I WILL BLOW YOUR BRAINS OUT M*!$*R F(*&£R!

And so I convened at the gathering of fiends once again for more prime gameage action. It had been some weeks since I had sat at the table, fumbling through the Marvel Heroes rule book, and having endured a tough day at work I was ready to enjoy myself, if at all possible. There was a substantial number of folks present, and I wound up as I often do at the Euro table, with Matt, Jimmy, Luke and "the new kid" Olly, very pleasant to make your acquaintance sir. I am sure these stalwarts of Euro gaming wonder why I masochistically put myself through the torture of the Euro efficiency exercise on such a regular basis, but the answer is that I get my kicks from gaming from the social aspect. If the game sucks, it really doesn't matter that much to me so long as people talked a lot during the game and there are laughs. And beer. This weeks offerings of fine ales at the Beef meant that I was able to ask the lady behind the bar for a Piddle in the Snow. And very nice it was too.

Ok, onto the action. Jimmy had brought back approximately every game released at Essen, and was quite keen to play each one, in order, for all eternity. This led us to a new offering from a Czech designer, I don't think I have played any Czech games before, but to be honest this one could have been made in any country as it didn't really have any surprising differences to any of the other games from the vast pantheon of the EURO. League of Six has the rather depressing theme of collecting taxes for the King, but it quickly becomes apparent that the theme is largely irrelevant. Players are bidding guards (or Knights as we erroneously and consistently referred to them as) to collect taxes from 1 of 6 medieval cities in a distinctly Amun Re mode. Being an incompetent player of such efficiency exercises, I rarely got into any bidding wars and generally settled for whatever was cheapest. This was plainly a bad decision as whatever was cheapest was mostly cheap for a reason. For some reason as a tax collector you end up with goods, that you put on your cart and deliver somewhere. So I ended up with minimal goods that I continually used to score victory points. As the final round drew to an end a mere 2 hours after we started, I was nestling in second place. Luke was way out in front. Look at that, I had done quite well! No I hadn't. Of course I hadn't. This is a Euro, surely you have realised by now that there is a SECONDARY SCORING MECHANISM. Collect suits of cards to earn yourself 9, 6, 4 or 2 points depending on how many you have! And I had none! Of any suit at all! So whilst Matt, Jimmy, Olly and Luke collected their bonus points, I slowly slipped further and further behind. Olly and Luke battled it out for the win, Luke narrowly pipped him, Matt and Jimmy were next in some other order, and there was I, the most pathetic tax collector in Lusatia. Well. I believe I sort of enjoyed the game, I definitely got into it as it went along, but whilst it was very well received by Luke and Jimmy it just never was going to be the kind of game that I would run home to place an order for from "Ja, ich liebe Spiele!".

Following all that intense intelligence and fawning to the freaking King, I lowered the tone and disgusted my fellow serious gamers by imposing the bawdy Ca$h n Gun$ on everyone, bar Jimmy, who went off to the other table to beat everyone at Franks Zoo. Anyways, I was getting the skunk eye from Luke in particular as I bumbled through the rules in my usual fashion. "This game has 1 minute of rules?" I could tell he was thinking. I was not expecting things to go well. And so the pointing of the orange foam guns commenced with nervous laughter and a bit of trepidation. I attempted to spice things up a little, but the lack of booze was causing quite a lot of shyness, Matt pointed out we were being far too polite and Olly rightly decried my attempt at brash rudeness by mocking my Norfolk accent that slips out when I am happy and relaxed. Many guffaws were to be had as we worked up the confidence to behave like complete buffoons for 20 minutes. I can't remember who won, Matt I think, he had a ridiculous amount of cash. We then were joined by Simeon, who had played the game before and we kicked things up a notch by introducing the special cards. I think we were more relaxed now as the second game flowed, with much yelling, laughing and general amusement. Luke revealed early on that he was INSANE! (we all knew this already), but he had a FREAKING GRENADE! This meant that we were all too scared to shoot Luke. Wounds were racked up, Matt got shot up and died just before the end, Luke never got shot, and Olly was quietly racking up money. The final bullets spent, we cashed in. Luke smugly announced he had $115k. Olly counted up, he also had $115k. But he was also SUPER COWARD! He was awarded $5k for his single display of shamefulness, and won. The least likely thug of all time, gangsters simply don't wear scarves Olly! I think we all enjoyed it. I was relieved that it hadn't fallen flatter than a pancake, and went home pleased that we had managed to play something that was a little out of the ordinary. And next time we play this Olly, "oi arm gooing to shoot you roight goord".