The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Truckers

Another fine evening of gaming last week, but truth be told, I can't say much about what was going on, I was chilling playing a relaxed game of Isle of Skye, Guillotine and then Take 6, plus fannying about with camera settings. So. This week there will be waffling. If you've ever seen the Fast Show with Paul Whitehouse and his bit with the old man in the chair, you'll know what to expect.

Formula De - time field distortion

A noisy full table of Formula De was played out beside us, I have no idea what track it was, but it looked good fun. I really like Formula De, but, and it's a big butt, it plays way too long for me for what it is. It takes forever and a day on a big track with lots of people, when all you're really doing is rolling and moving. Don't get me wrong, it's also a fun game, and in a campaign over several tracks with some serious minded people it can be another kind of groovy all over again. But yeah. Time.

1990, when my innocent self was still in the grips of schooling, I made my own formula 1 racing game, not exactly a million miles away from Formula De, except my version played in about 30 minutes. It proved to be very popular for the other sixth formers, who when given a choice of doing academic work / revising, or racing tiny cars around a track, picked the latter. Like shooting fish in a barrel ! Of course, me being me, shortly after I binned the whole thing and forgot about it, and now occasionally lament I did that, and try to remember exactly what the rules were.

In the grips of some madness of experimenting with to be honest, far too complicated camera settings, I tried to take some artsy pictures this week, with some long exposures and the like. Turns out, 30 second exposures of Formula De do not end well. 10 second ones, eh, somewhat better.

In other parts of the Mash Tun, Messrs David, Sam, James and Voitek decided to crank out the quality game of Galaxy Truckers, the crazy endeavour of assembling some form of cobbled together

Galaxy Truckers, League of Gentlemen style

spaceship, followed by taking it out into the galaxy to conduct your trading, looting and racing without it falling to pieces. I have to say watching them assemble their ships, they were by far the most, relaxed, polite, gentlemanly space ship builders I have ever seen. The spaceship assembly part of the game is something of a race against time against your fellow players - firstly to grab the bits you like, and secondly, you only have a minute to finish when the first player declares finished.

But apparently that was not of concern for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Truckers who you imagine ply their trade routes in smoking jackets and slippers. I didn't actually hear it, but I'm sure there was much conversation during building along the lines of, "No no dear chap, you take that part, honestly, it looks better on your ship anyway" and "Excuse me, but I think I may be nearing completion of my vessel, but I will sip on my tea instead of finishing to give you chaps a good crack at completion." . Clearly they've never played with Sam "Numbers" Blackwell who delights in creating half finished ships in record time just to watch everyone else fail epically.

Blood Rage, Ragnarok is upon us

Nicky brought along a new kickstarter binge, the gorgeously over produced Blood Rage, a game all about Vikings and Ragnarok and securing yourself the best combat death ever.

As the tag line goes Life is battle, battle is glory, and glory is ALL.

Now. If you know Nicky, you might not immediately associate her with bloodthirsty, kill or be killed all out Viking blood fests - her calm and friendly exterior revealing little of the Valkyrie inside. But that's where you'd be wrong. Which just goes to show, you never can tell.

The epically epic miniatures of Blood Rage

The game looks fantastic - of course, it's been done by Cool Mini or Not - and has been written by Eric Lang ( Chaos in the Old World, X-COM amongst others ), and seems to be winning fans. Nicky has promised to bring the blood letting along again this week, so, if you have a moment you can gawp at the fantastic miniatures, or if you're lucky, even give it a play.

A double dose of Castles of Mad King Ludwig was also on offer, one game drawing out into a somewhat lengthy affair with some dubious card recycling going on, Punk Rich was back in the house and found himself a quiet corner to hide in with Hazel and Dean where they got themselves wrapped up in Nations.

David and Chloe brought Imperial Assault along, where presumably they found the droids WERE the ones they were looking for after all, and have signed up to an every other week campaign of Star Wars ground based pew pewing. Looked cool. Although I hear some grumbles that playing the Imperials is something of a boring experience.

King of Tokyo stomped around the pub too, plus some Orctions gaming, and once again Mafia de Cuba got hauled out with a full table of 12 and some crazy shenanigans which proved to be very fun. Me and Sam nearly got away with both declaring to be drivers - despite that meaning there were one too drivers many - but Hannah belatedly pointed out our lie to Godfather Kieran who promptly ratted out Sam - an actual driver - then me - a diamond thief. Curses. Well played Sam though, he backed me up right to the end. If it wasn't for those meddling kids....

Thanks to Monika whos picture of Galaxy Truckers I purloined this week. My own picture succumbed to a 30 second over exposure madness.

The lovely Isle of Skye

Nations in the Time Out Corner

King of Tokyo and a trio of cool T Shirts

Imperial Assault. These ARE the droids you're looking for.

Castles 1

And Castles 2...

Another shot of the lovely Blood Rage miniatures

More blurry shots of Formula De for you...

NoBoG Consulting Detectives

"Elementary my dear Watson. It was Lord FiddleBottom, the fat dude, at the train station in the silly mask !" - something Sherlock Holmes never said.

There seems to be something of a minor trend going on at NoBoG at the moment. Quite a few deduction type games are sneaking their way into the pub, pushing NoBoGers to ask questions, shuffle around locations and employ thinking caps to work out who did what and where. Which is something of a nice change of pace. However, these games are also frustrating the crap out of Richard IV who seems to have something of an anti-knack with them - and who mysteriously also ends up playing them.

" The only way to get smarter, is to play a smarter opponent " - Revolver 2005 ( also Fundamentals of Chess 1883, but Revolver is way cooler and has guns and crazy paranoid schizophrenic people. Stick that in your pipe Fundamentals of Chess ! )

This week we had the brand spanking new*, ripped out of its cellophane Inkognito to play, a team based deduction game for four** which sees you completing a mission with your partner to win, before the other partnership can do the same.

Inkognito - move around the city and ask questions

However. You don't know who your partner is. And you don't know what your mission is. Hmmm.

Which makes the game either some hilariously*** alternate philosophical comment on the pointlessness of gaming...

Or requires you to ask questions and filter answers to deduce the facts of who is your friend and who isn't. And what you should be doing. And how you're going to win the game.

The key mechanic to this game is of course the deduction element, which in Inkognito is a question either about someone's identity or about someone's body type. There are some rules about how you answer a question, but the upshot is that the answer must include at least one true piece of information, as well as some incorrect information. Meaning repeated questions, or even cross checked questions will start to allow the process of deduction to churn.

The game also has a clever little mechanic that randomly determines exactly what mission the players need to perform - depending on who you are ( Lord Fiddlebottom, Colonel Bubble, Madam Zsa Zsa and Agent X ), and what piece of secret code you have ( one of four ) a table tells you what your joint mission is going to be - all of which are the variant of getting someone to somewhere.

So the game splits into two phases. The first prolonged phase is that where players move around the city, bumping into other players and asking questions to figure out what from whom, and then the second shorter sprint for the finish line phase of having worked everything out, you then attempt to shift someone to somewhere.

Inkognito's funky RNG.
Marbles pop out the holes giving you your actions.

The deduction element of the game has a good deal more variability in it than something like the very methodical alchemists. Depending what information you get back it might become very quickly clear who someone is in Inkognito, or you may end up having to ask a library full of questions to get an inkling. This is down to luck. There is also a good deal of head screwery that players can deal in, in so much that the answers you give out if thought about carefully can give the absolute minimum away in terms of narrowing things down ( or if you are unlucky this can backfire spectacularly ).

In a five player game, utilising the more direct ambassador to ask questions ( which will guarantee you know someones identity in a mere 2 questions ) is a far riskier proposition, as the ambassador is playing against you, and giving him that information can win him the game. In a four player game I would say this makes the game incredibly easy and extremely short.

For all that, the game is quite a fun romp around a city with a rewarding/frustrating experience of making your deductions and getting your mission done.

In our game it has to be said that Pete won - and fortunately for me I was his partner. My questions and answers were not giving me a lot to work on, whilst Pete on the other hand had fairly quickly worked out I was on his team, and then just slipped me a perfect info set declaring himself when I next asked him a question, thus pulling me up by my bootstraps.

Rich IV seemed pretty sure of who was who as the game got to its final stages, but, the eventual win did seem to surprise Owein and Rich, who queried whether we had traded info and got to where we were. My greatest ( and only ? ) contribution to the win was in manipulating Hal to move towards the destination we wanted him to be in, by placing his only "sensible" move in the direction I wanted him to go. Being a logical gamer, he of course obliged and allowed myself and Pete an easy task to push him just that little bit further for the win.

Sons of Anarchy. James is uniquely looks suited to this game.
He's one gang leather jacket away from the total package.

On losing, Rich IV declared "Fuck deduction games !". I think he enjoyed it.But possibly may still have been bruised from his thumping in last weeks deductiony Alchemists game.

Cool game. Very enjoyable with a great table of players. I managed to frustrate Hal by feeding him the same piece of information three times in a row. After this he threatened to just draw a large cock next to my name on his results sheet. Ah ha ha ha.



Elsewise, Sons of Anarchy the board game got its first show at the Ribs and Orctions got a somewhat more muted just before release second outing. But then anything that doesn't have Lewis in it is almost guaranteed to be more muted.

The opulently produced 10th Ann. Ticket to Ride

Ticket to Ride also showed up again in opulent form with the rather spankingly attractive 10th anniversary edition, which one way or another make it the bazillionth week in a row TtR has been played, but this time it was played by a whole bunch of new people to NoBoG.

James ended up scalping the win at Ticket to Ride, blasting the newcomers with his expertise - not an enormous surprise as I think he plays it just about every week, and is surely by now a Ticket to Ride savant. If there can be such a thing. They then busted out Dead of Winter, which is pretty good going, Ticket to Ride AND Dead of Winter in one evening, and again got to win.

Ticket to Ride. Look at that bits tin. Look at it.
Can you spell O-v-e-r-p-r-o-d-u-c-e-d ? Lovely.

I'm sure they are playing it wrong :p

Diplomatic Stu was fresh back from his travails down South, and being diplomatic got to introduce some new people ( and Tim, who is definitely not new, and therefore by definition old and dusty ) to the cave dwelling goodness of Small World Underground with a full table of five. I believe there was a crazy three way tie at the end, of which I am  not sure which way the tie breaker went. I think you have to play the game all over again until it's not a tie, turning the game into less of a test of random tactical placement, and more one of endurance.

A snuggle of gamers. Small World, Dixit and Inkognito upstairs

Lewis and his merry band bashed Dixit out to table, and failed miserably to beat the newcomer, so much for experience and cliquey gaming, and then went onto the narrative Betrayal at House on the Hill and lost again to the evil doing newcomer.

Tsk.

A few fillers finished the evening. A lovely game of Sechs Nimmt, Six qui prend, Category 5 or whatever you want to call it - I think from now on I shall just call it Cows, where the surely cheating Hal managed to score zero in the first round and 1 in the second round ( and despite picking up a few cards at the end won with a very strong score ), and Tim at the opposite end of the scale managed to collect nearly all the cows, ever, anywhere, even some that weren't in play. I believe he had a score of 40 in one single epic round. Owein got shoved out of second place by myself and Rich IV, and special mention goes to Stu who managed to collect a whole bunch of cows on the very first card play. Which takes extreme levels of skill to fail that hard.

Orctions. Caption competition for what Elliot is doing here.

Downstairs, Werewolf with a bazillion add on quirks also got a play, Lewis ended up putting in an artsy french mime artist play session, and the wolves finished with a pretty much convincing win - only slight suspicion being thrown their way. The newcomers at the table were - as so often happens with the social werewolf variants - blown away with it, and wanted to immediately play it again. Uh huh.

There was also a bit of pre Inkognito discussion about how Cluedo was the best of that ilk of games ( in comparison to say Monopoly ). Which was somewhat surprising to me - I don't hold Cluedo in particular esteem, it could be done so much better these days, but I did make the point that surely a remake with an app holding the murderous identity rather than a binary envelope which wins or loses you the game would surely be much better. Which got me to thinking about how much better you could make Cluedo all round for today. Surely a NoBoG group think design project. Pitch in your ideas for a Cluedo remake. Betrayers ? Active murderous player ? Secret objectives ?? Areas with different capabilities ??? Surely there's something in there between Betrayal at House on the Hill, Cluedo and Dead of Winter / BSG.

Oh and 31 players this week, if you're asking. Of which six were new recruits.

* Inkognito is actually a 1988 game, but as far as we were concerned it was freshly minted in its plasticky seals of goodness

** Although technically a four player game it does actually cater to both 3 and 5 players. 5 players adds a player into the role of the ambassador who is trying to work out who everyone else is before any team completes their mission.

*** Not funny at all unless you are into hardcore nihilistic existential absurdity of the universe philosophical comedy. IE not funny.