BOO!rd Games

OoooOOOOOooooOOOooooo! Welcome to the spoooOOoooOOokiest NoBloG of the year on account of it being Hallowe'en and stuff. It was on the quieter side of things this Tuesday — you could in fact say it was a little dead. Ho ho. I mean it wasn't actually dead, it was bangin' as always, but allow me some punistic license. Before the games started, Hannah treated us to some spooktably thematic chocolates:

BRING ME THE SKULLS OF MY ENEMIES!
OK, skulls of chocolate will do.

Anyway, I had a little look around in between being made an example of by Lewis (which we shall come to) and saw gamers playing Clank!, Champions of Midgard and Dead of Winter, whilst I played Betrayal at the House on the Hill. I'm surprised and indeed disappointed there was no rule that everyone had to play spooky games!

I suppose a ghost could clank its spooky, ethereal chains, but that's all the link to spookiness there is in this deck-building dungeon explorer. The aim is to steal the dragon's loot and escape using "the power of deck-building." I'm quite skeptical as to how impressed any creature that can breathe actual fire is going to be over how astutely you discard your starting cards but who am I to say? Things I notice on the board include archaeologists and bananas. I assume the archaeologists are not loot, but what about the bananas? I mean it's important to have a source of slow-release sugar when exploring a dungeon, and bananas are, to be fair, yellow, but I was promised gold! This is as bad as when Pocahontas gave the colonists sweetcorn instead of shiny metal.

Clonk!

Also the dragon looks like a seahorse. I'm not sure how much of a challenge stealing loot from a seahorse would be, even though Sam assures me that they are "very protective of their young!" Indeed it turns out you can actually steal dragon eggs, so you're less making off with a dragon's loot as with its afternoon snack and all its children. Harsh.

It's a bloody seahorse.

Next I had a look at the Champions or at least the players of Midgard, where there were actual tons of bits, which apparently were special kickstarter goodies. I've only played it once and didn't even recognise the game because there were so many little pieces. Tim announces, "we're foightin'" in what is claimed to be a Viking accent but which sounds remarkably more local combined with yokel. Aye, the Norfolk Raiders were well known for pillaging up and down the East Anglia coast, all the more effective because they could use their feet instead of oars. Ewan is trying to kill Fenrir Cob (like his brother "corn", not to be accepted as a substitute for gold) but isn't taking any surplus food on the journey, because he is a man who lives life on the edge. Meanwhile Tim is taking his entire party of mighty warriors on a hunting jolly because he wants food. Maybe to kill stuff on expeditions, maybe just to eat. At least the Norfolk Raiders have the gluttony aspect of Viking life down.

In Dead of Winter a player who, for the sake of dignity will remain anonymous, managed to end up in a location with a bitten survivor and get killed by the zombie plague on the first turn. Then he re-drew a rubbish dude and basically hadn't done anything at all by the time I came by. Thankfully Jamie, whose character literally appears to be Doctor Who (the tenth) can restore morale which must have come in handy what with all the bite-y, plague-y, zombie-y death. I actually don't want to know how this happens for I can only assume it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "sonic screwdriver." In spite of my repeated accusations that Jamie is the traitor he professes to believe there isn't one at all. And when I steal his goal card it even says he isn't one, so that must have been a decoy. He's very sneaky.

Looking down (metaphorically) on Dead of Winter

Jamie insisted I document the fact that he
wasn't a traitor.

The crappy replacement survivor

But what about a story of spooks, scares, and Betrayal? The game started normally; we picked our characters (I chose the little girl because I feel she best represents my inner self) and started exploring. I went to the roof (and not at all because the ground floor was at the opposite table — such metagaming is beneath me. Being on the roof, so is most of the game.) Hannah fell down a hole and we were all rapidly finding items. I found a dog. You might think that's cute, but I'm pretty sure that, besides being described as mangy, it was probably riddled with disease and maybe cursed after being in the house so long. It wasn't long though before the Haunt was on and the traitor was revealed!

A cute, innocent little girl. Definitely not grinning
maniacally and out of her tiny mind.

Except... they weren't. Curses — it was a "traitorless" haunt. Except... it wasn't. But the game wasn't ready to reveal the traitor to everyone just yet. What it was ready to reveal was that we all had Saw-style death-collars around our necks and would be getting a little nip/tuck in the neck area if we didn't each soon find a pair of keys to unlock our collars. The traitor even had their own collar, but if we got to the time when it triggered, it would just harmlessly click and only then would they be revealed. The traitor was a little upset that we hadn't helped his mother (or wife, or someone) in a car accident and left her to burn to a crisp. I think I'd be a little put out in that situation as well, but we weren't given an opportunity to discuss healthy ways of grieving with the traitor, so we were stuck. We had to unlock the collars of three honest explorers in order to win, but if we unlocked that of the traitor that was also fine — except they might then just start murdering us with their bare hands, in which case we'd still lose if we didn't have three goodies alive.

The first round of potential beheadings passed without incident (the likelihood of anyone ending up shorter increasing each round) and by the third we had already unlocked two of the collars (most importantly, we had unlocked mine, my trusty/mangy dog having retrieved the second one. The other key turned out to be inside me but by this point, my little girl character was skilled enough at abdominal surgery to extract it with barely a scar remaining) Unfortunately as we carried on looking for more keys, Hannah's fate, and that of another player whose name I've forgotten (sorry) wasn't so rosy and with a snap their necks were veritably cleft in twain. And there was much lamenting. Not least because now there were only two people left with collars and we basically needed to guess who was the traitor to win. Things weren't looking so good though when, next round, Lewis' collar fell harmlessly to the ground instead of severing his neck, whereupon he decided to head to the remaining collared player and start wailing on him with an axe, leaving him within an inch of his life. Things went from bad to worse when he tried to leave the room but was molested by an animated corpse. In his weakened state, he succumbed to the zombie's attacks, and Lewis was victorious.

As is now the law, since Hallowe'en is over, all blog posts from now until February will be Christmas-themed. Bye!

We Now Return to our Regular Program.

Cough cough cough hello? Oh, eurh, ah! I remember this thing. Let's see if I can remember what to do. I think we played some games at the pub, possibly drank some beer, then we went home, the end. How'd I do?

Pffff OK fine. We played many games, some of which were Takenoko, Cyclades, Vikings Gone Wild, Evolution and Arctic Scavengers. And also a bunch of other ones that I was far too lazy and having far too much fun to write about.

The first of the aforementioned games, Takenoko, looks like a sort of Chinese Catan, but instead of a robber, there's a panda. Damn thievin' pandas. Somehow I've managed to miss out on playing this NoBoG perennial, so the players gave me the lowdown. The aim is to complete objectives, the first person to complete a few getting a bonus, the winner then being determined based on number of points gained from objectives.

Hexes + Sticks = Catan, I will accept no
disagreement. Fite me.

Ominous hand of doom casts a doom-laden
shadow over panda-thief of doom.

Objective cards of two kinds

Objectives can take one of three forms: having certain formations of irrigated tiles, certain amounts and heights of bamboo or making the pandathief eat certain bamboos. All of thse different things are accomplished through actions which you can take two of per turn. You have to take two different ones, so it's a good idea to take different goals so that you can work towards more than one each turn. It's difficult to purposefully screw people over because you never know what their goals are. Lewis shows me everything in an excited manner, and when I come back around there's looaads of bamboo growing. Maybe the Panda got full?

The bamboo grows taller.

Box art modelled by Lewis

Bonus card modelled by Lewis

Then I cycled over to a table playing Cyclades. (I didn't actually, that would be weird inside.) Cyclades is "World Domination slash Island Hopping," apparently — though I'm not sure if that's the kind of island hopping that Caledonian Macbrayne offers between the various Hebrides. You're fighting over fruit or "prosperity croissants" as the players call them (I'm not sure whether that's down to overactive imaginations or this is a colourfully named part of the CalMac breakfast option). They are actually cornucopiae and supposed to represent revenue but to be fair to the philistines they do look a bit like croissants. So the croissants give you money (they do always seem to go quickly at Tesco) which you then offer to the cash-grubbing Gods of ancient Greece. Whoever offers the most money to a particular God gets to take the corresponding action, such as obtaining or moving boats (Poseidon), getting or moving troops (Ares) and so on. If you lose the auctions you can always fall back on Apollo who'll get you more baked crescents. Another thing you can do with the Gods is summon awesome-looking mythical beasts like krakens and all sorts, though for some inexplicable reason no-one had done that yet. I mean, if I had been playing then who cares what the best tactics were, I'd be summoning myself a kraken at the very first opportunity!

Island Hopping: not just for MacArthur!

Gods to whom you can tribute money.

Three warriors defending a
prosperity croissant

Cthulhu wakes! Whoops, wrong mythology.

The objective of the whole thing is to get buildings and merge them into metropolises. The nice thing (depending on which end of it you're on) is that you can let someone else build the metropolises and then walk in and nick them. Easy peasy! Though apparently you have to actually win the fight before the guys on the island just give up the city — so much effort!

Wild-eyed from playing Vikings Gone Wild, Hannah declared that she had been drinking all the beer. Specifically she is "a very aggressive drunk Viking." In fact they've got so wild that James has fudged the win conditions so that they could carry on playing for longer! Crazy!Wild! As an excuse, Hannah said they were "having too much fun," though I suspect that James just needed a bit more time to win. Hannah has tons of chicken towers which (for some reason) add defence, and also the ability to tax everyone else's beer. This is particularly unfortunate for David whose economy is based around making beer.

There sure is a lot of stuff on this board.

That's a lot of gold.

That's a lot of beer. Would be shame
if anyone were to... tax it.

Next I popped along to the primordial soup of Evolution. Now, some people would say Sam has only just crawled out of the primordial soup himself but that would be rude and unfair. The objective is to get as much food in your food pouch at the end of the game. Though of note is the fact that food goes into the pouch after you've eaten it — but for some reason the game didn't see fit to describe it as the poo pouch, or as I'd call it, the poouch. You have to add traits, body size and population among your species in order to accomplish this. Some critters can become carnivores in which case the others need to evolve defences or the ability to run away if they are not to become someone else's poo. You can even make one of your species a carnivore and have it eat one of your others! By the end of the first turn though I realised just what kind of game it is as Luke evolves a "hard shell" and Sam becomes "fertile." One can only assume that their species are, respectively, birds and bees. Tortoise-birds, I guess.

Primordial soup

Curse your sudden but primordial betrayal!

We always knew it, Sam.

Heheh. Hard.

Well, let us scrape together an account of Arctic Scavengers. It was my first time playing this deck builder that takes place in a typical post-apocalyptic nuclear winter or something. Your goal is simply to accrue as much population as you can, which is achieved by recruiting new people to your cause. There are three ways of acquiring new cards: digging through rubbish (which can turn up tools and assorted junk, but not people), directly recruiting people from the pool available to everyone, and fighting your opponents for a powerful card unknown to everyone except one player. Each card contributes some amount to zero or more actions: digging, recruiting, fighting and also drawing more cards from your deck. If a person has a particular ability, they can be given a tool to enhance it, as well.

Available cards for scavengin'

Tim considers his options.
Thankfully there aren't too many so we
weren't waiting that long ;)

Whatever cards you don't use on your turn are saved and then, at the end of the round, all are revealed and whoever has the most fighting ability wins the secret card: though to contribute, tools must be attached to a person and a person can't use more than one tool at once. The various ability scores cap quite low, so it's not likely for someone to get an unassailable advantage, but as you start upgrading your cards you do gain quite a bit — Ewan was able to handily defeat everyone else in the end-of-round fights by the end of the game. This set him up for a clear win, as many of the rewards from the fights are cards with massive population numbers (up to 5 compared to 1 for most regular cards). Having only played one game it's difficult to tell what alternative strategies are available — I don't see how you can win without doing well at the fights since they give you such large bonuses. However to win them you do have to set aside cards to win which you could be using to recruit cards with known strengths. You are prevented from really shooting for any single strategy though because you can only do each action once per turn — so if you stack up on cards which allow you to recruit you're going to be disappointed when a future hand allows you to dig ten times but you can still only keep one of the resulting cards. This is great for a deck-building moron such as myself but might frustrate people who are good at them and enjoys picking a particular strategy. In the end I came joint second with Eliza, which I consider quite respectable due to the aforementioned moronitude, although I think Eliza was a bit miffed about being caught in the crossfire of such self-deprecation — sorry!

And that's all I got! Catch you next time, gamers!

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