - not Agricola, not Seven Wonders, but instead Betrayal. Uh huh.

Ground Floor also returned - the game of hardcore corporate speak, vying for better storage closets, better advertising campaigns and in general being more of a corporate douchebag than everyone else. Owein won this with a strategy of producing nothing, but being wildly popular and having a very successful tv advertising campaign. As ever I fear this game is way too close to the mark of reality for comfort.

Ground Floor. I see your storage closet and raise you a
meeting room. Pfah, just wait til my internship program starts!
Oh dear.

Sam continues to extoll the virtues of the game, but its theme gives me the willies. I am too corp scarred perhaps. I do however really like its graphical design, and one day, I might even sit down with it and try to build myself one of them there storage closets. Surely the only board game in existence where you get to build a storage closet.

After all the excitement of that gaming nonsense was dealt with, I believe one or two fillers might have been played, in particular Ultimate One Night Werewolf, where a thoroughly cheesed off Luke being continually lumbered as a boring villager began to have delusions of grandeur and started acting out at random. A flaw to the game perhaps ? Villagers are boring ?

Until next week bat fans, same bat time, same bat channel.

Oh. And 25 people this week. I didn't actually have to raise my voice in the initial game organising to be heard for once.

Betrayal at house on the Hill

Smash Up

Catastrophic Catamarans

It’s a cold, crisp morning. The first rays of sunshine sparkle on the Bodensee. On the merchant ship Purrfect Storm, Whiskers McGee is checking the manifest: 'One chest of precision watches. One chest of rare books. 12 bottles of fine wine. And the case of refined glassware, which First Mate Tiddles is stowing in the hold. All seems to be in order.' Standing at the prow of the ship Whiskers admires his reflection. ‘I really am a very fine specimen’, he thinks as he adjusts his hat to a jaunty angle. A hard task when you have cat-ears. Smoothing down his fur he is jolted out of his musings by the sound of smashing glass and swearing.

“Be careful with that glassware.” calls Whiskers. “It’s expensive.”
“It’s this damn tail!” replies Tiddles angrily. “It’s bloody impossible not to trip over it on this cramped boat.”
“Don't you like pretending to be a 16th century feline merchant?”
“Not really. The cat outfit is itchy. The people over there are giving us weird looks. And neither of us can sail.”
“Oh.” mutters Michael Schacht, dejectedly taking off his Whiskers McGee mask.
“If you design a board game about cats sailing merchant ships then I'll happily play it, though.”

Tom grinning like the Cheshire
 Cat. Look at that awful cover!

And that’s what Michael Schacht did. Rather than live out a perverse fantasy life as a strange anthropomorphic merchant cat he designed Felina. Either that, or during a raucous night in a German beer hall the publisher lost a drunken bet and poor Michael, winner of the prestigious Spiel des Jahres, had this terrible theme foisted on to his game. And that is why Felinia is being sold off cheaply in the Works discount book store. And that is why Tom brought it down to the Ribs and insisting we play it. Because Tom is cheap.

If you look on Michael Schacht’s Wikipedia entry you will find a list of his games. He  designed at least one per year between 1999 and 2011, but there is an ominous gap in 2010. This is where Felinia should sit. He's ashamed, I tell you! But he shouldn't be. If you look past the dodgy cats and artwork, Felinia is a tidy little game with traditional Euro design roots. There is a nice acquisition portion of the game where players bid for the right to buy or exchange limited goods. Players can then cash in combinations of goods in order to load their cat-merchants on to the rather nifty 3D cardboard ships, which then set sail across the sea to the land of Felinia. Once on Felinia you can claim locations and grab tokens for points or special in game bonuses. It’s all rather familiar, perhaps a bit too familiar, but still makes for a fun time and the is some good jostling for position. Our biggest gripe wasn't with the gameplay, but that we found it hard to distinguish between the different goods. Three shades of brown is not the best choice of colours and we often ended up collecting the wrong goods. It would have been catastrophic if any of us were colour blind. Still not bad for a tenner.

See the lovely ships of Felinia. See the terribly hard to
distinguish goods. See not as much cat related stuff
as first envisaged. Sadly not even the meeples are cat-shaped.

Tom won by a good margin, taking time to align his merchants in nice rows to get placement bonuses. Nicky came second with a hefty stack of tokens. I came in third with my ramshackle strategy, and Stu was in last place; his food for points strategy not quite working as well as we'd all feared early on.

Not to be outdone on the ridiculed theme stakes, Sam pulled Ground Floor out for its second airing at NoBoG. You can read about its first reception here. New guy Robin, Matt, Alina and Alina’s friend (whose name I forget) sat down to pretend to be at work. They didn't finish, but it was better received this time. Alina especially enjoyed it - perhaps because she is self-employed and longs for the rigid structure and tedium that can only be found in a corporate office. And because she claimed to have African children working in the basement of her non-profit organisation. Hmmm.

Farming fun in the final round of Agricola.

Pete, Rich and new guy Oliver decided to toil in the mud and play the popular farming game Agricola, which Pete won. Then, insisting that Pete should win another game, they decided to play Hansa Teutonica.

Ousted from the comforts of the Wherry Room, Fletch, Dean and John were sent upstair to fend for themselves. There they found a lovely big table with comfy seats and played Core Worlds. This was an incredibly close game with Dean winning on a tiebreaker with John and Fletch only one point behind.

Beer: Ah, this is the bit you've missed! I had pints of Eugene’s Lair from the excellent Oakham. Named after a level on the 1980’s classic computer game Manic Miner. This is a hazy golden beer - well measured hops and tropical fruits with a hint of biscuity malt and a long dry, bitter finish. Nicely done. 8/10 Kemet in beer form.

Capitalism in the New World

Given that you are a person that plays board games, you no doubt at some point in your school days got picked on. Mercilessly. Hopefully you found your own methods of dealing with those dicks. Yet within the friendly confines of the Ribs of Beef last Tuesday night, all those horrible memories came flooding back, as four of us sat down to play the game of unfettered capitalism that is "Ground Floor". Those four were Matthew Bond, Sam, Stu, and me.

Now, I can tell you are already thrilled at the prospect of this game, just from the title. "Ground Floor". Not "Fearsome Floors" (which Matthew Bond had stowed away in his bag, oh how I wish that Matthew Bond had swapped it with "Ground Floor" when nobody was looking). Not, oh wait, there are no other games with Floor in the title. Anyway, so what does "Ground Floor" entail? You, my friend, are building a tower block, in which your business will be based. So what kind of thrilling business will you be running, perhaps it will be something illegal and fun? No. You might be running a publishing company. Or, wait for it, "web based" which I think was the one that Stu played. Now, actually, that I think of it, "web based" probably means you run a a company that designs pornographic websites. That's surely what the designer was going for there. Anyway. Each of these businesses has a speciality. "Web based" is particularly good at ... meetings. Meetings.

HELLO MY FRIEND! LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO THE WILD WORLD OF BOARD GAMES. WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME WHERE YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF A FLEDGLING BUSINESS? WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE THE WEB DESIGNERS? THAT'S PRETTY COOL RIGHT? WELL, GUESS WHAT! YOU ARE REALLY GOOD AT: MEETINGS!

Meetings.

And this is where the peer pressure came in. As we sat at the table, and went through the rules, and then took our first babysteps into the big wide world of business, our utterings were to be heard at the other table.

Matt: "I am going to upgrade my meeting room!"

Other tables: *they do not say anything, they are all rolling around on the floor giggling*

Later on I over heard one of the people at the other table say "I don't think that sounds like much fun". I looked over at them and grimaced. They giggled.

We were ridiculed mercilessly. Full time anarchist and grizzled punk rocker, "Punk Rich", who was killing Orcs or some shit, went fully to town on us. He criticised the man. He purposefully bought a scotch egg to prove how working class he was. He pumped his fist and ranted and raved. He criticised people at our table for wearing shirts, although Sam was in a t-shirt and retorted "I thought it was dress down Friday!". He threw a brick through my ground floor window. Anarchy in the UK. This was just a mere taster of the savage beatings we took at the hands of the other tables. And it made me think back of when I was in school. Not in a bad way, for this was all light hearted fun that I personally found roaringly funny. But it was amusing to see the whole hierarchy in action. Picked on in school for liking geeky games. Picked on at board game club for playing a game where you schedule meetings. Saints alive.

The rule session for the game took almost an hour and was a forebear of what was to come. The game itself was due to run for 9 turns, and it took 90 minutes to get through the first three. In the early days, our game based economy was stable then depressed, rather like the people playing it. Throwing caution to the wind, I played a strategy of employing people and manufacturing goods, even when very few people were likely to want them. It paid off. After 3 or 4 turns, I felt like I was in a pretty strong position, as I had plenty of the two important currencies in the game. Currency, and information. We had a good laugh about information, which seemed to be manufactured by the IT department. No doubt linked to PRISM, it would seem. Anyway, I saved up the spent all my earnings on clever upgrades for my towering inferno, and all of a sudden I was one floor away from being able to end the game (phew). I decided to spook everyone out on turn 6 and show my intent to end the game on that turn, I was pretty sure I could afford it. People's plans were thrown into disarray and a few minutes later my tower was finished, before we had even made it to the most powerful upgrades for the tower (probably a swanky new photocopier). Things were wrapped up and it was found that I had won with 37 points. Sam ran in second with 30, disappointed that all the money and time he had wasted on being "popular" (tell me about it) was ruined because I finished the game so quickly. Matt and Stu brought up the rear on 27.

So there you have it. A frankly astonishing game. It's actually not bad as a game, but good grief, that theme, that peer pressure ... I think we made the best of it, but I am not sure who this game is for. Maybe unemployed people who are desperate to simulate what it is like to actually be employed. And then they realise what a truly grim endeavour work can be and go back to curling up in a ball on the sofa, crying.