Ninja Penguins

With the excesses of the long bank holiday weekend past, Tuesday once more rolled around to find a group of travellers stumbling hastily into The Ribs. Given an asylum choice between the Ecuadorian embassy and a pub with games, six of us chose beer and entertainment. No word on what the Ecuadorian Embassy was offering other than a long boring conversation with Julian Assange, who after some 80 odd days couped up in the building must be by now going slightly cabin crazy - and without so much as a copy of Settlers to pass the time.

Unlike the embassy, our group busied themselves Ninja-ing, designing space ships, plying galactic trade routes, fishing in the ice and building wonders of the ancient world. Which is a rather surprising and unexpected range of activities to find going on at your local pub. Usually its just drinking - which we also managed to do.

Another veteran NoBoGer turned up for the evening - Dylan - there must be something in the water, or the weather is driving them out from their usual hiding places as this last month or so has seen a rash of vets turn up to put in a celebrity appearance.

Dylan, Mr Bond and myself settled down to Galaxy Trucker, with Bondy struggling to get his ships completed on time, Dylan consistently confusing his cabins for cargo holds, whilst I serenely cruised  to a good lead come the end of Round 2.

In a suspiciously Hustle type move, Bondy suddenly turned things around in the last round, completed a spanking ship in record time and swept pirates, smugglers and slavers before him to rack up a huge amount of bounty and haul home an enormous cargo to boot. Dylan and myself could only trail in his exhaust picking up the odd scrap - and the huge armament of my ship mostly unused.

Meanwhile on table 1, Matt, Dean and Tim strapped on their Ninja Tabi and proceeded to stealth around the grounds stealing items and wooing courtesans for their clan. Actually I am not sure what wooing courtesans has to do with it, but those involved assure me its a necessary 'sacrifice'.

Tim was obviously going for the Best Dressed Gamer of the evening award, as can be half seen in the picture to the right. But despite his obvious evening wear flair he only managed to place last with Matt and Dean beating him in the contest of who has the blackest pyjamas. Dean who has described this game as his favourite most played game clinched the victory peppering his foes with wooden shuriken and fancy cards.

Back on table 2, Hey, Thats My Fish was setup for a couple of quick rounds of penguin mayhem. The dancing birds shuffled around the ice floe to visit horrible isolation death on their penguin foes, their cute features belying their brutal machiavellian manouevering. The savvy and noble red penguins lead by myself secured a nicely sized island of fish and forged ahead to a comfortable win in round 1.
Round 2 saw Dylans shifty and underhanded blue penguins become far too greedy, trying to hive off a large portion of the ice floe for their own selfish bellies. Not standing for that kind of fish piracy my noble penguins and Bondys hapless birds assaulted his position, and stopped his greed from getting out of hand.
Somehow whilst this was happening, my red penguins also managed to win a nice sized island chunk and contest a third group of ice floe, leading my forces to another comfortable victory.
Bondy once again disgusted with his performance, derisively slurred his score as Rubbish.

Finally, all six of us grouped up for a game of Seven Wonders, both heavily militaristic players - Dean and Matt, scoring well, with Dean romping ahead with a perfect military score and a large number of points for science to boot. Matt managed to secure half the gold reserves of the old world - a sum of 30 odd coins to hand, making up for an otherwise rather bare play area.