Better Living Through (Al)Chemistry

Contrary to popular belief, science is not always an exact... science. For instance, the reason saccharin was discovered as a sweetener was because the chemist working on it accidentally got it over his hands, which then transferred to his sandwich. The lucky* chemist was then surprised when on eating his lunch the sandwich was a good deal sweeter than it had any right to be.

Being a good science lackey he then tasted everything on his bench, until on finding the culprit he figured he would test it was safe by taking a dose and waiting 24 hours.

Which, you know, is just sensible.

In a mad scientist, not to worry about poisoning kind of way.

A similar thing happened with LSD too when it was inadvertently absorbed through the hands. But with more colours and flying pigs.

Which leads you to some conclusions.

1) Never shake hands with a Chemist
2) Never trust a Chemist who asks you to just try something, it's safe honestly, it's been rigorously tested
and
3) Chemistry in some ways can still be a very medieval stick it in your mouth and see what it does type of activity.

And so it goes in the game Alchemists, which this week made a visit to the Ribs for some substance ingesting, random ingredient picking science. Old school style.

Alchemists - Mastermind for the Euro generation.

Alchemists is a light euro action selection type game who's main thrust revolves around deducing what ingredients do what. Or to put it another way, it's like a modern Euro take on the classic 70's family game Mastermind. Or the even older Cluedo.

Up to four players get to select actions from the board ranging from picking ingredients to drinking ( testing ) a potion. Crucial to scoring points is to figure out what each of the eight ingredients provide alchemically, and you do that by mixing any two ingredients together to get a potion and drinking it ( in the very best of Chemist Experimental Procedure ) - the result of which tells you some things about the ingredients. Rather humorously you can either get your poor suffering assistant to drink it - no bad effects should the potion turn out to be less than human compatible - or you can drink it yourself... if you're desperate.

After all the testing and observing, unless you have some kind of eidetic blind chess level of intellect, you mark down your results in a grid, which helps you to deduce what thing does what.

The more information you have about what does what, the more sure you can be of producing a certain type of potion - used to gain money when selling potions to adventurers, and also to score points in the final round - and also be more sure of what any ingredient provides.

The all important secret results grid of your potion drinking

Scoring points from your discoveries revolves around the concept of publishing your findings. For a gold coin you can publish a theory that Some ingredient provides Whatever alchemical goodness. This is a case of matching one of the eight ingredients to one of the eight available alchemical wotsits.

Publishing your work earns you reputation - victory points - and if you publish enough, reputation points per turn, and the chance to pick up a science grant of yet more reputation and cash.

The other wrinkle here is that published work doesn't necessarily have to be correct. You can publish any old tosh. Just to get your hands on a grant. Or some early points. But note, being found out - debunked - can cost you a serious penalty whilst handing a bonus to your debunker - and by game end your dubious statements will be revealed to be rubbish. Grants however, once awarded, stay awarded. Regardless of whether you are the academic equivalent of Beaker from the Muppets or the next Alchemical Linus Pauling.

The timing of publishing and debunking and any grants received provides the balance to whether spouting tosh pays off or not, plus a somewhat clever mechanism in allowing you to hedge your bets, know you are speaking rubbish, and secretly declare that you don't have much faith in your statement.

So how does it play ? The deduction part of the game is the meat and potatoes. The action selection is just an ordered way to get at the deduction. There isn't a whole lot of - or indeed hardly any - typical euro engine building and optimisation here, it's just about timing of scoring and getting your deductions done.

Which on the face of it is rather thin. However it is a fun experience - it's quite different from much of the board game field, and the added ( necessary ) gimmick of using your mobile phone to test results on adds a lot to an otherwise mechanically sparse game.

We played with four alchemists, which sees your action pool reduced to four a turn ( from a possible six ), which really makes figuring out ingredients a time pressured endeavour. Of course you can glean some information from others debunking, and the addition of a periscope or otherwise can allow you to snoop on others results, or make for more efficient resource gathering.

Smash Up. Reclining luxuriously on sofas.
AKA avoiding the camera

I enjoyed it a lot, Ben suffered an aneurysm about half way through and almost gave up figuring out potions, whilst Richard IV managed to cock up his results and get things spectacularly wrong and Ewan played a strong game of having the most bling equipment. Turn order was absolutely crucial - I was in a position at the end to score a truck load of points, but because I was beaten into last place turn order I could only sit back and watch everyone make dubious statements, wrong theories and generally miss out. Ewan won, I came second, and Rich and Ben challenged for Worst Alchemist of the Year.

Dead of Winter. Martin oversees the survivors.

Whilst all this alchemical nonsense was going on elsewhere Tragedy Looper was brought to table again, this time with Owein filling the shoes of the diabolical mastermind. When I checked in with them for the last time there was much shaking of the heads for the good guys, and a rather smug Owein gloating in the corner. I'm not sure who won this, but judging from that I would say Owein.

Camel Up galloped a few laps a table over, whilst Smash Up also did some smashing up on the comfy sofa seating table.

Downstairs Dead of Winter got another play, the colonists were doing a fantastic job, hardly any zombies, almost no helpless survivors ( were they even playing right ??? ), but morale was teetering on giving out entirely. They ended with a survivor victory and no traitors.

Hamsterolle. Wonky tables for pro level difficulty.

Mad King Ludwig was also on offer downstairs - this is proving to be really popular at the Ribs with an often eager player group waiting to bust it out. Fletch had a turn with this this week, and gave it a thumbs up and another confirmed report that it was indeed very similar to Suburbia, but nothing like as number crunching.

An ended Five Tribes. Guillame shows off his winning score.

Lastly James played Five Tribes for a final time before he sold it to Ben, Guillame winning this with a typical Euro stomping emphatic win - he's rather good at the Euro efficiency malarkey. They then followed up with the novelty acts of Hamsterolle and Loopin' Louie.

Other fillers were to be had. Guillotine made another show - Guillotine is racking up some fairly consistent plays.

Tragedy Looper. Tragically Owein is winning.

*Lucky - Lucky that he didn't a) die from cross contamination and the lesser point that b) also discovered something useful. One can only imagine that evolutionary pressures play a much greater role in selecting more assiduous scientists for say the role of Infectious Disease Researcher, which is perhaps why you don't hear about nearly so many "lucky" infectious disease scientists. The very worrying thought occurs that all scientists are like this, and that shaking hands with anyone in the scientific community is a good deal more hazard filled than people commonly believe.

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.

Poo, huh, yeah, what is it good for ?

As Edwin Starr never sung, Poo, huh yeah, what is it good for ? Absolutely nuthin !

Which is not strictly true as we found out this week with Adrian finally bringing Poo to the table. Fortunately for all concerned this wasn't Adrian acting out some display of trousers down table top defecation, but instead introducing us to Poo the card game, which sees players acting out as Monkeys flinging poo at each other and utilising it to humiliate your foes.

Poo - a card game, not a dinner party lighter trick gone wrong

At this point you might be wondering if there is any topic that could not be made into a game. Given infinite, ahem, monkeys, or an infinite amount of time with finite monkeys, is Poo the Card game what they would come up with ? It's probably a fair bet they would come up with it before getting around to writing the entire works of Shakespeare.

Poo is a quick filler game that sees you playing a fairly limited set of cards to either do poo damage to other monkeys or defending yourself from flung poo. Poo totals can go up and down as some cleaning can go on, and in practice this can lead to the game dragging its heels at times as the merry go round of flung poo, clean poo, flung poo, defend poo goes on. There isn't a whole heap of strategy or depth to this, hang onto those handy defences, try and play some good poo flings when someone is on the ropes, but by and large it pretty much plays itself.

A handful of poo. The game writes its own jokes.

I think the main draw to this game is the humorous and offbeat game and art and fulfils something of a novelty niche. In many ways the game plays out like a simplified Nuclear War, where instead of firing nukes and other complex weapon systems at each other you are chucking poo. Indeed there is even a card that is straight out of Nuclear War - the final retaliation card that allows a defeated player to play all his remaining poo cards at his enemy. A mutual poo destruction card.

Caroline won the poo flinging contest with quite an OCD cleaning run. She revealed at the end that her win was quite true to life. I gather she meant the OCD cleaning and not the poo throwing. You never know though.

Elsewise we played a nice game of Glass Road, where my last round met with some disastrous results and I missed two building actions to stumble to a poor 15 points along with Adrian, whilst Sam and Caroline scored a slightly better but still off 18 points. Both Sam and Caroline attempted to claim the moral victory, with Sam stating he had half a point of sand over everyone else, and Caroline attempting to count overlapping sand pits twice - which the points building didn't actually rule out as illegal.

We finished with some more cows from Sechs Nimmt, where as per usual, Round 1 and 2 I was in the lead, and slumped to an atrocious score in Round 3. Mr Bond was the greatest loser however, and Sam was the winner. Quite a good evening for Sam even though he continually professed to having no plan.

Meanwhile downstairs they played a wonky game of Tragedy Looper - Hal won again as the bad guy I believe. Hal is getting far too much practice as some evil doing time traveller. It's funny what board games end up training you for.

A Wherry room of Gamers, Room 25 front and centre.

Room 25 was also played. Lauren promised that she wouldn't kill me this time if I played. I wasn't falling for that however. And left them to it. Which was a good move as Lauren turned out to be an evil doing guard once again, and managed to win the game in preventing the hapless prisoners from escaping in time. Andrew as another evil guard won post humously after he blindly walked into a room of death in turn 3.

I think James got a blast of Five Tribes - can't quite remember, and I recall seeing Incan Gold out afterwards.

The seminal Settlers of Catan

Upstairs Mr Bond had a blast of retro Euro with Settlers of Catan. The title that kick started the board game revival and introduced the world to Euro / German gaming and the phrase Wood for Sheep, amusing countless numbers of American gamers. Mr Bond won this despite Lewis looking like he was in a strong position. Perhaps too strong, inviting everyone to ignore him with avengeance ? Who knows.

Pete got Lord of the Ice Garden to table for the fourth consecutive week. Everyone seems to be taking an exploratory stab at this, and this week it was the turn of what I rudely dubbed the old farts. Tom, Stu, Owein and Pete. I couldn't quite grab a thumbs up or thumbs down from this, from which I can assume it wasn't universally cheered as the next awesome sauce or the worst of the worst.

Werewolf had some blasts downstairs. I think the wolves won it. Richard the IV even went so far as to twitbrag about it. A lesson for werewolfers at NoBoG in future - check twitter for tells.

25 for this round of gaming. Giving rise to more than one person noting how quiet it was this week. 25 is quiet. Apparently. Just so you know. The stats reckon its average. This time last year 25 would have been a record attendance. Pfah.

No Cake, Plenty of Hats

Despite there being rumours of cake for this weeks shenanigans they turned out to be greatly exaggerated. As Portal players know, the cake was indeed a lie. In place of cake however there were a great many admiral hats to be had, which lead NoBoG to take on something of an 18th Century Naval feel, despite there being no 18th Century Naval games to play. The hats were part of some beer promotion, and were being given to those who I can only assume looked dashing enough to pull the look off. Of course I had one - Lewis kindly gave me his. Wait. Does that mean I wasn't dashing ? And Lewis was ? I demand a recount.

I am ashamed to admit that I failed to take a picture of anyone wearing the jaunty headgear, Richard the IV in particular wore his with aplomb.

Ticket to Ride Marklin

But enough of hats. This week Elliot was back with Ticket to Ride Marklin - presumably after he had calmed from his rage that totally did not happen you guys - and this time managed to redeem himself in good order by thrashing everyone at the table. Particularly Lewis. Who's cheesy Marklin winning grin from a few weeks ago meant that he deserved his thrashing.

On the table over we had the cool and yet simultaneously hot Tragedy Looper, a game about manipulating time to prevent bad things from happening. Like suicides. And murders. Uh huh. It's a dark little anime game, what can you say ?

The game with its locations and characters comes off in a way like a modern Cluedo with a heavy anime vibe and a reset button. If you get it wrong about who is doing what to whom you get to try

Tragedy Looper

again - hopefully with some information gleaned from your failure. Unlike Cluedo the players all pitch in together to match wits against a single mastermind character. By manipulating the characters via such things as increasing their paranoia ( and potentially making them commit suicide... ) tragedies can be overted or instigated.

A deduction game that is driven from a number of scenarios to setup the puzzle ( with rules on how to make up your own scenarios ) it presents a fresh style of gameplay that is rarely seen. With its modern incarnation and funky anime style ( the game is originally japanese and has only just recently made its way into the Western markets ), it's an interesting cool game that will please those who like to use deduction, logic and misdirection to win games.

On the last table downstairs Lords of Vegas got another play where Mr Bond had a possible case of beginners luck and took the title of the Lordiest Lord of Vegas. Despite winning he wasn't entirely sure what rating to give the game, good, ok, ehhhhh were all words he used. I suspect the Random Number Generator that is active in the game was putting him off somewhat. Lords of Vegas is a good game, but sometimes the luck can be kind of crazy and end up making a bit of a foregone conclusion of a 2 hour session.

Tokaido

Upstairs the clean aesthetically pleasing art of Tokaido was on show where everyone travels along a single path and decides where they would like to go. Where you move to determines the way in which you can score points and how many there are on offer. Stringing together a decent strategy whilst working around the other bumbling idiotic players that are getting in your way is the crux of the game.

A nice light game created by the same guy that did amongst other things Takenoko, Ghost Stories and 7 wonders.

Finally Dead of Winter got another try, and once again the colony collapsed - this time amidst raging hunger as Richard the IV plunged the knife in. An epic three betrayers were at the table of five, with poor Caroline and Tom facing a very uphill struggle.

Dead of Winter

The betrayers all won I think - once you take into account there was some rules questions - and I am now beginning to think that Dead of Winter is just too hard for non betrayers. It's too easy for a betrayer to sit largely unseen before at a critical juncture upending the table and causing the colony to tank. The game is plenty hard enough that often the betrayers don't need to do much if anything to weaken the colony to where it becomes vulnerable to a sudden upset. Perhaps Rich IV is right and more exiling needs to go on. Hard to say.

The game has a lovely narrative nevertheless and the crossroads cards really inject a story into the play. I had a great card trigger that I had never seen before - if someone at the table yawns, trigger this card. I failed to spot anyone yawning however.

Boss Monster !

To finish off some fillers were played - Nates table that were playing Tokaido also played Hanabi ( same designer ) and I think Skull & Roses. Downstairs Boss Monster got a blast and finally we had an epic eight handed game of Avalon Resistance, which saw Lewis as Merlin possibly the most upset / stressed I have ever seen him ( he recounted that he had nightmares about the last time he had played Resistance 8 or so months ago ) as Pete a filthy evil doer labelled him a spy. Pete was doing a great job playing it straight but towards the end perhaps his one too many accusations at everyone else made too many fingers point him out and the table turned for a good guy win.

Despite Luke and Pete being sure that Lewis was Merlin, it was Tom as Percival that got stabbed in the face, securing the win for the good guys.

Pete then spent the next ten minutes whilst exiting and standing outside the pub logic ranting about mistakes made. I think he was slightly miffed at losing when he knew Obvious Merlin was Merlin.

Nevertheless another really enjoyable, very noisy and pretty stressy game.

25 this week.