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!

Show me your war face !

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The charming kickstarter Cauldron.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The visually intriguing and mentally deductive Inkognito

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

A very full Machi Koro setup

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

Lewis and Clark go exploring.

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

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

The mighty Cthulu Wars !!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kingsburg !

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

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

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

You Win Second Place in a Beauty Contest...

... in a lineup of one. So goes the Monopoly inspired joke. More of that later.

Did you know ? The most popular day of the year for holiday
hunting is January 5th. Just after lunch. One can only assume
this is because everyone is miserable being back at work after
Xmas.

Since Christmas the NoBloG writing goblins have become slack. Weekly issues are failing to get out, news is being missed, and all the while the slacking goblins have been eating the last remnants of festive chocolate, complaining about having eaten too much, and using their office time to search the web for cheap winter holidays. What can you do ? I have sent them all off to a recuperative post christmas blues tropical beach, and been forced to do my own typing in their absence. Pfft.

The last couple of weeks have returned to a busy pub of gaming with 34 people turning up on both weeks ( with a huge variance of *who* actually turned up in the differing weeks... should everyone instead decide to turn up at once ... ), with Resistance having a resurgence in popularity and returning to its regular-ish slot of end of night play.

Stu and Tom were with us this week, both of whom like nothing more than the meta game of the Bargain Bin Rummage. I think they must have some competition going on as to who can find the cheapest or most obscure game. In the past this has brought us classics from Giants, a euro game about shifting giant heads around Easter Island... and putting hats on them.... to Felinia, a game about sea going medieval cat merchants. That is to say, cats, who are merchants. Stand up on their hind paws. And engage in conversations about... fish ? As opposed to merchants who deal in cats.

This week Stu ( or possibly Tom ) had managed to dig a bit of serious retro gaming out of one of his secret bargain bins. Waddingtons Formula 1. Which with an initial release date of 1962 is I am going to guess, older than every single NoBoGer currently in irregular attendance.

Formula 1, Tom roars into the lead with a bit of
judicious picture taking timing

At first glance the game looks suspiciously monopoly inspired. A dice. Two decks of cards bearing an uncanny resemblance to Chance and Community Chest - except of course, here they are Pit Cards and Tactics cards. And a carefully measured track with spaces to move your playing piece around. There are no second place beauty contest wins here however - but instead varying advantages of moving faster, accelerating to top speed, careening around a bend without incident, or the reverse, missing a turn because.. well.. you have been subject to poor pit work. Such are the advanced game design machinations of the 1960's family game. If it doesn't have a random number generator lurking in a deck of cards, you are doing something very wrong.

Five enjoyed this hark back to a more innocent gaming age, with Caroline roaring across the finish in first place. And despite its age, everyone really did seem to enjoy it.

Elsewhere Mr Bond brought along one of his Christmas presents - Imperial Settlers, a full table of four spending the evening standing up and poring over the wording on cards. No idea who won. But seemed fun.

Lewis, Tom, Lauren and Andrew had a go with Takenoko, followed by Get Bit and Love Letter. Lauren was on the warpath and taking no prisoners, bashing her fellow gamers with expletives, threats, yells and anything else. She ended up winning Takenoko and Get Bit, although whether this was due to great game play or just banter intimidation it's hard to say. She took her losses on Love Letter hard. I think she wanted a clean sweep victory.

Downstairs Caverna was given a whirl, with it has to be said a group that was probably thrown to the

A busy Wherry Room full of gamers

lions. Just about all new to Caverna, and in some instances new to gaming. A trial by fire. I'm not sure how this went down, but highly experienced Euro gamer Guillame wiped the floor with everyone apparently. Hmm. We might have scared off some new people there.

An epic six player game of Lords of Vegas was on the table over, and over from them - I think Room 25 got another bash.

Upstairs I got to take a couple of completely new gamers on a tour of what's what, starting with Colt Express, of which the programmed movement seemed to at times really mess with their heads, before moving onto Sechs Nimmt, which as I suspected, they really warmed to and took a picture of it at the end so they could go buy it themselves. Scratching my head for easy finishers we settled for Loot Letter, which almost earned a ban from Mr Bond because it had Munchkin in the title.

Last week Bondy threatened NoBoG legal action against the players of Munchkin on the grounds of Bad Taste Gaming. Despite having taken photographic evidence of the deplorable activity and posting it to the NoBoG twitter feed, the threatened Official Letters of Warning have yet to be actioned. A lucky escape perhaps for the transgressors.

Lastly downstairs they had an epic game of Avalon Resistance - they were frightened off of using the new chiefs and spy hunters malarkey and instead stuck to swords and sorcery. Pah. Luke performed the tricky game intro spiel with morgana, merlin, percival and the kitchen sink and did a good job getting it all right. However. You could hear his brain whirring as he paused at each step, thought about it, thought about it again and his voice steadily slipped into BBC English. Watching Resistance can be nearly as much fun as playing Resistance.

Upstairs I got to enjoy a quick filler of Port Royal with Hal and Mr Bond. Stealing the win right at the end away from the many be-pirated Hal, Mr Bond declared the game to be awesome. Because he had won. With a strategy of... doing everything not particularly well. Except possibly capitalising on everyones failures more than anyone else. I had personally gone card draw crazy - ignoring victory points to.. I don't know. Show off with how many cards I could take ( which helped me not at all ). Hal had a very solid heavy pirate strategy. But somehow. Pushing his luck just... never... worked. Greed ! Without it, he could probably have won the game a good few rounds earlier. Fun game. Funny banter. Always a laugh with Hal and The Bond.

Port Royal is a really nice little filler game, a push your luck, build up a simple tableau, earn victory points piratey card game. It's not long enough or deep enough to become some card memorising synergy monster like Race for the Galaxy, and its shorter and less prone to breaking than Glory to Rome, but shares a few elements with those games... in a piratey themed way. And let's face it. Pirate themes are the best themes. You can take your Race for the Galaxy Uplifting species and.... uplift them. I'll stick to pirates.

Last week Mission Red Planet showed up for its quarterly airing. Newbies all. And for once I managed to capitalise on my experience, and romped to a 3 point hoarding win. We then had some Frank's Zoo. Which I totally failed at. Although it has to be said this was more to do with my partners than myself - both of whom flopped out in last place for zero points, and despite me finishing first in the last round, I had the worst score. Bah.

Suburbia was also on show. Resistance. And err. Other things. Like Munchkin. And Seven Wonders ( which James had never played before... ! ). And Tragedy Looper. And more stuff. Which I forget. And the goblins are all away at the beach. So who knows.

Night of the Long Knives

Another Tuesday, another NoBoG evening of gaming, a far better way to spend an Easter evening than say living inside a stuffed bear.

A rather cosy sixteen turned up, which marks the first time since, ooh, I will take a guess at 2013, that the numbers of NoBoG have dipped beneath twenty. I blame Easter for many of the missing regulars. *Shakes fist at Easter*

Some of our regulars hot footed it from the Norwich Forum and its Gaming Festival - a half dozen new people having been possibly recruited there for future NoBoGing - where they had played some crowd pleasing games of Resistance and presumably began to teach otherwise nice people the art of lying convincingly whilst simultaneously sowing seeds of distrust and discord amongst other nice people. I fear for the moral fabric of Norwich society...

On the tables at The Ribs, Lords of Waterdeep, Archipelago, Pillars of the Earth and Suburbia made a showing, with Sam showing two learners how to win at Suburbia - although the scoring was fairly close, and Rich building his way to victory in Pillars of the Earth.

Lords of Waterdeep exploded half way through with some choice curses and stomping of metaphorical toes as Richard IV leapt in to thwart his fellow Waterdeepians and beat them to the punch. In the face of the heated table banter, Richards calm reply was to "Sod off" as he had been hard done by all game until that point.

If the long knives were being brandished in Lords of Waterdeep, then they were blatantly out and stabbing with wild abandon in the semi co-operative Archipelago.

Pete launched an audacious town building program in the very first turn that saw Matt's territory invaded, and before he could harvest a Pete Tax applied to any future fishing operations.

Outrage ! Infamy ! Injustice !

Turn 1. Knives out - Bringing the "semi" to "semi co-operative" like never before.

Setting the tone for the rest of the game Pete played an aggressive and unhelpful role as everyone else around the table rallied against him. It was obvious, Matt noted, that Pete was the Separatist. Personally I never doubted Pete - I knew he couldn't be the separatist because... I was the separatist.

I was however happy to agree that indeed Pete could be the separatist. Filthy Separatist. Evil Pete. *Internal Glee*

The Archipelago almost at full stretch,
Alina in Red with fewest meeples is the dark horse.

If you've never played Archipelago then the Separatist wins when everyone elses loses - or if you know Resistance, then the Separatist is the spy / mordred evil doer. The snake in the garden.

Unlike Resistance however, everyone is out for themselves - to a point. And the Separatist is not always a role in play. The colony itself is an unruly beast and needs careful co-operative management or it can turn nasty very quickly. The question in Archipelago is how helpful do you need to be to not have the game collapse in a loss for all, and how selfish can you get away with trying to secure a win for yourself.

Pete's playing an aggressive - I could well be the separatist but am actually not - strategy is an uncommon but not unknown formula in Archipelago and can net you some nice advantages as you declare Everything to Be Yours, and Who Gives a Stuff About Helping Out The Colony. However if the other players collaborate to make your life miserable, the advantages you get in being utterly selfish can all too quickly evaporate ( not to mention you can potentially play right into the hands of the real separatist who is suddenly pleased to find such a willing ally to send the colony into hell ).

So much for the old. But this is Archipelago with sharp and pointy expansion. The new. Some of the new cards can really punish unhelpful islanders. Pete quickly found himself on the wrong end of one of these - the Jail, losing his rebelling meeples controlling town and market, only to see someone else step in and take control of the lucrative buildings. Me in fact.

Pete turned sad at this point. Deflated. Defeated. Punished.

I couldn't bear to see his sad face for long, so after a while I said he could turn over a new leaf, refrain from further shenanigans - and offered his market back. His town I would keep. Perhaps a more ruthless me would have kept the market. I could certainly have done with it - and it ended up being an end game victory point as well. But Pete's sad face. I couldn't live with that sad face for the rest of the evening.

The game continued with much banter and malarkey and we were all reminded why Archipelago is such a damn good game and why its path is just that little bit different to everything else out there.

Alina ended up the winner - her pacifist role successfully netting her the extra VPs to nudge ahead of Matt and Pete, whilst I languished a couple of points behind them - I had the most money, and joint lead in other things, but alas, few of them were scoring at game end. Being thrown - very unfairly everyone agreed - in jail by Alina in the penultimate turn didn't help - my meeples were out of position, lacking wood, and unable to build that extra town. Not that it would have helped much.

Great game - huge island, all the tiles were used at game end !

The Archipelago was not the only island to see time at NoBoG this week. Ewan brought along Survive, a game where you get to escape a sinking Atlantis and avoid all manner of nasty things from killing you before you reach the safety of nearby islands.

Survive is a true veteran of board games, having been around for over 30 years and has experienced a number of reprints, re-releases and minor variant changes over the years. Originally marketed as a family game and something great to get the kids involved in, it bounced between the big names of such gaming back in the day - Parker Brothers, Waddingtons - before in this day and age being pitched back at the niche board gaming market via Stronghold Games.

A lovely island with happy meeples - Survive

Survive is one of those games which in theory seems like a nice fun family game, and would indeed be great for the targeted 8+ year old players, before you actually realise that the game play is utterly brutal and cut throat, involves devouring the oppositions people ruthlessly with sharks and sea monsters, and can reduce those aforementioned 8 year old players to tears. Seen that, been there, got the tear stained T-Shirt.

If you've played Hey That's My Fish, then you are probably well aware of this phenomenon. Except it's worse than Hey That's My Fish. Much much worse.

From a gamer's perspective the game is great. Vicious, direct, open to all sorts of whining, bargaining and shenanigans, and luck only has a light touch on the game. What you do, where you go and who you can convince to play nicely carry far more weight than a bit of luck with the monster dice.

In short the island is made up of a number of island hex tiles - with one tile a turn disappearing and turning into sea to reveal anything from a handy boat to a deadly sea serpent - some of which appear immediately, and some of which you take in secret to play at a later point. In your turn you get to move a total of three spaces with your meeples - but swimmers can only ever move one space. Once your meeple moving is done you get a dice roll to move the monsters - and possibly eat other players meeples.

A disintegrated ruin of an island, with devoured,
drowning meeples - Survive takes a very dark turn.

Rinse and repeat until either all the meeples are dead, escaped, or the island blows up ( variable game length timer ).

To add more things to think about in game, each of your meeples has a score printed on its underside. Get the meeple to safety and you score those points. But once you've placed them, you don't get to look at them again - and can you avoid the tell tale twitch as someone goes after your high VP meeple and ignores your lesser ones ?

Great game, and if you've never played it, it's something that you should get round to experiencing.

Nate ended up swimming his meeples to victory in this - or perhaps he simply murdered more of the opposition. Glass half full, glass half empty.


Do you like King of Tokyo ? If you do, then Lewis has pointed out that Athena Games is having a King of Tokyo competition this weekend - with promotional new power cards for all attendees and a special Space Penguin new monster item given to the winner ! So if trashing Tokyo is your thing, get your best Godzilla suit on and stomp on down to Athena games on Saturday.

Betrayal at Waterdeep

Both Lords of Waterdeep and Betrayal at House on the Hill have seen repeated play at the Ribs in recent weeks. I always seem to be playing something else when they appear, so was pleased to get to try both in one session.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is a super thematic game where the players are exploring a spooky house. Tiles are laid out as new rooms are entered and players contend with all the usual sort of things you’d find in a haunted mansion – encountering strange events, collecting items and revealing ominous omens along the way. Finally, one of these omens will trigger the end game where one of the characters betrays the others. A scenario is randomly determined and the traitor goes off to another room to read his objectives (usually kill all the other players) while the rest of the players look up their part in the corresponding scenario - how to survive and/or defeat the traitor.

The game rattled along at a brisk pace even with six players. We played a particularly long game, with lucky haunting rolls (which determine the end game) prolonging the exploration part of the game. By the time we’d determined Richard as the Assassin – keen to murder us all and stop young Clive, the heir to the mansion, from claiming fabulous wealth – most of the mansion had been revealed. This played in our favour and we got Clive to the throne room with the requisite items and still in one piece. We did lose Nicky and Pete II along the way, but they were only ever assassin fodder in my eyes.

It’s a pretty simple game. Easy to drop new players into. It really shines if players get into their roles and treat the other players to a bit of theatrics when reading the omens and descriptions on the cards. If you’re not into that sort of thing it can still be fun, but you’re really just waiting for the end game to trigger so you have an objective, rather than wandering the halls tooling up your character. Plus coming in at 90 minutes it doesn’t outstay it’s welcome.

This meant we had time for Lords of Waterdeep. A game based on the Forgotten Relams D&D franchise, this sounds like it should be a thematic romp with high adventure in the port city of Waterdeep. It's not. Those with cold and calculating eyes (and even those with just plain old seeing eyes) will look past the stock D&D pictures and see a game about buying and spending cubes to accrue victory points. If you need to get into a role and pretend to be a mighty Lord of Waterdeep and crave nothing but adventure, walk away now. This will disappoint. It's not bad, it's just that Accountants of the Lords of Waterdeep is probably more of an accurate title. So if you like euro/efficiency style games and aren't sniffy about the theme then there is an enjoyable game to be had.  And coming in at between and hour and 90 minutes, it doesn't linger in your hallway boring you with tales of its arthritic feet.

Thanks to Richard IV for bringing along and explaining both games to me. I had a lot of fun with both.

The rest of the pub was crammed with NoBoGers  playing all manner of games.  I think there were five tables in all, with 23 gamers. Four intrepid gamers drowned as they failed to beat Forbidden Desert. Twice. There was a five-player game of Blood Bowl Manager with the Sudden Death expansion. Suburbia got a look in. As did Grimoire, Kingdom Builder, Race for the Galaxy, Libertalia, and Skull and Roses.  And Pete got his rather nice looking Space Game prototype out for some more playtesting. Once again the playtesters let it be known that they still disliked the “If your name is Pete re-roll the dice” rule. We shall see if their concerns make it into the next rules re-write.

Hey, that's my bamboo !

Concise-a-tron activated.

Attendees : Seventeen
New people ? : Yes
Tables : Four
Games played : Lords of Waterdeep, Takenoko, Mascarade, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Smash up, Core Worlds, Suburbia, Blood Bowl Team Manager, Resistance : Avalon
Did you win ? : No. All the games were rubbish. I blame Pete for losing us Resistance.
Tips : Don't play Owen at Core Worlds. He is a Core Worlds Savant.

Concise-a-tron out.

Got to play Takenoko this week, the game of bamboo growing, angry gardeners and greedy pandas. You can see this play out over on tabletop if you haven't already :

If you dig the theme, and with such lovely presentation who doesn't dig the theme, then this game is an enjoyable romp around the zen garden.

Bamboo, gardener, panda. Must be Hey, that's my Bamboo !

The game is overwhelmingly controlled by what random cards you pick up ( which you score points with ), and by and large is pretty much out of your hands in a bigger sense, but it's still fun to run around trying to beat everyone else to their perfect bamboo setup.

Played a quick hand of Mascarade - why is it this game is only ever played with five or so down the pub, I would love to see it with a fuller table ( it does up to 13 ) - which was fun, Nicky kept forgetting which card was which when both were in her hand - she'd shuffle, confuse herself, and get no gain at all out of it. Not quite the point of the game. But funny.

Betrayal was also fun. The evil Nicky was running around as the small girl, found another small girl to keep her company, and it suddenly became oh so clear we were stuck in The Shining. Nicky went out on to knife the Jock upstairs, knife the socialite in the basement, and otherwise direct her demons to eat everyone else. Happy days.

Resistance was played. Bad guys failed. A pretty lucky set of people was found for the missions. Me, Pete and Dean should have done a better bad guy job. Tricky.

Core Worlds. Meta game of trying to fit as
many cards as possible onto the smallest table possible.

Suburbia. Sam came a lamentable third with a PR firm
that didn't quite fit.

A last note, The Ribs have started locking both understairs cupboards - the cloths and levelling device have been relocated to the larger cupboard and may require bar staff attendance to get them out.

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

Start as you mean to go on...

With Christmas feasting and New Year frivolities out of the way, this week saw the return of gaming to the Ribs. A record equalling/busting ( depending how you count ) 23 people turned out for the first NoBoG of 2014 as an epic five tables of gaming were setup.

Lords of Waterdeep, Kingdom Builder, Caverna, Suburbia and Village were played - Stu's table played something before Kingdom Builder but I forget what it was.

It's not the first time Village has been down to NoBoG ( earlier play description here   ), but it's been a while since it made its first appearance, and not many got to play it. This week Village was played by a new audience, and Rich, Pete and Ed all had good things to say about it - Ed liking it despite coming in an abject last and suffering from a swollen foot. Not sure if this was beneath the table foot stamping signals that had got out of hand or an earlier injury, but nevertheless after a triumphant Pete had killed the most of his villagers for the win, Ed went limping home, happy but sore.

Pete then managed to sneak Race for the Galaxy out onto the table for a quick round, before finally the various tables finished and the customary end of night Resistance game ensued. The evil do-ers had a torrid time, with a straight three victory win for the good guys, and some shifty behaviour by the tell dropping bad guys sealing the slick win. However, all was not lost, as the bad guys still had a chance to assassinate Merlin, and even with Ewan playing it cool and ignoring the general pointing in his direction, the bad guys chose to assassinate him - who was revealed indeed to be Merlin. A win for the bad guys via assassination !

Caverna ( play description ) had another run through down the pub, with only one other seasoned Agric player - and no Caverna players at all - at the table, the game was initially daunting for the new players. Everyone picked it up quickly however, and Owen the Agric vet piled on the weapons to score strongly at the end with 73 points. Alas he was pipped to the post by my peace loving dwarves, who with no weapons and only one mine could hardly be counted as dwarves at all, but eked through with a score of 76 - and a remarkable number of dogs.

For those ardent fans of Race for the Galaxy, this week saw the release of the new expansion Alien Artifacts, which brings a small board element and in theory more player interaction to the otherwise purely card based and largely solo game. It's likely to turn up next week if you are interested, although the whole Orb board game bit seems a bit.. well... poor. But your mileage may vary - hit Pete up for a blast, as I am sure he will have it with him.

Calamity City

A belated fifteen this week, some newcomers, plenty of old hands, and three tables of gaming pleasure.

Lords of Waterdeep made another appearance this week, and with just about everyone being familiar with how this now plays, the game was fought over, finished, and Rich crowned the Lordiest of Waterdeep Lords in very quick fashion, leaving plenty of time for game variation.

Suburbia

Whilst that was going on, Suburbia was skirmished over on table two, which also finished in a nice time for some end of evening shenanigans, splitting into Avalon Resistance and Kingdom Builder for the We Don't Want to Play Your Stinking Spy Game NoBoG faction.

The last table found Tzolk'in with the new and sexy expansion that allows an increased five people to squabble over the slowly rotating action spaces. It was at this last table that I found myself competing against Evil Pete, Tim, Robin and new guy Phil. Phil admitted that whilst he had played a few games, he wasn't an experienced old hand at such things. Given the players, the game and the increased crunchiness of the expansion, I suddenly felt the need to apologise in advance for the experience he was about to receive. Which turned out to be just about right.

Tzolk'in is of course a hit board game from last year with a sexy / innovative / gimmicky ( pick one ) series of cogs that see your worker placements slowly shifting place over time. In mechanics terms it's just a worker placement game that triggers actions when you remove workers as opposed to when you place them. But we know all that, what we really want to know is how does the expansion play ?

The expansion adds some variety into the up til now, pretty static setup. First off there are the new tribes which provide a player with a single subtle game changing mechanic to influence your strategy. Powers range from things like - your second worker costs 1 less food to place, to, any action space you choose is capped at a maximum cost of 3 food.

Tzolk'in - Tribes and Prophecies

Next, expanding the actions available, the start turn space gets added to with three extra slots costing 1 food each. The action available on these slots changes with the turning of the cogs, and they vary from the almost useless - pay 1 food to take 2 food - to the much more compelling, pay 2 food to immediately build a building, or pay 1 food to take a gold. With a gold bonus tech going on, things like instant reward 1 food for 2 gold are almost obscenely good to take if you have some fancy building on your mind.

Lastly calamities are added - these represent possible bonus points for meeting criteria, but also crucially penalty points for not meeting them. They also inflict changes to other parts of the board - in our game all the calamities made temple advancement much more difficult by forcing people to pay extra resources to advance a step, and in some cases forcing people to retreat a step when some resources were collected. This had a definite cooling effect on temple competition for our game.

The tribe powers you choose at the start are very cool, it's nice to have everyone start on an uneven footing, and adds spice to what might otherwise be a fairly dry opening strategy. On the other hand the powers are also very situational and can be incredibly powerful in the right circumstances, or just about useless - or even a detriment - in the wrong ones. Surely then this leads to more careful strategic play. Kind of.

The expanded three extra actions are a no brainer. With five people all trying to jam into packed action wheels, the three extra actions are something of a congestion reliever and a good addition. However. Again, it's situational. At times the actions on offer are - as Pete likes to say - about as useful as the Guernsey Tax Office. And so sometimes the cogs really are cluttered because it's highly unlikely you are going to waste placing a worker to get you a net gain of 1 food.

Calamities. They certainly change the weight of what you want to be doing or perhaps avoiding, and offer an interesting - although at times just about impossible - way of garnering victory points.

Overall for me the game was tortuous. It was cool to see the expansion in action, and nice to have a chat over a game, but game wise I spent most of my efforts in last place turn order wise, and with five players, one of whom started with five workers instead of three to place, I found myself at times boxed into a corner to get on the busy cogs, or struggling to lurch about looking for a new plan. The situational tribe powers just added random insult to injury as some were able to get good use out of powers at times, and others, well, just downright struggled. Poor Phil with his five worker start faced an uphill battle all game of feeding all those mouths AND having increased costs of 3 food per worker instead of 2, AND an increased VP penalty for failing to do so. On the one hand, five workers out of the gate is awesome. On the other hand, paying fifteen food to maintain them is horrible. And remember. Five players. Packed cogs. Your placement costs are up on what a four player game might be.

And here lies perhaps a fundamental issue. The lovely / gimmicky cogs, fixed very much into the heart of the game as they are cannot be upgraded or changed when you decide you want to do an expansion. So to a certain extent you are jamming more people in the core mechanic fixed size space. As Pete noted, five is perhaps not the sweet spot for Tzolk.

Tzolk'in with the expansion is decidely not for beginners. Or the feint of heart. Personally I have some serious reservations about whether a fifth player actually works that well. Or that everything balances out well. Or that you can't get some seriously game cooling perfect storms popping up. I was also unimpressed with our final scoring which didn't seem to be particular clever as just mostly opportunistic. Blah.

Pete also confessed to having struggled for the first time ever playing the game - he's a big fan - and not entirely enjoying his experience.

As for Phil - who managed to net himself 10 negative points in one scoring round - I assured him that his gaming experience were he to return would only get better from hereon in, and only half jokingly, that next time he should try something fun, like Resistance.

As it was, Robin won the game with some decent in game scoring and a respectable end bonus, Pete came second with some extremely last minute bonus scoring - he had scored practically zip all game, which left Tim languishing in third and me and Phil way off the pace.

If you are a fan of Tzolk'in, I think you will like the variation the expansion brings. There are some nice ideas and cool things going on. Does it lose some elegance ? Yes. Can it fall off the rails a bit ? I think so. Is it really designed to fit five people in ? Probably not. But I think a fan will skip those "minor" quibbles and embrace the new challenges that it offers.

Resistance good guys won again. I think the bad guys are just phoning it in at this point. Shocking. There needs to be some serious spy training undertaken to shore up the score tally.

The Dark Side of Worker Placement

Back to 18 on Tuesday with Tuck joining us for his first taste of the sweet, sweet NoBoG honey.

Dean, Paul, Tom and Stu played Spyrium, which was sold by Dean as “A game by the same bloke that did Caylus”. Then, as if that didn’t sell it enough – “It’s worker placement, but you don’t put workers on cards, you put them in between them”. Ah, cunning. I look forward to the next evolution in worker placement games, where cards are placed on top of workers. Heavy thick cards that crush the workers like some malevolent industrialist exploiting the people. Worker Exploitation it would be called. Far more representative than the sugar coated 'Worker Placement' phrase. Right, Punk Rich? Anyway… that Caylus bloke is William Attia and from a quick squint into the murky corner where Spyrium was being played it certainly had a resemblance to Caylus: Magna Carta with that pale blue look to the cards. Apparently, Spyrium is set in a steampunk version of England. Players build factories and recruit workers to produce a commodity called "Spyrium". Producing Spyrium in one factory, then processing it in the next results in victory points. Alternatively, Spyrium can be purchased, but the material is rare and expensive, and players are constantly short of precious cash. See? Better to exploit the workers.Their lives are cheap! This is definitely worker exploitation. Dean won as he was the most ruthless and cruel mill owner – flashing his gaudy VPs in the face of his down-trodden workers that had broken their backs for his superfluous gains. Boo hiss.

Ewan, Ed 2 and I played Bloodbowl Team Manager. I am pleased to announce that it ended with a crushing win for the Bondy Dwarves, who swept away the opposition with 48 fans, to the Orc and Human teams’ 24 fans a piece. Admittedly, I got lucky getting to compete in 4 match ups twice. However, all my dwarves were well treated and although they fought for their lives in a grim and bloody version of American Football they were paid well for their services. Ewan’s Orcs even had comprehensive health care in form of an apothecary. Better than working in Dean's Spyrium mill.

Rich, Pete, Martin, Ed and Richard played another Fantasy Flight spin-off from the Games Workshop stable in the form of the popular Chaos in the Old World. But despite this being seen regularly at NoBoG, this week, the players must have rested on their demonic laurels as the Old World (the game itself) beat them all. Chaos defeated, good wins!

Alina, Matt and Sam played Suburbia. Creating three Utopian neighbourhoods. Such beautiful neighbourhoods that they should all be declared winners.

On the final table, Fletch took Sam 2 and Tuck on a medieval farming journey with Agricola. Fletch won by five points. His family of farmers enjoying the simple pleasure of providing for themselves. Only for their children to bear witness to the ushering in of the industrial age, where in time, they would be forced to endure back-breaking tasks in those dark, satanic mills and eventually be thrown into destitution by the emergence of the spinning jenny.

At the end of the evening we split again for a games of Smash Up, the newly Resistance re-themed Coup and of course Resistance: Avalon. Various people won.

PR for Beginners

Apologies for the lack of updates here. John has gone to Lincolnshire for his annual holiday. Not a man to idly while away his time, he spends ten days each autumn, on a poultry farm, sexing chickens. Apparently, he finds sorting the little balls of fluff and sending the unfortunate male chicks off to a quick death very therapeutic.  He took a quick break in his holiday to remind me that I was shirking my duties and hadn't updated the blog. Don’t worry, John, I shall remedy that now. You can get back to that tray of tiny birds that need electrocuting.

Last Tuesday was Bonfire night and it would seem that many of our regulars were up for some pyrotechnics as only nine emerged from the chilled smoke-laden darkness to play games in the welcoming warmth of the Ribs of Beef. And how they were welcomed! Pete had found a cheesecake on offer in the Coop and brought it down for us lucky sods to enjoy. Thanks Pete.

On the games front there was a clamouring for the classic role selection game Puerto Rico, which was played with the full complement of five. I taught Nicky, Fletch, Richard and Clive. One experienced player against four noobs? Those that know Puerto Rico will assume that I won, with Clive sitting to my right probably handing me victory. Not so. Well, OK, as the only experienced Puerto Rico player I did win, but this was mostly down to the new guys playing a couple of exploratory rounds early on and not knowing about the game’s pacing, rather than the seating order. Nicky (who sat to my left) did really well with an aggressive building strategy, ending just a couple of VPs behind my mixed shipping strategy. For those of you wondering why I'm mentioning seating order – one of the biggest complaints about Puerto Rico is that seating order really matters and one inexperienced player can hand victory to the player sitting to their left. Much of the game is about selecting a role that not only helps you, but helps the other players the least. If the player to your right constantly chooses the Craftsman (which produces goods for all) then on your turn you’ll get first dibs on using the newly produced goods to enter the empty Trading House to earn cash or fill the empty Goods Ships to the detriment of the other players. I've seen it happen and heard moans of despair from players further around the seating plan, but on Tuesday, perhaps because (almost) everyone was inexperienced at Puerto Rico this wasn't an issue. Or maybe everyone was just having fun and didn't care too much about perceived injustices. Or maybe everyone at NoBoG is a savvy and hardened gamer and would rather burn on a bonfire rather than make a generous play that in any way benefited another player. Apart from Pete who would give everyone cheesecake. Cheers for that again, Pete. Anyway, nice to see Puerto Rico make a return.

Suburbia was maxed out with four players on the other table.  I can’t say what happened in Suburbia. It’s not a secret I just didn’t pay much attention. I do know they had two games of it. In the second game, Rich looked to be leading with an industrial complex of mighty proportions, dwarfing Sam, Pete and Robin’s efforts.

We finished the evening, as is now almost customary, with Resistance: Avalon. Myself, Sam and Clive did a terrible job as the evil dudes and the good guys with Rich as Merlin and Pete as Sir Percival rode home to victory.