NoBoG Mondays have branched out with a regular roleplaying group organised by Adam, they've been trialing different systems and different GMs so far, and their numbers seem to be a pretty solid single group 5 at the moment. Board game wise NoBoG Mondays continue to be a very quiet affair, and the last few weeks we've been down to a single table of 3.
Secret Hitler - the popular and epically still not released social deduction game - continues to wane in the number of plays it's getting. Apparently the full version has switched over to wooden bits and wooden boxes and a much higher component quality, but I'm gonna take a guess here and say that the game has already peaked and the arrival of the final commercial sets will be a subdued affair - I think pretty much everyone that's even been slightly interested in the game has already had a chance to play a print and play version of the game at this point. After the smoke and hype has cleared the game hasn't had the legs that Resistance had - at least at NoBoG - possibly because its premise is only a subtle ( and purposefully mildly outrageous ) variant on Resistance itself, whereas Resistance was a much more innovative evolution of Mafia. Plus differing roles and game variance.
The main schtick of Patchistory is that of the patch cards. Every turn you get to bid on and take a two by two civilisation card from a central pool which must be laid at least partially on top of the other two by two civilisation cards that you already own. This creates a patchwork of overlaid cards representing production sites and historically important stuff. Patchistory indeed. Some things will end up buried under other things, with all the remaining visible and intact things forming the current state of your civilisation, and part of the art of this game is figuring out where things can fit, and what and when to sacrifice and bury under more important cards.
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| Patchistory - image courtesy of bgg |
Which all sounds pretty good. And it is pretty good. But the game has some play balance and feedback issues. The game has a wacky startup that limits a civ to only 40% of the available actions to be taken in a turn - and getting access to the other 60% is a hit and miss affair of competing in a cutthroat auction. Have an unfortunate series of turns, or a player(s) that is using a political starvation strat and you could find yourself playing a significant amount of the game stuck being able to do only the most cursory of actions. This is a huge issue where the game fails to properly get started for a player - in my case I was literally half way through the game, an hour and a half in, before I finally managed to bust out and take more meaningful actions. There are also issues with feedback loops on things like money - getting more money allows you to win auctions and secure patch cards.. that possibly earn you more money, and yada and so on. Unless there's a particularly choice set of empire upgrades going on, going for dominance in money is a simple and solid strategy, particularly because resources can be traded into other resource types, but only money gets you dominance on getting those choice history cards.
The problem of money and auction dominance also feeds into how swingy the game can be. It certainly feels like a lot of the game is just busy work, and by that I mean you spend a lot of time and effort dicking around the edges, only for a single card to come along and swamp all the other clever subtle things you've been doing by giving you all your victory point cards in one lump. If you have money dominance, picking up the right card to give you a huge dump of points can mean a lot, in our game Guillame had a single card that scored some 2/3 of his overall points and I think Pete had one that ended up scoring him half his points.
BGG has not been silent on the issue of dodgy political starts and there is a suggested fix for this to open up gameplay. But overall I was left with the feeling that the game has an interesting and different central mechanism but has been let down by playtesting that hasn't revealed some glitchy game balance. Or maybe it did but they just didn't care.
Interesting game, and even if some of the game is just busy work, it's quite charming busy work. I have a suspicion it could degenerate a bit once players know specific cards to look out for and riff major scores from however. I think Patchistory passes the mark overall with a few simple game fixes to help it along, is by no means perfect, but is cool to play.
Talking of game design . . .
Without any doubt we're currently experiencing a golden age of table top gaming. Never has the field been so popular or so well served with so many new titles that puts the previous board game peak back in the early to mid 80's to shame. However, as more and more games come to market, riff off each other, taking pieces and slamming them together in different ways, I fear the quality of how some of these games hang together as a playable experience suffers. All too often I get to play games that have gaping holes in them, that perhaps on paper sound like a good idea, but in practice fail in some awful way when put under stress. Games like this for me almost always fall into the category of being in the business of playing like you'd imagine a board game to play, but mechanically playing like a trout tied to a brick. Almost as if you copied a game you once saw through a window, got the spirit of having cubes, and people moving shit about, but completely failed to understand what makes a game... an actual engaging exercise. Or if you like, trying to design a car by only ever having seen the outside of one ( and having no prior knowledge of what an internal combustion engine was ). It looks like a car. It certainly doesn't drive like a car.
Of course at this point you could get all philosophical and start to debate how much playing games are just about having fun and how much they're about puzzle solving and strategising and being in charge of your own destiny. At one end of the scale flicking wet playing cards at each other to see if they stick to your opponents forehead might be considered a fun game, whilst locking yourself in an isolation room with a pile of sudoku might be considered a mental workout. And in different situations those things are appropriate. For me, the idea of a modern kind of board game is one that is fun, but, also, hangs together well - occupies a meaningful design space that doesn't make a mockery of your time spent or actions you are taking.
I think games being pushed out of Kickstarter only exacerbate the situation of dodgy design even further by skipping the traditional critical eye of a seasoned game publisher or relying on the pressures of an investment to ensure a product is sound, and instead skipping to a group of willing enthusiasts who provide zero feedback into product development, but allow anything from half assed designs to gimmicks to see the light of day.
In theory something like Kickstarter democratises the whole production mechanism. In practice it can remove oversight and QA from design and ends up rewarding shiny presentations over anything else. Or in other words. You can peddle any old shit to a naive but enthusiastic punter that cannot see entirely what you're going to give them.
If you're being cynical you might wonder if this is not a huge cash in on the happy go lucky willingness of the board game enthusiast to part money with anything that has colourful cubes or bigger than ever miniatures ( and this is not limited to kickstarters here - there is a gold rush going on for any kind of board game that looks like it could sell well ). If you're being less cynical then perhaps you could think this is the product of an enthusiastic but naive and poorly skilled army of wannabe game designers pushing out their lovingly crafted - but ultimately flawed - brain farts.
A straw poll for any game kickstarter backers. How many kickstarted games have you received that are truly great games that you continually play ? How many are ok games that you play once in a while ? And how many are flawed disasters that you probably only play due to consumer investment ? Take a cold, hard, critical eye to those kickstarters. And see how they stack up against best in the field board games. And how many of those games look nice, seem to promise something cool, but end up lacklustre in play or balance ?
Moving on.
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| Isle of Skye |
Last weekend the eagerly awaited UK Games Expo happened over in Birmingham, and a good sized contingent of NoBoGers headed West to join in. Elliot had a stand at the expo and with the help of Joe, was demoing and selling both his own Orctions game and acting as auctioneer ( sorry Orctioneer ) to a whole stack of accumulated games that managed at one point to bring the expo to a standstill. Elliot was also auctioning a bunch of unwanted NoBoGer games at the event, and in something of a convoluted path, Sean ended up buying one of Nickys games but with an added 300 mile round trip to Birmingham and back in order to do so. The NoBoG attendees report on having a great time and managing to get together and play a whole bunch of games with each other. And some have already booked their places for next year. Crazy keen !
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| Champions of Midgard |
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| Imperial Assault |
For those more into the serious art of euro gaming, Nate turned up for a couple of weeks in May with his usual strong showing of Euros including Aquasphere, and things like Mombasa, Steam Time, Troyes and Rokoko have seen table time. Aquasphere actually got played a couple of times in May - gasp - which is great as this is one of my fave games, but seems somewhat tricky to get to table particularly given it's somewhat fearsome hardcore reputation.
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| Rokoko |
Brewcrafters has largely gone on hiatus with David mostly not being able to make it to NoBoG due to work commitments - perhaps I should start bringing it to pick up the brewing slack !
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| Clacks being played cooperatively |
James also had another kinda new game in the form of Artifacts Inc., a dice worker placement type game ( similar mechanics to things like Kingsburg ) which was a nice archeology themed card collecting engine building kinda game that seemed pretty solid, butttt, probably went on for about 30 minutes longer than it needed to. It runs a bit long for what it was basically, but to be honest, it's a minor grumble and it's pretty nice.
Fillers seem to be a mixed bag at the moment, and whilst Secret Hitler is being played, Sechs Nimmt has crept back in as the stalwart fun filler, Guillotine is still popping up here and there, Resistance has had a few blasts and One Night Werewolf is doing a fair trade. I'm getting quite a few plays of Divinaire in as well, and Port Royale is showing up once in a while. Despite having the expansion for Mafia de Cuba, this filler has gone pretty much unloved, and things like Saboteur haven't been played in an age. Which reminds me, I should make more of an effort to get some regular Tichu play in - a great four handed card game.
Plenty of other games have been played too many to mention, but including Dead of Winter, Panamax, Robinson Crusoe, Kingdom Builder, Archipelago, Galaxy Trucker and Cauldron.
Chairs have steadily been going awol on their own missions in the Tun, first the Gin Palace decided to help themselves to some of our more old school chairs - and were then retrieved - before the Pint of Science event then helped themselves to all our chairs downstairs, before finally this week, the Tun itself deciding that some of our nicer chairs were far too good for us, and placing them at the front of the pub and out of our use.
To one extent or another this puts me on the borderline of either just letting it go, or being annoyed at the liberties being taken. Having had to kit out our own chairs and tables to accommodate numbers it seems at the very least impolite that everyone and their mom has then come along and helped themselves - without so much as a please and thank you. I demanded the chairs back from the Gin Palace ( outright underhand theft imo after they'd tentatively asked about buying them, not pursued it and then just decided to take them anyway ), let the Pint of Science event slide, and have politely pointed out to Luke this week that four of the chairs at the front of the pub are actually ours. On the one hand we have plenty of chairs to go around and am happy to let others use them so long as we don't need them, on the other hand, some of the nicest chairs have been swiped which left this week Lewis sitting on a not so great chair upstairs. I feel there is a case there, that if the pub is short of nice chairs, it should go buy some nice chairs and probably not just help themselves to ours ? Or at the very least ask and say, hey, we are out of chairs, can we use some of yours. Sure. Except. They're not out of chairs at all. They just liked our ones.
Meh.
According to my personal code of ethics that makes the perpetrators at the very least rude. You certainly wouldn't catch me just helping myself to stuff. Maybe I am old fashioned.
If it keeps happening I fear we will need to enact plan Nuclear, retrieve all the tables and chairs and brand them with some serious ass NoBoG logoing. Heat branded. Or engraved. Or some shit. But surely it won't come to that. Maybe I'll just take a pocket knife to whittle with every week whilst I game.
Or maybe I should just not worry and let things land where they may ? By all means let me know in the comments.
As always. The gallery. A monstrous several week gallery full of pretty pictures of games that statistically you probably weren't playing. ( although technically I skipped an entire week of taking pictures... so there's a lost week of May in there somewhere )
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| Kingdom Builder |
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| Champions of Midgard |
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| Sheriff of Nottingham |
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| Panamax |
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| Pete terrorises a group new to the game at German Galaxy Trucker with all the expansions. |
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| Steam Time |
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| Dead of Winter |
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| Castles of Mad King Ludwig |
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| Skyline 3000 - this was the game that did 300 miles |
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| Imhotep... Imhotep... Imhotep.... sorry.. Mummy flashbacks. |
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| Dead of Winter |
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| Robinson Crusoe |
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| Troyes |
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| Lords of Waterdeep |
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| Battlestar Galactica |
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| Cauldron. Despite making their ears bleed the last time they played, Adam and Mel have another go of this. |
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| Artifacts Inc. |
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| Brewcrafters |
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| Lords of Waterdeep |
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| Mombasa |
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| Archipelago |
* Because modernity is often self congratulatorily awe inspiring and has absolutely zero sense of the irony of how it will itself look in another hundred years time. If history is your grandparents, then modernity is the teenager that rolls its eyes and knows how awesomely awesome** it is.
** Or fleek. Or snatched. Or whatever modern word the kids are using to mean good. And for anyone over the age of 16, no, I haven't made up the words fleek and snatched. Snatched is the new fleek. And fleek. You grandpa/grandma means good. Sheesh. Get with the program.
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