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!

Blood and Cocaine, or, A Regular Night at the Mash Tun

Hello, good evening and welcome to another exciting episode of the NoBloG: the show where, well, I wrote about what happened at NoBoG. I guess you could have anticipated that since you are, after all, at the NoBoG BloG. No BloGs BloG just as much BoG as a NoBloG BloGgeD if a No GoB GloG BloB GllNlooGlBGolGNGGolGNlBlo.. Ahem. So what happened this Tuesday? It was a reasonably busy night with a good variety of games on the go: read on to find out!

The first game I observed, and one which continued for quite a while, too, was Epic Spell Wars. I didn't find out too much about this game though I gather it involves a lot of blood. Indeed, the players seemed almost obsessed by the collection and disbursement of haemoglobin—perhaps Epic Vampire Wars is the alternative title? Blood was found to be a hydrating resource and was thought to be imbibed in the form of a cocktail.

Owen plans a spell. But how is his perfusion?
And O₂ sats? No, this is NoBoG, not Casualty.

A little while in and Sean was getting a bit disheartened and seemed to be close to being effectively out of the game—I guess it has issues with effective elimination. Meanwhile Owen, ever the blood-lusty, had what I considered to be a fairly respectable 7 blood although he characterised it as merely average. A round or two later and he was clearly in contention for the win, so it evidently wasn't too shabby a result. I'd be happy to have that much blood to be honest, I think these days I only have about three—and that's after a rare steak.

Blood changes hands. Or veins. Maybe hand-veins.

My next trip around the tables took me to an entirely foreign city, or at least its suburbs in Suburbia. Various strategies had taken form in the management of these microcosms of circum-metropolitan life. Take for instance the "poison lake" strategy which started with a lake by a factory and, when I returned, had taken an extreme turn with the addition of a landfill and an airport. Perhaps the fluorescent mutated fish make good eating—I'm not sure. The lake-poisoner was not too confident about his secret goals requiring requiring the highest reputation but lowest income—tricky but not impossible to accomplish. Andy, meanwhile, was a newcomer to the game and had no strategy at all. In true NoBoG style, however, he remained hopeful for the win. Strategy is overrated anyway. That's what I always tell myself when I don't have one. I checked on them later and Andy's borough was rather nicely zoned so he seemed to be getting the hang of things.

Mmm-mm! Delicious effluent.

In for a penny, in for a pound:
choke the lakes with toxic waste!

I was very interested to stop by the table where they were playing T.I.M.E. Stories. The game takes place over multiple play-throughs, the idea being that the first play-through you may fail horribly and die, but in doing so you uncover some information which you retain for the next one, meaning you can progress more quickly and without dying so horribly.

Monika sets up T.I.M.E. Stories.

Dying horribly is par for the course, as the time-traveller dudes you play as are actually possessing the minds of the patients of a mental asylum and are surrounded by (indeed they are themselves) the dangerously unhinged. Perhaps not too foreign a concept; Sam seemed to be enjoying his steak-eating cocaine-addict alter-ego a little too much. The aim of the game (while maintaining a sufficient supply of snow) is to prevent a temporal rift from occurring while avoiding being whallopped by monsters or loonies or whatever.

One should always take T.I.M.E. to read the rules carefully

The game certainly seems quite flavourful, though perhaps sometimes without commensurate gameplay effects for all that theme: when I arrived the players had just finished dancing at the behest of a tux-clad eccentric who was himself reacting to them having given him a plunger, but this was basically just flavour text, rather than having in-game ramifications. Still, you end up with a lot of humorous pronouncements and it's certainly not every game where you hear someone ask, "are we going to give the cocaine to the chef?"—"he'll probably just give us cat meat!" Sam the addict was less than keen to give up the coke but thankfully they ended up not having to and received their meat (which appeared to be beef, not cat) without sacrificing any of it. At some point during all of this cocaine-and-meat-fueled excitement he punched a Manticore to death.

The map changes as the game progresses.

The game also looked gorgeously designed with quality artwork and a butt-ton of little tokens. I discovered that the blue ones represented cocaine in this particular game, but that they could be different stuff depending on the scenario. I was told by someone who'd played a few times that the replayability could be a bit lacking because, once you'd done the first play-throughs and worked out what places were necessary to visit and which could be skipped entirely—even in a new game which didn't form part of the same campaign—it became a little trivial. Still, it seems that with the multiple play-through mechanic and a few different scenarios and characters to play, this is perhaps not a major issue.

The Adrenaline junkies were at it for the third week in a row. People were getting shot all over and trying to dodge out of the way wasn't helping too much. This week I learnt a little bit more about the game: when you shoot people you put damage tokens on their health bar which turn into points when they are eventually slain. Thus you don't need to actually get kills in order to gain points. Also when you die, you respawn and are not worth as many points any more, which sounds like a nice way to even things out and prevent anyone from being the punching-bag.

Lewis' Rainbow array of death is displayed top-left.

Passions were running high as Elliot exhorted another player to "blast that fucking shit right away", and Lewis had a veritable rainbow of different-coloured damage tokens, perhaps because his character's colour was itself grey. He claimed everyone else had started beating on him like paper Mario, but he won in the end regardless.

There was a rather toxic environment surrounding the table where Plague, Inc. had just been completed where three rather nasty-looking bacteria had just finished rampaging across the planet and killing most of its population. You don't have to be a bacterium—the base game allows you to play a virus and there is apparently the possibility of other pathogens with expansions/stretch goals. However, the pathogen you start as doesn't affect the game that much—it just gives you plus or minus a couple of stats which you can obtain or buff easily enough during the regular course of the game.
The objective is, as many of you will know or have worked out, to infect and kill as many people as possible. There's a bit of a snowball-effect as you buy traits with points you receive for achieving mass death—the traits being worth the same number of points as they cost at the end of the game. The game rapidly accelerates towards the end, as you need to acquire traits like heat resistance to infect certain countries—as you obtain them, the number of countries you can spread to increases rapidly.

The aftermath of three worldwide epidemics

Unlike in the board game Pandemic or in the computer variant (in the former you are trying to cure a disease, in the latter you are, as in Plague, Inc., playing as the disease) there is no force trying to come up with a cure or lock you out of certain countries. It's just you, your opponent lurgies and 7 billion innocent human beings.

Even the die looks pustulent!

Upstairs there was the vast game of Vast. Well it was a sort of normal-sized game really, but I've decided not to write a complaint to trading standards as it looked very interesting. The game is highly asymmetric: you play as very different roles with completely different rules, abilities and objectives. In this game we had the Dragon, the Knight and the Goblins. The Dragon is trying to wake up from its ancient slumber and escape the confines of the caverns—presumably to then wreak slaughter and misery o'er the land—the Knight is trying to slay the Dragon and the goblins are trying to gobble the Knight. I'm not sure who, if anyone, is trying to kill the goblins. Maybe they kill each other since there are multiple tribes—I can't imagine inter-tribal diplomacy is very amicable with goblins.

Look! Caverns!

The Dragon, in spite of being asleep, can still walk around, which I found very confusing. She must be sleepwalking. As the cavern is explored, tiles are placed surrounding the walkable areas with different tribes' symbols, representing where the respective tribes of goblins can spring from. The Dragon seemed to be suffering from a severe case of the lazybones and wasn't waking up any time soon in spite of the Knight exploding bits of the cave with bombs. The Knight then snuck through and wished to attack the Dragon, sending them scurrying for the rules to see if this was possible before she was awake. I can imagine that playing the game a second time as a different character might require completely re-learning it as the abilities are so different. I left the game as John declared that he needed "another three wotsits to wake up." I personally think Monster Munch would be better food for a dragon.

Awake dragon—so cute!

Then over in medieval England the townsfolk were building a cathedral that, rather self-importantly, was supposed to form the Pillars of the Earth. When I arrived the cathedral was looking a little post-modern in its architecture—on stilts "for flood avoidance" apparently—but it transpired that the game was already over and it had been rearranged that way from its more traditional style. Disappointingly, the rather cute wooden cathedral is just a marker to show the progression of the game—it would be cool if its stages tied in more with the actual events that unfold in the game. The game itself is a little engine-builder where you try to gain resources and produce things that will end up being useful to the building of the cathedral. So Ewan won by building pews. Now don't get me wrong—surely no cathedral would be complete without pews—but it strikes me that there are more critical things in a cathedrals fitting and building than the seats. Perhaps the walls might be more of a pressing matter, or the roof? Or even the stained glass? But it transpired that Ewan's tactics were as underhand as his benches were underbottom: he had a friend in the clergy who'd granted him extra favour in spite of his uncomfortable berths.

Unusual architecture: the cathedral
looks like some kind of gothic-revival sheep.

A wider view of the temple to the sheep-God

Last but not least I will indulge myself with a description of our game of Betrayal at the House on the Hill. I'd been trying to get a game of this for a few weeks, having played it a couple of times a year ago but not having done so since. The premise, for those not in the know, is that you are exploring a haunted house by stepping into empty spaces and placing down a tile, which may result in some kind of awful event transpiring, receiving an item or most spookily, receiving an Omen. These give you often-powerful abilities but progress the game towards the second phase in which one player becomes the traitor and attempts to murderise/eat/curse you all, according to a specific scenario drawn from a large book, providing a lot of replayability when paired with the many house tiles and items.
Poor Jen started the game unluckily by contracting a bad case of what we decided must be "haunted miner's lung" causing her to sustain physical damage every turn until she could find some fresh air. Fresh air was in rather short supply though, and we couldn't find the house's garden or balcony, for example, from which she could finally breathe easy. With her life force ebbing with every rattling breath, the House threw fresh terrors at us as haunted mist poured from the walls, we fell through rotten floors and acquired knives that attached via syringes to our very veins. And I found a teapot.

An explorer moves into a new room to, well, explore it.

The Haunt—the name of the second phase—was narrowly avoided when I foolhardily chose to draw an omen card—but the circumstances dictated a particular scenario which we couldn't do, so the rules told us to play on. Not long after though, it all got too much for the explorers and the Haunt was on. And it was Jen who, though now cured of her consumption was still rather at death's door, was the traitor. Though "traitor" is perhaps the wrong description; in fact it was the rest of us who were Haunting her! We were the ghostly denizens of the devilish dwelling, and, in a twist on the usual types of stories, Jen had to exorcise us. We could no longer actually be killed, but while we could sacrifice our sanity to move through walls, Jen could steal items from us and sacrifice them to destroy our tether to the house, freeing our spirits and herself.

Reading what has befallen the poor—and spectral—explorers
after the Haunt begins.

Unfortunately her efforts were in vain—her earlier run in with the choking dust of the old mansion leaving her weak, and no match for the—magically enhanced with a lucky feather—attack of us ghosts. "Welcome home! Welcome home!" we chanted to our new housemate, joining us for eternity.

"Welcome home!" The final mêlée is concluded outside the bathroom.

Though the game is always fun simply for the spooky stories, it does highlight a recurring problem: the first half of the game contains little to no player interaction, there being essentially no incentive to do anything but explore, unless you can help someone dying of TB or something (which we couldn't.) The second phase can then be over very quickly: just three people had turns from the haunt being declared to the game ending. It might make for some annoying rules, but it seems that if killing the traitor is all that's needed for the others to win, the rules should take account of the possibility that the traitor has only 2 HP remaining and is about to be attacked by 5 overly-friendly fae spirits.

So, kids, what have we learnt? I dunno, this was a night of board-gaming, not a school lesson. Get out of my house! Blood was stolen, cocaine was hoarded, ghosts were spooky, plagues were incorporated (into people's bloodstreams) and lakes were pumped full of toxic garbage. If that's not some kind of lesson, I don't know what is, though that doesn't mean I know what kind of lesson. See you next time!

It's just a step to the left

Busy week at the Tun this week - but not because of a flood of interested people who had read last weeks newspaper or seen us on TV. Fickle and funny fate saw fit to feature ( say that quickly 100 times ) the Tun have one of its busiest Tuesday nights that we've seen, some sort of self help group turned up out of the blue and a fairly busy smattering of non gamer pub goers also competed for space.

Which meant space was critical. And upstairs was off limits due to Salsa noise. And I had issues with some serious people juggling. Something I've not had to do since the Ribs. This makes me unhappy. This gives me a meh face. It looks like this.

So yay. Are we back to running out of venue space ? Our once possible extra space has evaporated, and meh. For the record NoBoG numbers were pretty consistent again at 46 so, not us per se, just everyone else.

Maybe a new NoBoG folded table or two round the corner, hands off, plus some chairs is in order if this is the shape of things to come ( there is some spare ground space if not table space available ). I think the current folding table has done a fantastic job and is a pretty nice size for most games... what do NoBoG goers think ?

Anyway. Just a blip. Probably. Nothing to worry about - Famous last words as the ship sank beneath the icy waters.

On with the games !

The game I was most excited about seeing this week - and got to play - was Time Stories a curiously minimalistic looking deduction/narrative game that has you jumping into time to Sort Stuff Out. This game has been on my radar for sometime, and the very quiet word on the street from those that had experienced it was that Time Stories was one of the best board gaming experiences ever... ever... when you factored in the expansions for it. So, low hype, high performance - sounds almost like the opposite of most kickstarters... burn !

The minimalist box of TIME Stories. The Minimalist future aesthetic is kept up on the contents inside too.

This is going to be quite the waffle about TIME Stories. To my eye there's a lot of if not exactly new things going on here, then a very much pushing of the envelope in what it's doing, a lot of clever things, and arguably a very distinct take on story telling that... hasn't really been done before in a board game ? In short, a lot to talk about. Consider yourself warned.

So what is T.I.M.E Stories exactly ? It's just a step to the left... and then a jump to the riiiii-iii-iii-ii-iii-iiight. No. That's something else entirely.

Thematically the game is something of a Quantum Leap, Time Cop, Back to the Future any of those time travelling sci fi shows where Future People jump around in time to Fix Things, Break Things, or generally unwisely dick with the potential for some universe destroying time paradoxes by taking their own mom to the prom. You'll play one of a number of scenarios, with each scenario given the benefit of a time jumping premise being set pretty much anywhere anytime in any kind of reality. Expect swords. Or guns. Or Zombies. And just plain boring humans in a nuthouse.

Mechanically the game is a narrative exploration through a deck of location cards. And for a given scenario / story, you'll have a different deck of cards to investigate. So, cards are laid out to represent locations, and on visiting those locations you get to pick up the card and read the narrative on the back. A bit like some Choose Your Own Adventure or Fighting Fantasy book, but in card form. If you've ever played Holmes and Watson or any of those deduction detective games that have you travelling to locations and reading things, then you'll get an understanding of what's going on here ( and to a lesser extent something like Tales of the Arabian Nights ) . This isn't a game about harvesting cubes or setting up some euro production engine, nor about mass invasions of armies or politicking, it is instead a light RPG type game, where the roleplaying is non existent and confined to the elements of your character card, and the emphasis is on a collective experience of a story.

Where TIME Stories really starts to excel beyond all those other narrative and deduction type games before it however is in its rich and ( for what it is ) complex setup of a story and your journey through it, where you can pick up items, discover new locations or even change what's going on at a given location entirely. The game has mechanics that can empower a story to be highly interactive - if it so chooses, it's entirely dependent on the scenario - wherein even just looking at a new card alters the fabric of something else, either opening it up to discovery, or locking it away from your grasp. How the game pulls this off mechanically is very clever - story tokens ( just abstract shapes ) indicate what knowledge you have of events - and those story tokens allow you access to things or places you might not have been able to in the past. The simplest example of this shows how you can push narrative along - talking to a person in one location has them whispering to you that they know a secret, and come talk to them later in the Dormitory - and you get a token for that. On visiting the Dormitory one of the locations has that token, and on doing that, you get to talk to that person who whispers you their secrets.

The futuristic TIME Stories. Where you meet Bob. The chief
time technician. I'm not joking. Bob, holds the fate of
the universe in his hands.
You'd think he'd at least be called Robert
with such a serious responsibility.

The permutations for this can escalate quickly - particularly when entirely new areas of the map are revealed to you, and finding a key lets you through a door, the map changes, and now you can visit the previously off limit gardens for instance.

Given that the starting scenario has some 30 odd items to discover and perhaps a dozen different tokens on top of that, this is a pretty big deal. It allows a static game to actually track a progressing narrative, tracks what you know and dont know explicitly - and also implicitly via the players just figuring out WTF is going on, and the environment you are in changes and adapts to the unfolding story.

Those that play RPGs that mostly narrate a story directly into the imagination are well versed in a rich and evolving environment that lives around them - the GM tirelessly shifting scope to adapt to the infinite possibilities of the players. Doing something of the same in a board game is quite the mean feat where you have static setups and no GM. Don't mistake what something like a "light RPG" game of Descent does with its narrative being driven by new areas on a map to stick your minis and new foes to kill. This is an entirely different beast driven by story - not your location on a tactical battle map. Indeed going back to the RPG analogy, if the melee table top fights in a pen and paper RPG are directly related to games like Descent and Mice and Mystics - which are all fights and very little story, then the narrative story elements in an RPG - that have no table top part - are directly relateable to what Time Stories does. And don't mistake that for something like Tales of the Arabian Nights either which is a super simplistic Choose Your Own Adventure setup. TIME Stories is more Scotland Yard, with multiple paths, a dynamic environment and a rich narrative.

Is TIME Stories in fact one of the first board game versions of the story side of an RPG experience ? I'm struggling to come up with any other game that has done that - something like Pathfinder Adventure Card game doesn't even come close to what Time Stories achieves, even though component and stuff wise, they are probably in the same ballpark. PAC to me tries to simulate a tabletop melee heavy dungeon crawl in card form without a tabletop, it has little to say about story. I'm thinking that TIME Stories could be something of a unicorn here - the narrative bit of an RPG and something never really done (so well) before.

The game above and beyond all that also has the TIME element which feels similar to the time setup in tragedy looper. You get to play through the game once - almost certainly fail - reset TIME and try it again. You're time travellers right. However, somethings can stay the same between time jumps - as time agents you already know what happened before, and this time around, you can maybe shortcut something. Or fix something. You know where that hidden cupboard is. No need to spend time searching for it this time. And so on. You can argue here about whether this is an interesting mechanic to allow you to do meta things and get foreknowledge between runs - or whether its a cynical element to make you run through the same content more than once, eking out new content in a controlled fashion - or whether again it allows a designer to put truly hard scenarios into place knowing that you will get several cracks at the problem.

TIME Stories - who will you quantum leap like jump into ?

The game also features something which might be arguably superfluous - the characters themselves and their capabilities, the usual-ish simple setup of melee, charisma and agility. The stats however are a little vague in places - I suspect because like the rest of the game it means a given scenario can actually choose what those stats mean, so instead of strength, glibness and agility, maybe this time its fighting, intelligence and research. Locations can have you doing the whole by the numbers melee fights - just like your Fighting Fantasy books - zomg, here comes 2 orcs, they start fighting you, roll to hit - as well as dice rolls against your stats for stealing items, persuading people, breaking down doors and yada.

There was a bit of debate at the table as to whether the whole dice roll thing added anything to the core game - in a purist sense it does not, but in a lets roll some dice and experience some epic misses, epic hits and skin of the teeth saves, it probably does. But. There is an element there of if some encounters are hard, does it make you stop and tool up first - visiting locations and spending time. Do you risk it, or play safe ? And of course, as Alfie pointed out, everything takes time, and those melee encounters and otherwise all serve to burn extra time at a location. When you run out of time your jump finishes and you have to reset. I think on balance the characters and dice rolls add that smear of necessary light RPG-ness to the game. It gives you a different element to hold onto. But I can totally understand that someone appreciating the narrative, deduction or puzzles could be somewhat perplexed at the need to roll a dice at X location. I think its appealing to more than a niche of one kind of player.

Because of the nature of the game and its clever setup it has a great deal of scope about what it can throw at you. Not only in the stories it can present to you. But also game wise what it can do to you -  It can give you deduction problems to solve. It can give you outright mental problems to sit and solve at the table - like some mid game Sudoku or labyrinth solving exercise. It can threaten you with melee and force you to gear up and find healing stuff, or give you moral dilemmas about whether to beat someone to death or chase them away ( and the consquences can be different for each ). It can give you choices about the dreaded Splitting The Party, or which character you should Sam Beckett Quantum Leap style jump into this visit. And offer challenges of working out what the story is doing - the motivations of the characters, do I release that chained up nutter or leave him be, do I trust that mad capering idiot with the top hat when he says he has something awesome to show me.

All in all, it seems like the game is pretty capable of serving anything up to you. Which is pretty amazing.

Of course. All of this is entirely dependent on just how well written the scenarios are. How cleverly they make use of the tools available of the game mechanics.

We played the base box scenario - you get one, and only one scenario with the game.. which is... rather mean, but given how much is in it, it probably is the equivalent of several scenarios of a more static deduction type game ) - and the story was compelling and the elements nicely clicked. Without giving spoilers away, a visit to a mental hospital in the1920s to investigate something Bad Going On. You can probably imagine what kind of field that gives you to work with - its not an unfamiliar trope.

I can see why TIME Stories is picking up a devoted following. The game IS a one shot affair however - play it once and that scenario is then dead to you, so, there is definitely a big issue of replayability here, a one hit wonder with a vengeance. This is not entirely unknown territory for such narrative games though, and others before it have had similar problems - albeit, TIME Stories with its single scenario is really testing the limit of whether a one play one box thing is a good deal or not. Of course, as of writing, there are another four scenarios you can go out and buy, and get a cool experience all over again. But yeah. Unfortunately there's really no other way it could be with TIME Stories - because the scenarios are so interleaved and carefully crafted, there's not much you could do to approach the game as a high replayable scenario without destroying many of the elements that make the game stand out ( the puzzles would immediately go out of the window ).

For  me, it's debatable whether you'd want to buy TIME Stories. Its limited replayability is a big issue. On the other hand the experience it gives - for my money - is second to none, other than actually playing an RPG, and even then, it manages to bang out what an RPG can do in probably, I don't know, a tenth of the time. Oddly enough, I think TIME Stories is probably the ideal club type game, where a single copy of the game could be played by many different groups of a single club. It'd be a great experience, get a lot of use, but still abide by its you can only play me once deal.

Overall - Highly Recommended. A must play for anyone who is even slightly interested in narrative things, deduction type games, or any form of RPG. I'd go further and say it's probably a must play for any kind of board gamer, at least once, just to see the clever tricks the game manages to pull off and use an inspiration springboard.

I got to play as some cute but wild eyed and committed cannibal girl, followed by an attractive lady with an erotomania problem, and learned just how sexy plungers ( the kind you unblock toilets with ) can be. I won't spoil it. But it's definitely all in there. Ask any of the players about The Plunger.

Alfie stuck with his coke head character who could snort cocaine at will to gain dice power ups - but using the last dose of coke meant a permanent health hit, Hal flipped between a hardcore soldier who was a secret pacifist and couldnt abide anyone dying, and Darren played some glib mouthed shyster who needed to be escorted everywhere otherwise we lost time. Time doing what ? Don't ask.

Fab game anway. Really pleased I got to play it, quite the unique experience, go play it !

Dead of Winter. And no sign of Jon Snow.

Dead of Winter was back on table this week, one of the most popular NoBoG games of 2015, but seemingly the steam has run out of this title and it's dwindling in its replays and I dare say it wont feature in the top 10 for 2016. I saw Elliot having a bash at this - I think it might have been his first foray into the game, and it seemed to go on for quite a while, barring a heavy 5 player Imperial Settlers game, it was the longest play of the evening ( over 3 hours ). I didn't get a chance to really ask if everyone enjoyed it - I kinda got the sense it went on a bit too long.

Elsewise, after some squeezing onto a larger sized table, Lewis got Epic Wizards to the table, whilst at the other end of the table Star Wars Carcassonne shaped up to possibly be the most interesting of all the carcassonnes - it certainly looked hella funky.

We also had some lovely old school gaming going on with Judge Dredd, a real blast from the 80's

Judge Dredd. IIRC the Ape Gang are in this. Awesome.

past, and a game from the - in my estimation - first golden age of gaming, when board games were busting dice out left right and centre, Games Workshop was still.. well... about Games and not just miniatures, and companies like Avalon Hill, GDW and TSR had yet to go financially tits up.

Luke and his more than 100 games of Betrayal at House on the Hill ( isn't it about time someone made him the official mascot of the game or something ) led a table around another dance on the hill ( really, more stories required !), whilst down on the ground what looked to be a great game of Imperial Settlers was shaping up, Ben had so many prestige buildings as Japanese it was bewildering ( but apparently he wasn't winning ???? ), and Ewan got the lovely second edition Mission Red Planet out again, with a mostly gentlemanly first round of scientists, followed by a much less gentlemanly round of secret agents, followed by some positively dickish Femme Fatales. If you've never played the game you won't have a clue what that means, suffice to say, increasing levels of dickery.

Also David lead his merry band of Star Wars people through the romp of another Imperial Assault - albeit Rebel Chloe was absent, presumably off training on Dagobah with Yoda. David reports that they are just about half way through the campaign, but, I think Stormtrooper fatigue is beginning to kick in, as their cannon fodder Red Shirt nature is starting to tire Darth David out. Uh huh. Maybe there should be a bad guy rota thing from week to week. . .

As ever the evening finished with the game du jour - Secret Hitler, Lewis finally tumbled off his winning streak, for once being a liberal and also marking his first loss. Richard IV managed to take a few snapshots in game of the characters in play with his super secret smart fascist detector mobile app ( which I suspect is just him drawing things on the screen ). Awesome !

The Smart Fascist app detects its first positive

Imperial Assault

Epic Wizards Spell War Thingies. Rearrange words to make sense.

Carcassonne Star Wars.

Betrayal at House on the Hill

Imperial Settlers kicks off

Mission Red Planet 2

Card Drafting Heaven

"If you find yourself alone, riding in the green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium, and you're already dead!" - Maximus Decimus Meridius from his cavalry warm up speech.

This week Dean brought along the new and swanky card drafting, pool building game Elysium to NoBoG with its lovely art and Greek mythology theme. There is some fluff and nonsense about you competing with other demi gods to compose the greatest feat of narcissism by collecting artefacts, heroes and composing legends about yourself all in a bid to impress Zeus and have him pick you, X Factor style BC ( oh the horror ), but what it boils down to is collecting sets of things to score more victory points than your neighbour. And yeah. They all have Greek mythological things going on. Imagine Canasta, or some variant of Gin Rummy, but instead of the Ace of Hearts you have Persephone, 3 of Hades.

Elysium - pic courtesy of BGG

Elysium is pretty much what we've seen before from such games - every round a pool of cards is placed in a central area for everyone to draft from. There is no real purchasing going on of the cards at this point - everyone has an opportunity to draft four things in turn, the only constraint being whether you have the right colour selection left to take an available card ( which by and large you always will have ). A small twist on the typical drafting shenanigans at this point sees your card pool split in two - those that are active and possibly earning you capabilities and gold, and those that are inactive and that score you end game points ( for sets of things and special VP multipliers ). Timing when you push an active card into a scoring card is a little of what the game is about - you get limited opportunities to do so, and every card you push down costs an amount of gold, so getting your ducks in a row of how many cards you want to push down, covering the costs, and getting enough actions to do it is the order of the day - not that it is particularly taxing to do so, this is not a game that's going to beat you over the head.

The game offers a mild point salad in how to approach things, there are bonuses for being first or the best in particular category, and you can also engine up into raw points early game, or go for the long game and invest in sticking stuff into your scoring area.

There are limited opportunities to dick with other players ( Poseidons cards are all about the dicking) but by and large the gameplay is not terribly cut throat, something like say Core Worlds is a much more explicit fight and race for crucial point scoring opportunities. Elysium is way more laid back, build your own area up, graze from the deck pool. It's also not a heavy synergy lead game like say Imperial Settlers where that drafter is all about the ramping up of interaction - you will be turning cards into inactive point scorers throughout the game which keeps the interaction and complexity rate low ( imagine if at the end of every round of Imperial Settlers you widowed cards into an end game score pile where they no longer took part in the game - and you only scored end game points from that pile, not your open tableau ).

Elysium, pic courtesy of BGG

All in all the game is a nice example of its genre, lovely theme, nice artwork, good production and is a cool addition to a collection if you have a need to scratch a card drafting itch and don't already have something like Abyss or Core Worlds ( unless you are Dean who seems to collect *ALL* the card drafting games ), but ultimately doesn't really bring anything new or innovative to table and is something of a Me Too game.

For my money, Elysium would probably edge out all the other card drafters - it's a bit more relaxed, simpler, quicker, streamlined and open to newbies doing well, as opposed to experienced players slicing and dicing in Core Worlds, and on the whole I probably prefer the Greek theme to anything else - even sci fi. Gasp. Blasphemy. Then again, I have two mutts and their names are Ares and Athena. And I dig the Iliad and the Odyssey. And I can fan girl when I know the stories of the characters I am picking up. So. You know. Bias. YMMV and should arguably pick Core Worlds instead ( Imperial Settlers is different enough here that imo, they are just enough of a different game to stand apart ).

Martin won this by possibly a single point - Richard IV got the end turn order over me and stopped my glorious victory. The points were very close all told, everyone was within a point or two of everyone else. Dean, expert and shoe in for the win came last. Surprise !

On Her Majesty's Service

We also busted out a game of On Her Majestys Service earlier which was all round pretty funny, and incredibly back stabby. I went from a single turn away from victory all the way down to last place, Martin, stole the single turn away from victory spot away from me, before I managed to stab him a few times, leaving Dean in the oh so close to winning position before Rich IV came from nowhere and pipped the win. Ridiculous. Funny. High points include Dean exclaiming that I had dicked him twice in one turn, and Martin's face when it went from the smug, I have won next turn it's all downhill to the backstabbed, shit, now I can't win. Priceless. The game has enough going on to make you think in a turn, and enough backstabbery to make that journey sometimes painful and usually funny.

Med Ed was in the house and decided to play one of my new things Isle of Skye - which amounts to Carcassonne on steroids. But this is Carcassonne with someone taking a deeper look at the scoring, sorting out the tile placement and putting in a better way of interacting with players. In short. It's a whole lot better. In fact. If this game doesn't at least get nominated for an award I would be surprised - it's simple yet offers a surprising degree of variation complexity on what you should do in your turn, and has a very high replayability factor.

The game is played over the course of 5 or so rounds ( depending on player count ), with each game having different scoring things at different rounds, meaning no two games are ever the same ( there are some 20 different scoring items, and only 4 per game are ever selected ).

Isle of Skye

The game itself revolves around your placing tiles to create your own little Isle of Skye fiefdom, with fields, water, mountains, roads and the usual malarkey giving you a modular landscape to piece together, on the face of it like Carcassonne if you had your own private board.

But here's a nice twist. At the start of a round everyone gets to pull three tiles in secret from the tile pool. You then have to decide which of the three you will discard, and for the other two, how much money you will place on them. Once everyone is finished, all tiles are revealed and then in player order you can buy a tile from anyone for the amount of gold they have placed on the tile. Purchased tiles are then added to your pool for you to place, whilst the seller gets your gold, and the gold they placed on their tile back. Unpurchased tiles have the gold removed and go into your placement pool.

Isle of Skye, closer shot of the tiles

This means that on tile pick up there are plenty of things to consider here - where can I place these tiles that gives me good scoring, either now, soon, or later. What state are other players boards in, and can others use these tiles and potentially purchase them away from me. How much money do I have to potentially make some tiles very expensive for others to buy and lessen their attraction. Do I save my money for future in case something really good comes along that I want to keep or purchase.

And on reveal that set of choices multiplies. Who has a great tile for me. Who would really like tile X. Can I afford it. Is it worth it. Yada.

Although simple in principle, the puzzle of where to place, what to buy and what to guard is surprisingly deep, and I suspect this game would be a trough fest of Analysis Paralysis in the wrong hands.

On the whole a fantastic light tile laying game, scratching the itch of building your own little kingdom, enormous replayability in scoring and timing options, and a whole bunch of player interaction with the open tile buying. Great game, well worth having a go of.

Trains : Rising Sun

Elsewhere Tim brought along Trains Rising Sun, which is the second game in the Trains series, which for those that don't know is Dominion with a board and themed solely around ... trains. I very much like Trains, and whisper it, I think it's superior to Dominion, albeit Dominion scores heavily on the breadth of available options making it supremely replayable. Trains Rising Sun is a welcome addition to the line to start giving the whole thing more breadth in what you can do. Either play it as a standalone, or mix it up with the original Trains to expand the number of options available ( just like you get with each Dominion set... ). Davey reported that although Tim was excited about having the rare opportunity to bring something a little heavier this week, he was less excited at getting beaten into last place. Oh dear. Stupid game anyway ! Maybe this is the real reason Tim never brings it.

We also had Lewis introducing new people to Smash Up and beating them all with his... Steampunk Cats, followed by Monty Python Fluxx that saw only Lewis brave enough to adopt silly accents and other ostentatious diplays of ridiculousness. Although to be fair, in Lewis' case that's normal behaviour, where silly Bane accents come as part and parcel of Batman Love Letter, so he has an unfair advantage.

Multiple simultaneous games of Dead of Winter were on the front tables with a whole bunch of new people. Not sure if this is a new trend of the front tables to have multiple copies of the same game going on.

Pete had a Petetastic evening with two games he really likes - Steam followed by Hansa Teutonica. He mentioned getting an early 5 actions in Hansa, so I would presume the game went very downhill for everyone else from that point on.

James and Torres

Old school Torres was busted out, I think James won this by a single point, and then they went on to play James' prototype Robot Robot... which if we aren't playing at least one prototype every week, then we have failed. Perhaps everyone should clump together into a co-op publishing house and raise a new game company from the ground.

The university season has restarted, so, as such, we had a spread of Uni people back with us, including Luke who seems to have had an argument with the barber over the summer and lost his shoulder length hair. He brought Betrayal at House on the Hill back to table, along with some other social crowd pleasing goodness.

Firefly also made a visit - I think its first visit to NoBoG, but slacker that I am, I have no idea how that went down, or indeed much of anything else that went on in the Tuna.

And there were some ridiculous Speed Avalon Resistance games which unsurprisingly was a crushing win twice for the bad guys.

I also failed to get decent pretty pictures of what was going on this week. The camera died. What can you do. Thanks to Tim for a couple of his snaps.

In other sad news the new red gaming cloth has also died. After suffering from the great Eastern Sea Coke spill a few weeks ago, its tangle with the washing machine caused it to shrink to a fifth of its size and declare it was done with being a gaming table cloth and instead had focused on embarking on a new career as a rather fluffy bath towel instead.

56 this week for the count, just one off the record 57.