Peak Gaming

It's been a very busy April at NoBoG. What with all the chair and table shenanigans. And arranging the new and shiny NoBoG Mondays as the alt day for NoBoG Tuesdays. The end of the month was also pretty busy. Wil Wheaton's ( increasingly exclusive ) Tabletop Day and Diceni conspired with NoBoG Monday and Tuesday to give you four days worth of tabletop gaming back to back. Elliot heroically attended all four days. I managed three.

My Diceni stack - the short, the crazy, the pretty, the captivating

Although officially NoBoG was not doing anything for tabletop day, a number of NoBoGers were doing things on the day - particularly at Athena - and took part in a bunch of demonstration run games. International Tabletop day is in a weird space in my head right now - originally I thought it was all about just a general day of organising and playing board games, a Wil Wheaton driven thing to get more people playing board games. This year however, only North American gaming stores have been invited in to officially get involved, private and non commercial groups have been given the elbow and the nature of the event at Athena was very demonstration lead. Which all seems to me much more locked down and commercial than I thought the original idea was meant to be. I can't say I am a fan of the direction it has gone in, it would be interesting to know the reasons why some of those direction decisions have been made. Nevertheless fun was had.

The sublime large scale Takenoko. This hands
down generated the most public chatter.

Diceni - one of many gaming type things going on in Norwich this year - we were officially present at however, and we had a small table running for most of the day including the very passer by interactive inducing Flick 'em Up and the eye catching Takenoko Collectors edition.  We could have made use of another table at one point as some of us ended up observing rather than playing, but no big deal, and it did mean I could chat to the public whilst some of the gaming went on. Akrotiri, Guillotine, Flick em Up, Takenoko, Jamaica and Cash n guns 2nd edition were the order of the day - I think with a bit more space a bit more prep time not running around in the pursuit of tables and chairs with the Tun we could have had more games like Cash n Guns being played for longer, which at the peak of the day I would guess would have got some good engagement. Quite a number of NoBoG regulars and irregulars stopped either to play or have a chat in passing, the day went by super quick, and was an interesting and different gaming day.

Flick em up - a great suggestion by David for a Diceni game

I can't say enough good things about Flick 'em Up for something like Diceni. David loaned me his copy of the game with a suggestion I play it, and what a great suggestion that was. The game is perfectly pitched to be eye catching, as simple a game as you can possibly imagine, be capable of having players drop in and drop out - or even just take one go in passing - and yet be fun. Tim's groovy printed NoBoG boards came in handy for this too - we could position them behind the line of fire to catch any wayward shots. If you have no idea what Flick em up is - its a wild west themed game where two teams get to shoot it out with each other. Moving a person involves you flicking a movement disc - and placing the person wherever it stops. Shooting involves you flicking a "bullet" at someone else, and if you knock them over, you've wounded them. Health is tracked, and meeples can only activate once per round. Additional rules and scenarios cover entering buildings, picking up items, chucking dynamite and so on, but for basics, stand in the street and have a duel. How this game isn't the must buy toy for any (grown up or actual) kid I don't know. It probably needs better marketing.

NoBoG Mondays continue to be quiet, last week we had an epic 14 people turn up, but this week after a hectic weekend of gaming, pouring rain and a bank holiday Monday, we were back to a very cosy 6. If you haven't been to Mondays, then you've missed out on some classics getting to table including Agricola, Seven Wonders, Dominion and Medici, plus you've missed out on the singular experience of myself and Elliot lamenting about being old, because no one else at the table knowing who Phil Collins, the Pet Shop Boys or a host of other 80s type people that were on the playlist of the Tun. You also missed the unveiling of the receipt. Crazy fun times.

Seriously though, Mondays are a very nice quiet throwback to the days of NoBoG yore and it's all very laid back and easy. If you don't like the more "atmospheric" NoBoG Tuesdays - and I know some of you don't - Mondays are definitely the way to go.

Brew Crafters. David wins this with another yeasty Malt strategy.

Two weeks of gaming to catch up on then. Of course we had Brew Crafters - there was even some talk of a double table of Brew Crafters going on, but in the end there was just enough for the single table, David is locked into a hardcore Brew Craftering phase at the moment, and his scores are edging up into the mid 80's to take the win. Picking up one of the Malt suppliers and taking advantage of a market glut of yeast seem to be his current winning formula, where everyone else goes for the yeast lab and becomes yeast self sufficient - leaving yeast on the market unwanted. The theoretical win for the mass production of low quality beer continues to just be theoretical - I don't think anyone at NoBoG has pulled that off yet - very tricky as you really need to get your incoming resources nailed down which can be hard going when everyone is scrabbling for every last morsel of malt.

Chaos in the Old World. An Eric M Lang
game that actually works. Burn !

Chaos in the Old World made a return to NoBoG, it's been a good few years since this game regularly got table time, and this was a pretty much new to the game group giving it a run. It turns out they got the dial clicks entirely wrong for their game, but everyone enjoyed it, and on hearing the dial clicks were wrong ( and had ended up winning the game for Khorne Slaanesh ) - there were demands for a rematch.

Lords of Waterdeep also made a return - the popularity of Champions of Midgard has not survived into Spring, and with the two games somewhat similar, Lords of Waterdeep has started creeping back to get some table time.

TtR India. Lewis won this. He was rather chuffed about that.

We've had some solid Ticket to Ride back at NoBoG too, the gateway game getting much love either via James or Elliot and poor Elliot had to stand in as train croupier for Ticket to Ride India, as unlike most of the other TtR titles it only caters to four people.

In another blast from the past, Archipelago was back for a run - but without the War and Peace evil shenanigans ( boo ) - to delight and in the case of Siv, confound its players. Siv who is relatively new to NoBoG found Archipelago baffling - and long. Which I can understand - it's an easy enough game to play, but to understand what you're doing is a fairly subtle and tricky exercise in watching what everyone else is doing whilst you go about your usual Euro style game actions. The fact that the game might not reward you at all for playing a nicely optimised bit of

Archipelago. Oh so pretty. And tricky.

Euroing, and for all your nice little empire you've managed to do squat end game can be something of a weird experience. I suspect Archipelago might be something of a (euro) gamers game on the quiet. Anywho. I enjoyed it. And failed to capitalise before time ran out. Pete won, everyones final scoring was within a hairs breadth of each other. Good stuff.

Sheriff of Nottingham has also been doing the rounds again of late. I think I've seen it being played two or three weeks in a row now, and for other old things coming out again, the infamous Battlestar Galactica was back, this time with a table of six, and in the most epically unsurprising outcome ever, Monika was a cylon. In fact she was a cylon sympathiser AND a cylon. Remarkable. I think Monika carries a You Are A Cylon card in her pocket at all times.. just in case.

Battlestar Galactica. Monika attempts to hide her Cylon glee.

The good guys lost, and when I checked in Galactica was critical on Fuel, Food and Population, but surprisingly for all of that Morale was high. Only the sociopaths remained on board perhaps. Or just the cylons were left and of course they were happy - all the fleshbags were dead. Seemed like fun anyway. It's always enjoyable watching Monika do her cylon thing. On the other hand - you have to consider that the game has trained her to lie extremely well by now. The skills you learn in board gaming eh ? Learn to lie and cheat your friends ! Without tells ! Become a better manipulator of fear and doubt ! Inspire distrust between colleagues ! All this and more you will learn at NoBoG. Machiavelli would be proud.

This also might be of some use - the NoBoG goblins have put in months of work into devising a flowchart to help you spot who the cylon is when playing Battlestar Galactica at NoBoG.

The NoBoG BSG Cylon detector flowchart. Never let Monika fool you again !

Machi Koro and Colt Express have seen table time. Both these games are great, and it's good to see more people getting a play of them - they deserve a bit wider audience than they've had at NoBoG I think.

This week the Mice and Mystics group returned - Joe finally freeing his worker from the Family Expansion space to make it to NoBoG and continue the mystical antics. I got to join them for their fortnightly outing this time to replace Ben. This was a chapter I'd never played before and involved the cooperative team splitting into two groups and maxing out the hero mice with six in play. Both teams had objectives to accomplish before theoretically meeting up in the smithy for a final climactic battle. In practice the splitting of teams was a little clunky - the game is designed around an assumption that everyone will be on a single tile - and the timing of the end game didn't seem to click that well as me and Sam arrived a whole tile earlier than Joe and Ben.

Cheese Golem Smash ! Smash Good !
Needs a Cheese Golem miniature.

The end battle was suitably difficult, and with only one team on board it could have been a tough fight, were it not for the fact we had picked up the Cheese Golem spell earlier. With a few defensive items to hand, Maginos the spell caster hulked out into the Cheese Golem and rolling a bucket of dice in attack and defence proceeded to one shot everything in the room - helped with a blast of multiple effect lightning. The fearsome boss wasn't much help to the bad guys either, who managed to fire off one shot of his bow before he was hammered into the floor from the weight of a cheesy golem fist. Cool stuff. Easy given our equipment drops. I suspect however this chapter could be a massive pain in the ass if the wrong kind of monsters spawn on the wrong group - as both groups are feeding a spawn counter, but crucially only one of them will trigger it. A struggling group could find themselves struggling even more with a bad spawn.

Deus - Imperial Settlers with a board ?

We also had a new to NoBoG game - Deus - turn up at the Tun. This game originally made its debut at Essen 2014 and picked up a bundle of award nominations in 2014 and 2015. The game can probably best be described as Imperial Settlers with a Catan like board. A shorter civilisation building game set ( loosely ) in an ancient Greek theme, players compete to build different buildings and gain victory points from building powers and conquering barbarian lands. In a very Imperial Settlers kind of way, players receive a hand of building cards which can be built and placed into your tableau - each of which gives some kind of power that can be synergised. With buildings requiring a number of different resources in game, so far Deus is Imperial Settlers. The differences here however are that the buildings get placed on a map - and there is some conflict over the first come first served conquering of a territory - and buildings will only trigger when a new building of the same colour is built. The game looks interesting but there are some questions about its limited player interaction - but I think this game is more pitched at a civ building card game, than an outright knife in the back competitive builder or war game.

Close your eyes. Listen to the voice on the phone. Werewolf !

And of course there have been plenty of social filler games going on, with the usual suspects of Secret Hitler, Avalon and Werewolf getting to table - although, unless I am mistaken, the bloom of the cult of new is most definitely off Secret Hitler, and it is beginning to fade in popularity. I personally got to play Divinaire a few times - and win.. of course... - and got to have another go of Alex Pfisters Oh My Goods ! but this time with the revised v2.0 rules. Which were much smoother. It's still something of an RNG fest, but the new rules allow better mitigation of it, and you're much more likely to get a meaningful build out of it. I'd recommend this nice Imperial Settlers type filler game. I definitely want to get some more plays of it to get a better feel of it.

The NoBoG cash kitty after chair expenditures now stands at £63.53. I've also started labelling up some of our chairs - as the Gin Palace this week made off with three of our nicer chairs that they had been drooling over the week before, and other of our chairs are generally wandering out into the general area of the pub. Not a problem per se, so long as all the chairs are available for gaming use when required !

Numbers for the record, 14/41 and 6/39 for Monday / Tuesday respectively. Lower turnouts than the previous weeks 50's.

Crafting brews with a furious Dracula

A much smoother NoBoG this week. With the upstairs at the Tun all sorted (ish), far less furniture hauling going on ( but still some ), the serious business of gaming could proceed without worry. And what a great week of gaming it was !

Fury of Dracula. Pete reprises his role as the Count.

Third edition Fury of Dracula was back to table again this week, and this time game owner Hal actually got to try his own game out for the first time pitting wits against the wily Count Peteula. The game ran long again with Pete managing to fairly easily elude his pursuers, mostly first time players allowing the arch vampire to slip between the cracks of pursuit and ramp up points to a victory. I suspect splitting player turns into two turns of one action each, compared to the old variants of doing two things at once can push the game long if you have players that like to think about it. Nevertheless the 3rd edition seems like a solid game, and if you've been on the fence about it in the past, this edition is definitely worth a look.

Brewcrafters. David blasts to a win with all the assistants.

David brought Brew Crafters along again, this time managing to secure a good win by picking up a strong set of synergising specialists and ingredients pulls meaning he could brew the complex beers without breaking a sweat ( particularly neat as everyone else had focused on self sufficient yeast production meaning he could reap a whirlwind of benefits from a glut of unused yeast on the market ). Richard IV tried the not entirely easy to pull off mass production of shit low requirement ale, but failed to get any hops infusing extra victory points in on the action and coasted to a lack lustre finish. This game continues to get a good buzz about it, and more interested eyes are turning its way when it is in play.

Also upstairs Isle of Skye got a request for a play, my copy seems to slowly be doing the rounds and for good reason. I think in hindsight Isle of Skye has to be my top game of 2015, it ticks more good design boxes than you can shake a stick at and hits something of a nirvana of a very nicely thought out light to mid weight game. Co-designed by Alexander Pfister, this designer is starting to be one of my favourite designers - he also did Port Royale, Broom Service and Oh My Goods ! amongst others. You can read up my initial run through of Isle of Skye in the earlier NoBlog post here - http://norwichboardgamers.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/card-drafting-heaven.html

Talking of Oh My Goods ! that I enjoyed last week but slated for being a raw RNG fest, it seems I am not the only one that thought that as a 2.0 set of rules has been released for the game that sees an overhaul of the mechanics designed to mitigate a lot of the unmanageable randomness in the game. As well as that a few tweaks on top of the RNG handling ( mainly to nerf the power of the ridiculous take an extra card building ) promises to make the game a much tighter and satisfying experience. Alex Pfister has defended the first set of rules as being "more open to casual gamers" and that the second set of rules is more for the "experienced euro gamer". Mmm. Ok. Sure. Although I kinda suspect the first set of rules are just plainly not that good - casual gamer or not. The 2.0 rules certainly do not bring in any further complexity to the game. Just ways to mitigate the RNG ( by discarding and refreshing your hand - something even the most newbie of casual players would appreciate doing instead of being stuck with a hand for the entire game that you can't use ).

I look forward to giving Oh My Goods ! another run - this time with the (proper?!) 2.0 rules.

Funnily enough, after Isle of Skye I played Port Royale. To make it a Pfister evening. A Pfister evening ? Hmm. Doesn't sound the kind of evening you have in polite company. Anyway. It was great fun. Mick managed to trawl the unlikeliest of odds by failing to score a single game winning point in his own turn - instead going bust - and seeing Chris gleefully securing the win instead.

Betrayal at House on the Hill. Part of Bens send off.

This week also saw the old NoBoG favourite Betrayal at House on the Hill return in style with two simultaneous games of this getting to table. Ah. It's like the old days back at the Ribs. Betrayal played every week, sometimes on two tables in parallel. The slightly awkward passing of the ostracised played out in the badly lit bit of the pub in the stairs / deck / corridor reading up on their scenario rules for just what kind of a betrayer they are.

Of course Betrayal savant Luke got in on a game, by his own reckoning he has not only  played all the scenarios, but played each of them multiple times, and also Ben got in a game after requesting it as his final NoBoG game. As previously noted, Ben, one of the intrepid Mice and Mystic regulars, was due to head off to Japan at some point and that time has finally come with him departing to stay over there for the next four years to make interesting observations about water. He managed to squeeze in a couple of games of Coup after Betrayal followed by possibly one of the best sessions of Secret Hitler I've seen, fascist turning on fascist and Hitler getting confused by all the fascist internecine fighting going on shooting one of his co-conspirators ( Ben as it happened ) in the face. This marks the second time that Pete - as Hitler - has done far too awesome a job of appearing liberal and has harmed his fellow fascist team. An awesome game, and a great send off for Ben.

Old school with Carcasonne

In some news that's sure to excite the hardcore Betrayers, it's been recently announced that a new expansion of Betrayal is out soon with a new set of 50 stories and some extra tiles including a roof area for the house. Which is about time !

Elsewise on Elliot's table they were getting all old school with Carcassone ( *cough* the inferior version of Isle of Skye ) and Lewis put in a hugely theatrical turn whilst playing Aye Dark Overlord ( which is as rare as Hen's teeth to try and obtain these days - I think Martin might have brought it along ) as the Overlord, chewing out his minions over why they had failed.

I think we might have found Lewis' true calling. Dramatic Dark Overlord.

Sheriff of Nottingham. Lewis is digging being the Sheriff

Which is possibly slightly better than Secret Fascist. Maybe not. Prior to this Lewis had been warming up his theatrics with a game of Sheriff of Nottingham and really getting into the part of Sheriff.

James got another play of Village, his £3 bargain bin charity shop find, but has come to the conclusion that the game is just "alright" and will be putting it on his trade list. Still at £3 you can't go wrong. I can't remember anyone ringing the praises of Village, it did seem however to be an acceptable Euro when it first came out. I've never played it, all I know is you can score points by killing people.

Upstairs with Terra Mystica

Lords of Vegas and Terra Mystica were also back at table, Terra Mystica continuing to sustain its renewed NoBoG life, and Nate was with us again for a second week running this time playing Mombasa. Which. Bizarrely enough. Is yet another Alex Pfister game. All Pfister. All the time at NoBoG !

This week was also the inaugural week of NoBoG Mondays where we started trialling NoBoG on a second day of the week. Despite the weight of democracy coming down on Mondays as the choice day of the week, only six hardy NoBoGers turned up on Monday for some gaming. Six people on two tables was all very old school NoBoG. Back in the days where you didn't need to wrangle people into games, or do shout outs, organise people or find tables and chairs.

So Monday was all very civilised. Richard IV finally got his epic set of all things Dominion to table - where he proceeded to do the dickish tactic of making everyone mill through their decks via Saboteur, and over on the other table they played Terra Mystica.

We finished up with some fillers of Divinaire ( which, naturally, I won, because I am always the bestest psychic of them all, and Richard IV managed to finish on negative points thus giving him the very firm career advice that psychic was not in his future ) and also Pandemic Contagion. Pandemic Contagion was new to me, a competitive quick filler from the Pandemic world based on you trying to infect ( instead of cure ) as many places as possible, and grab more victory points than everyone else. It was an enjoyable game, but to my mind the game is, if not broken, then almost not a game. Your choices are not well balanced - there is a single obvious strategy to adopt, and final gameplay is a very arbitrary slam dunk kind of gameplay where you can wrap up scoring cities in a single turn. The game practically plays itself once you are fully invested, and you can't help thinking that the game needs some serious tweaking to give more meaningful choices a chance, and is kinda broken the way it is - for casual players though who aren't looking at optimising their choices, it's arguably a nice game. Woe betide any serious gamer who sits in with them however.

Next NoBoG Monday promises to see more people turn up. If the irregulars of NoBoG are to be believed. Plenty of people were either a) surprised there is now a Monday to play on, and of course I will turn up on Mondays now as they are better suited for me and b) fell asleep at some point before 7.30pm and missed the start. All very Boom Town Rats sleeping the whole day through.

Some more table and chair money was generously donated this week, and with expenditures on a total of 14 new chairs and 1 table this week, the NoBoG fund stands at £68.53.

More Betrayal. With apparently some Love Letter and cutlery thrown in. Luke is getting desperate to keep the game fresh.

Lords of Vegas

Village

Mombasa

Lights, Tables, Action !

This week there was something of a stir in the lands of NoBoGia.

Upstairs at t'Tun

Following on from last weeks burrito based bedlam, new upstairs space at the Tun had been cleared for use, and the cry had gone out for all NoBoGers to quest* in search of tables and chairs. NoBoGers responded in marvellous fashion, scouring classifieds for items, driving around Norfolk to secure bargains and putting in some time as amateur furniture movers. New Table Tuesday thus arrived with some tables and chairs already delivered, and a bunch more turning up on the evening, all of which got hauled upstairs into the labyrinthine depths of the Tun.  Perhaps I am biased, but I don't think you'll find a more friendly helpful community than that of the Norwich Board Gamers, from the regulars to the most scarce irregular. Awesome.

Light in the Dark, upstairs at the Mash Tun

In the end we managed to obtain five tables for this weeks use and some fourteen or so chairs. . . which wasn't enough chairs, we had to grab chairs from anywhere we could - including the Tun's staff only area "office" chair - whilst leaving the majority of the ( unused ) seating alone in the main area of the pub.

A fairly busy 51, 52, 53 turned up this week to see in the new tables, and every single usable table we had was put to good use ( only Hal's slightly wonky loose bolts table not being used ), oddly enough split five tables downstairs and five tables upstairs.

The space upstairs is ample for our forseeable needs, there's a need for more chairs - which we are halfway to resolving - and the lighting in places is very dubious. For those who had never been upstairs there was some surprise at the space available. Potentially we need more tables but only to cover Peak Gamer - which might be moot as we're moving to a two nights a week trial format.

What was played this week ?

The end of Time Stories. Figuring out the last puzzle.

I got to finish of Time Stories with Darren, Alfie and Hal where we finally put the first story to bed after a six week hiatus. During this session, without going into too many spoilers we learned that Hal will do anything to please a naked lady. Fortunately we ignored his happy trusting nature of naked ladies, took a different path and went on to win the game - with an epic score of zero. There was once again much discussion post game about the cost of the game versus its amount of play, whether the need to buy the base game was there once you'd cleared the first included story  ( the conclusion was you didn't need to buy the base game at all ), and the design aesthetics of the first story - dead ends and wasted time versus a need to not have players become complacent about never being able to fail. Despite the involved conversation about the game, everyone really enjoyed it, and I got the impression that the game if nothing else is a really unique and interesting experience for all involved - and for that reason alone is a must play for any half serious gamer.

We finished with a nice condensed euro filler of Oh My Goods! which to me is like a compressed Imperial Settlers without any dicking with other players. An interesting little resource management / synergy game, and I enjoyed it a lot, but whilst on the surface it has a lot of good nods towards euro goodness, player interaction is zero and ( a fixed limited ) card pull plays a very large part in whether you're going to be competitive or not. If you're being critical the game comes down to whether you pull the right two cards at the right time or not - and have some luck with resource pools available. This trend of super condensed euro fillers is really interesting, but I think is a difficult nut to crack without falling into just busy work hiding a big ole RNG engine. Still that being said, I'd really like to have a another go at this filler.

Pete enjoys vamping around Europe

Over in the corner of thematic gloom, Pete got the first play of the third edition of Fury of Dracula, the deduction based cat and mouse game of hunting Dracula across Europe. The third editions sees a number of shakeups, a changed day night cycle, a removal of dice and a bunch of minor tweaks. Without the vagaries of the much maligned dice melee thus becomes a good deal more predictable, and whilst in theory the removal of dice brings the game more into a modern Euro sensibility, it can mean the combat can seem on observation a little contrived as you can reasonably work out the outcome of any rock paper scissors type fight - great for Dracula if he's crunching his escape numbers. Pete for one likes the tweaks the third edition introduces and gave the game a big thumbs up.

Brew Crafters with a mad mix of Beers available

David busted out Brew Crafters for the third week straight - and Brew Crafters games seem to be popping up here and there in response to it showing up at NoBoG. David rather cruelly put newbies of Voitek, Monika and James through the paces of a bunch of advanced ( and pretty hideously tricky ) beers. Richard IV won this by sticking to a basic collaboration for points strategy and brewing nothing but one of the few non tricky beers repeatedly. Given the rest of the beers on offer this was almost certainly a sensible strategy.

Guillame brought Shakespeare along - Sam muttered it was surprisingly good, very Euro. I don't think he was amazingly thrilled with its Euro-ness. And James table, probably the hardcore player table of the evening with Nate, Tom, and Nicky played Istanbul, and something else I forget.

Busy downstairs, four tables in shot, 26 people !?

Downstairs was a huge filler night as two big tables of party / social games were the order of the night, Mafia de Cuba, Secret Hitler, Resistance and something new to me antidote, which at a quick glance seemed like a nicely themed up simple deduction game.

Ben had a third large table of players, hosting an epic 8 player game of Robo Rally which to me sounds utterly mental. Everyone really enjoyed their experience however and they even managed two games of it, the first game a bit of a training run through on one board and the second one a more proper run over 3 boards. Crazy.

Lords of Vegas, Quadropolis and a finishing game of Thunderbirds were also going on downstairs, and Tim has some pictures and something to say about Quadropolis.

Quadropolis

Being the yearly ‘New Game’ from Days of Wonder, I came to Quadropolis with Ticket to Ride front and centre in my thoughts. Having enjoyed many games of of the ten-years-plus old classic, with a wide variety of people, my hopes were set high. Being reminded that DoW also produced Smallworld did nothing to lessen that. I should perhaps have instead focussed on DoW’s Five Tribes, a game at the heavier end of the ‘Brain Crunch Spectrum’(TM). I have never played Five Tribes, but the reviews I have seen indicate that it is nowhere near as simple as Smallworld, let alone Ticket to Ride. After one play, I would put Quadropolis somewhere between Smallworld and Five Tribes.

The game consists of four round, with four player turns in each. A player has four numbered Architect tokens and plays one per turn to select which building from the central stock they will construct. The different building types score in different ways based on how they are placed in a players city, so careful thought is needed about every action.

I definitely enjoyed playing this with Ewan, Simon and Matt. The art style (and probably thoughts of Ticket to Ride) made me think I would get away with using my brain a little less than was the case. I certainly won’t say no to another play in the next few weeks, and if it stands up to repeats I may get my own copy.

Jarryd showed off his progress with the NoBoG app this week. It's coming along nicely, events are displayed where you can check out what games are available to play as well as adding your own games into a list, all of which hooks back to the BGG API to automatically include box art, number of players and other details about your games.

Next week we are going to trial Monday NoBoG or as Joe has christened it, Ultimately Inferior Night, as well as the regular Tuesday night. Moving to a two nights a week setup has been something kicked around for quite some time and is the single most requested NoBoG thing as some people just want to game more, and others can't make Tuesdays. Thursdays would I feel have been a better day, but from a pub night point of view Monday is a no brainer as if pubs are mostly dead on weekdays, then they are doubly dead on Mondays.

It remains to be seen what will happen to player numbers - will Tuesday numbers reduce ? Will Mondays be super quiet ? Will both days end up busy ? Who knows.

Diceni - one of the many gaming type conventions going on in Norwich this year - is also rapidly approaching, and we're going to go there and play some games with any passers by that are interested - or just amongst ourselves if the crowd is more of a watching type of vibe rather than a participating one.

As ever I leave you with the gallery.

Lords of Vegas

Robo Rally 8 player

Antidote

Beer + Secret Hitler - NoBoG style

Quadropolis

One of the strange half rooms in the Tun. This is the bar outside the upstairs larger room.

Shakespeare

The final fight of Fury of Dracula requires everyone to stand. It's in the rules.

Some of the labyrinthine stairs and corridors upstairs at the Tun. It's like Hogwarts without any of the class snobbery and more 1970's decor.

Seriously, possibly the best ever thematic lighting for a game of Fury of Dracula ever. Pete doing his best Translyvanian count bit. If Translyanian counts started wearing hoodies.

David (left) wrestling with the choices of Brew Crafters. Richard IV ( right ) hoping no one will notice his single beer collaboration strategy.

* Elliot's words. He was questing with his son Bilbo and fellow NoBoG regular Sam in something of a very Lord of the Rings vibe. But for tables, not evil rings. Elliot should probably change his name to Frodo. Or possibly Aragorn. Or maybe the crazy dude covered in bird poo - Radagast.