Please do not Adjust Your Board Games

What's up guys, it's me, Fish-Face. It's time for a quick NoBloG. You'll note my dedication to the cause as these notes were written on the same day as I finished enduring a downright harrowing experience. You guessed it — I got back from driving a manual car for the first time in 10 years, more or less unscathed. If you hear about any unexplained road deaths between here and the Cotswolds, say you don't know anything. But enough about me, what about the games?! Well on this sunny evening (sunny until the sun went down, anyway — funny how the weather forecast at night is never for sun, isn't it?) we played some of them. And the ones I will tell you about are as follows: Mysterium, Blood Bowl Team Manager, Carcassonne, Cottage Gardens and The Networks.

Starting up at the mysterious table where they were playing Mysterium, I don't have much to tell you — the players seemed quite engrossed and I just got a brief summary that it's "Dixit Cluedo." Intriguing. One player has a special role — the Ghost — and gives you clues which get you to pick the correct story describing what has happened. Other than that, Sam just told me that he is "fucking spanking at it," which I would have thought would be inappropriate at NoBoG, but the bar staff weren't saying anything.

Looks mysterious, right? It's supposed to.

Next I had a look at Blood Bowl Team Manager. I always like to imagine the Blood Bowl games as being about literal bowls filled with blood, though nothing I've experienced supports this view. Never mind. They were just getting started and resetting the score counters which had been co-opted in a different game. As I'm checking that the players are all setting their counters to zero and not 13 for some sneaky bonus points, I hear Jacob exclaim, "Allllllriiiiight" upon drawing his first hand. Unfortunately it's the sarcastic kind of "allllllriiiiight," as he's drawn his four linesmen, the worst of the starting cards, all at once. Before I was tempted away, he cunningly played his "crack linesman" to a match with crap rewards under the assumption that no-one would contest it hard.

A Blood Bowl is set up. Sans bowl, and sans blood.

I next found myself in a sprawling medieval metropolis: an absolutely massive game of Carcassonne was taking place involving expansions I'd never even seen. They had a cool meeple-shaped scoreboard and a starting mega-tile to replace the ordinary starting tile/river mini-expansion. I think the scoreboard should have replaced the countryside artwork with depictions of meeple-organs though, so you can describe your score not as the mundane "38" but rather as the glamorous and unique "in the duodenum." With such a big game of it, there was of course lots of jostling for access to various features: there was an absolutely massive field which was so juicy that the two players sharing the points from it had three meeples in it apiece. A third player was still trying to get in on the action and had even tried to pip them to the post with four meeples, but the others weren't having any of that and cruelly entombed the farmer in a tiny field surrounded only by roads.

I think this qualifies as "sprawling."
Also check out that sweet light
to illuminate dingy pub corners.

All this is a great excuse for lying down in fields — lazy meeple! — but what of the cosmopolitan life enjoyed by all up-and-coming brightly coloured wooden figurines? There was plenty of action there two with a similarly massive city sporting at least one cathedral being simultaneously built up by the inhabitants sharing it, and the other players no less avidly trying to prevent its completion — requiring just one tile to finish it off, the space where it would slot was, however, surrounded on all four sides making it a tricky proposition. In the end Tom (or maybe Dom? He was several fields away and it was tricky to hear over all the sheep!) won the game and, though he was in the field it wasn't the deciding factor — though had the farming pretender managed to get in, that would have done. Who said Euros couldn't be cutthroat?!

This meeple wants to be something... something MORE

Zooming in a little bit brought me to the Cottage Garden aka Tetris: the Board Game! The basic gameplay here involves taking tiles from a pool to place on one of your gardens, where you must cover up certain features and avoid other ones, which score you points. When you complete a garden by covering all of one kind of feature, you score points based on the number of visible features of the other kinds. Then you draw a new garden and start again, the game ending after a certain number of rounds. It all seemed very polite and proper, though as in Carcassonne I'm sure there was lots of backstabbing and all-round devilry going on beneath the genteel exterior.

Several cottage gardens
surround the gardener's
market.

Looks nothing like
Wyevale to me.

The garden itself and
its scoring track.

That brings us handily to the game I learned and played — The Networks. In this game each player assumes the role of a TV Network commissioning and scheduling their prime-time shows, with the objective to accrue as many viewers as possible. The game plays out over 5 rounds — "seasons" — and each season the pool of available cards is topped up from the deck for the appropriate season. Within each season play passes according to the positions at the end of the previous one — bottom to top, giving the player in last place a significant bonus in terms of choice of the best cards. Those cards come in four varieties — Show, Star, Ad and Network. Your basic action is to purchase a show and place it on your schedule — hopefully in its preferred timeslot. But most shows require one or more ads or stars before you can buy them, which respectively provide a boost to income (great for shows with high running costs) and to viewers. Many ads and stars will have their own requirements so that you only get the benefit on certain kinds of show. Some shows have optional slots for these cards as well, but if you don't add them when you buy the show initially, you have to take an extra turn to apply them, which might mean being late to the end-of-round bonus party which gives you a healthy boost to viewers or money if you end the round for yourself early.

All in all it's a nicely themed game with a decent amount of tension between different choices — whether to grab the show first or the perfect ad to go with it, or perhaps the limited network cards providing special actions and scoring bonuses. The shows are all parodies on existing ones like "Found," "Communist-y" and "How I Lost Your Father," with silly pictures to go along with them. Your initial (worthless) shows are all such classic hits as "TV Test Pattern Hour" and "Biannual Bubble-wrap Popping Tournament" which I, for what it's worth, would watch the shit out of. I didn't win, sadly (actually I think I'm on a NoBoG losing streak — someone give me a pity victory!) in spite of being in first place going into the final round.

I forgot to take pictures of The Networks, but you can
see some of it artfully framed by my body, which in turn
is observed by JD.

And that was the week — another short one I'm afraid, so my apologies to those I never got 'round to see. I'm now going to settle down to a nice episode of Old People Complaining About Things.

In Which Chips Were Chomped

Yes mateys, I've only gone and done it, I've only gone and written another blog post! What a mad lad I am. Actually I'm cheating by writing this before everything else so I am technically, right now, lying. Please report me to your nearest priest. Festivities started early this Tuesday with a respectable cohort (I mean respectable in the sense of numbers; never has there been a shiftier looking bunch to grace Norwich's cobbled lanes) gathering outside the Grosvenor to consume fried delicacies. Like sausage. After a brief period of confusion in which David and Matt thought they were going to have to share their chips (Lady and the Tramp style, for every one, we are assured), everyone's food arrived and was consumed in short order. We then made our lardy way down St Gregory's Back Alley (what a shame the hill doesn't go the other way...) greasing the lean earth as we walked along. Drinks obtained, we arrayed ourselves around the pub and awaited what the evening had in store. And what an evening! Games I observed were Blood Bowl: Team Manager, Amyitis, Dead of Winter, Hamsterrolle, Lords of Waterdeep, Machi Koro, and World Championship Russian Roulette. I myself was involved in Lords of Vegas and Avalon.

So let's get cracking — cracking some skulls in Blood Bowl: Team Manager I expect, where Joe "the crap wood-elf" announces he's "gonna go there, gonna steal the ball." I'd have thought sneaky wood-elves would be stealthier than to announce such plans to everyone, but there we are. He is a crap wood-elf, so I guess it's OK. Sam's response (from whom I assume the ball was stolen) is "Arsehole." Short, and to the point, just as one would expect an ork to be. Though they'd probably say "Waaarghsehole" or something. "I'm gonna smack you again," he declares, which I imagine is exactly in keeping with how an ork would let someone know before socking them in the face. At this point the table devolves into racial epithets like "tree-hugging pointy-eared bastards" and maybe I imagined "green-skinned, unwashed, fetid-footed troglodytes." Before the in-game brawl spread to the real-life players, I gathered that the wood-elves have typical elfin skills oriented around evasion and non-contact, but when they get into a fight with orks they "get punched in the face repeatedly and they don't like it." I retreat before I suffer a similar fate.

Probably a Wood-Elf getting squashed.

Next on my rounds I come across the impossible-to-spell-or-pronounce Amyitis which sounds like a very uncharitable way of describing your friend Amy's weight gain. (Actually a trip to wikipedia reveals that the etymology of the name may come from Old Persian Umati- meaning "having good thought." Take that, Amy-haters!) Amyitis was the wife of one of the Nebuchadnezzars, whose name is also hard to spell, but not nearly as easy to make fun of. Enough about Babylonian royalty though, what of the game?! Right, yes. The designers were presumably too up themselves and/or French ("same thing!" I hear you louts cry, but well, you might very well think that, but I could not possibly comment. Thankfully with my French ancestry I can get away with such xenophobia.) to call it "Hanging Gardens of Babylon: The Game," but that is in fact what it is.

Temples are near the top, gardens in
the middle, Babylonian Wyevale at the bottom.

The players are gardeners doing various things to try and make the best contributions to the Wonder of the Ancient World, like planting plants, collecting caravans to buy plants, going to temples to pray to plants and so on. As I arrive, Martin is racking up the points, gaining six and some money all at once — sounds good to me. And he then kicked some people out of a temple! Rude! Apparently you get a bonus for having a majority in them and it operates on a "first-in, last-out" or "FILO" system. Or perhaps they were just eating lots of pastries, I remain unsure. The game looks to be a "Guillaume classic" — fairly complicated and with oodles of tokens, bits of wood and things to do. Martin, Tom and Nicky weren't objecting to being subjected to it, though, with Nicky's strategy of "trying not to be last" bagging her first place at least at that moment in time.

Next was a chilly Dead of Winter even though the weather is finally showing hints of getting warmer. Some people live in the past though, I myself having finally played the game last week. Upon my arrival, Colin the slob had forgotten to take the rubbish out, the lazy sod. Tabby complained that it was just like student living again, though confessed to not having taken it out herself — her excuse was that she'd been busy building barricades, which is just the kind of nonsense art project students use to get out of chores anyway.

Zombie Cheerleaders?

Following the rubbish incident, Sean's plan is to "make shit-tons of noise and run," which sounds like a lark and pays off in the form of assault rifles. At this point it all gets a bit tense as Tabby accuses Matt and Sean of being traitors due to "being too helpful," and all the while Colin is building up a tidy stash and being rather secretive about it. (I had a look though and it didn't contain anything particularly juicy, and also snooped on his loyalty card which placed him as a goodie. Boring.) David was keeping a suspiciously low profile, especially for a DJ (which is his character's profession, rather than his. As far as I know, David is not a DJ, but perhaps it's his alter-ego.) However, his ability is more like a ventriloquist than a DJ, being able to make noise in other locations than his current one. I checked back in at the end of the game, and everyone but the poor ventrilo-DJ had won. I immediately assumed he had been the traitor but no — his personal goal required him to have a fuel can and I hadn't found one in the whole game. Poor guy. I bet it was hard to get anyone to listen to his mixtape during the zombie apocalypse, as well.

I rolled back through the pub by way of my table and ended up where a bunch were playing Hamsterrolle which is absolutely ludicrous. It's definitely not a board game, but John was playing it so it must nevertheless have the official stamp of approval. (I should mention that I did see them playing a sensible game beforehand so do not fear for our glorious leader's soul.) Hamsterrolle is like Jenga with a big wheel: a set of rules govern how you have to place wooden blocks onto the wheel, which has internal teeth to make this a bit easier. They also force you to place them further and further along so that each turn the wheel rotates a little bit. If blocks fall out on your turn they are graciously given to you, but the goal is to get rid of all your pieces. When placing a block, you're not supposed to wiggle the others and "shenanigans are called if you fiddle too much" — "oo-err," as Sam rightfully pointed out.

Hamsterrolle!

I looked back a little later and Sam was being admonished, "that doesn't work, Sam, that doesn't fit!" — "I've heard that before!" The regrettable follow-up was "no licking it," which I fear needs no comment from me. However apparently someone in another game had actually tried licking one of the pieces to get it to stick a little onto the wheel. Some people just take their love of gaming too far. The game can be made harder by removing the table-cloth, which means the wheel turns and wobbles far more readily. Sam was so confident at this harder version of the game that he was banging the table to give himself more blocks, but I never did come back to see if it worked out for him.

What we need is strong and stable
placement of wooden blocks on rotating wheels.

Rolling away again I accidentally rolled into the sea and washed up on the shore of Skullport to find the Lords of Waterdeep which was at an exciting moment in the game. Exciting maybe but not, I was disappointed to discover, sufficiently cutthroat. Elliot was gunning for the hat-trick, hoping to win three weeks in a row and, in spite of my encouragement to do so, his fellow players weren't really ganging up on him. Bad form. I wasn't overly upset though, because he wasn't winning. In fact, Hannah had just raced into the lead — bagging a 40-point quest to bring her from last to first with just two rounds left. Hannah, the charming little cherub, was completely free of corruption at a time when Victor was having to remove three — and after his betrayal of all of us in Dead of Winter last week I still suspect he's not entirely untainted. Elliot, perturbed by my call to arms, was pretending to be "no danger to anyone," but I wasn't buying it. He claimed that JD "just needs to build more buildings and he'll kick our arse," but it turned out than in the end he lost to Hannah by a mere two points (if I remember correctly.) So Elliot didn't win and we can all be happy. I should really be celebrating Hannah's victory rather than Elliot's loss, but I can't help that I'm a mean-spirited bastard.

Lords of Waterdeep, just as Hannah snags the lead

Final board state of Lords of Waterdeep

Over in Japan, Tom is about to win Machi Koro with just the harbour left to build. He puts it down to beginners luck and receiving a lot of help and advice — to which I'm sure you, like me, will react with gasps of shock and dismay. Beginners are to be crushed not counseled! Never mind, there are always other opportunities to send 'em running. David was also helping, not with advice but by giving him all his money, explaining his trailing position, with four objectives remaining. Tom's restaurants were just too good; "he just comes back again and again," apparently.

Machi Koro with expansions gets BIG!

After finishing Machi Koro, this bunch broke out the madness that is Dobble.

Card collision in Dobble!

I then sauntered over to a table where they were readying up to mutilate their minds in Cthulhu Realms, but hadn't started so I have nothing interesting to report. Instead I'll tell you a little bit about how their play of World Championship Russian Roulette had gone. You'll be pleased to hear that, miraculously, all four NoBoGlins who had taken part were still standing. Actually I was somewhat displeased to hear that there is absolutely no risk to the players at all, as they're not actually playing Russian Roulette and you don't even get any guns in the game box. No, it's more like the "Championship Manager" of Russian Roulette: you have to lead your team of hapless daredevils to either win the most points, or, naturally, be the last team to still have their skulls intact. The idea is to predict how many times you can pull the trigger without splattering your brains over the wall, with a push-your-luck and a bluffing element, since you can sneakily pocket your one bullet before the round begins, with other players able to call you out if they suspect you. Throughout the game you get extra abilities that retarget your shots to be aiming at the ceiling or other people and so on. All in all, the game sounds absolutely mindblowing. Ha ha. (Sorry, had to take a parting shot. (You weren't expecting so much punfire were you? (I hope this isn't triggering your disgust at puns (Please aim your ire elsewhere (OK I'll stop now)))))

So now it's time to sink into the ignominy of my own game of Lords of Vegas. This was the first time I'd played so here's a run-down of the rules in case you are similarly ignorant as I was. The aim is to obtain points by having casinos you control be activated by the cards which are drawn once per turn. Each card has a colour and activates the corresponding colour casinos. The trick is that each colour will come up a limited number of times, so you have to build the colours of the ones that will be most lucrative, and perhaps switch up once they run out. When your casino is activated you get money equal to the number of your die which is placed on it, and a point. Adjacent casino tiles of the same colour merge into a single casino worth points equal to the number of tiles, but the points are only given to whomever has the highest die value in that casino, with draws resolved by a roll-off. This means you can buy a casino next to someone else's which either starts off with a six or which you "reorganise" (re-roll the dice for) to get a higher number, gaining control of the whole operation, and all its points. (The money is still distributed to everyone.) This makes the game a constant fight for control whether by buying new tiles (which is not so easy, since you only get the purchasing rights randomly, and have to pay double the ordinary cost to buy otherwise and may then lose the spot next turn if someone gets the right card) or re-rolling the dice in an existing casino by paying one money per visible pip. This is made all the more important because after a few points, you have to actually gain points from a size-two to move up a single space, increasing the further you get.

Action shot of Laurie chucking a die

ZOOM AND ENHANCE

I found it reasonably fun but it was pretty difficult to have a decent amount of control over what happens to your empire. You rely very heavily on the card you draw on your turn giving you a decent spot to buy a casino on. Though you can buy casinos on plots adjacent to ones you've already built, it costs twice as much for effectively half the benefit (since on average you will lose it to someone else after half of the rest of the game.) Building casinos already costs a lot, so this seems like it's almost always a bad idea. There's also literally nothing you can do to prevent other players from trying to take over your stuff except re-rolling low dice and hoping for higher ones (a good idea anyway since it'll get you more money.) In a way it's nice to not have to worry about defending yourself, but it does just mean you will end up repeatedly losing control of your acquisitions and having to pay to try and get them back which is a bit frustrating. Still there's enough to think about on your turn to make it interesting, and not so much it takes ages. Though I did have the benefit of sloping off to gather blog material during the downtime.

Close-up of the hard-to-distinguish tiles

In the end it was a pretty close game. I can't even remember who won, but it wasn't me (I came joint second I think.) Oh and one parting thought: the colours are awful! Being what the politically correct call "chromatically challenged" games often have this problem for me, but most do pretty well. However, the casino tiles are not the typical bold hues that most games use for their pieces, and some of them are really easy to confuse. Gareth couldn't even tell the purple and brown ones apart, making him a special kind of hue-halfwit!

Final board state of Lords of Vegas

After rolling our final dice we skulked around watching various games end until it was time for a traditional episode of Avalon. I actually hadn't played it at at NoBoG ever, and hadn't played it at all for about a year, so I was very excited to once again be a... loyal servant of Arthur. YAWN! Lucky for me this is Avalon and not Werewolf so being the most boring role isn't that boring. In a controversial turn of events the first quest was immediately accepted and passed, with no opportunity to see more information from the voting. The next quest took two attempts but then it, too passed. Were the Minions of Mordred stealing a snooze, or just being superbly stealthy? Furious arguments took place over who would go on the second mission, and we'd agreed that we would take the two apparently-good guys from the first mission plus one other, and also agreed to switch it up for the third mission to ensure we had enough information at the end. But then, surprise! The third mission passed — had we just got lucky and avoided all the baddies, or had Oberon — the "mystery meat" of the game — forgotten which side he was on? It all rested on the Assassin to determine who Merlin was. But my forceful argumentation had convinced the evildoers that I had magical information, when in fact it was merely the searing power of pure logic that drove my debate. The Assassin targeted me, Merlin, the very man who picked the final mission, lived, and Good triumphed.

And thus ends the week! I hope you've enjoyed accompanying me on this adventure through time and space (well, from 6:30 to 10:30 on Tuesday, between the Grosvenor and the Mash Tun...) and will join me for another before too long. Adios! You thought you were safe from the gpuns? Well that's about to... backfire!

All quiet on the Mash Tun front

It's been a quiet few weeks at t'Mash Tun and a decidedly relaxed more cosy air has settled on the weekly gaming. We've seen a spread of new gamers and new games both, but by and large it has been business as usual for NoBoG Tuesdays with classics such as Lords of Waterdeep and Ticket to Ride getting plays as well as the lesser spotted things such as Cyclades and Study in Emerald.

Hal, Pete and Sam enjoy a quiet game of Unfeeling Creatures

Dark Moon got a play a few weeks ago to a largely new group who wanted to sample its delights, and for once the game wasn't a horrendous car crash for the survivors. Welcoming Jack to his first NoBoG evening, he got to be one of the treacherous infected players, and on Sam's opening turn was pretty much revealed to be a filthy evil doer. Which isn't ideal. In fact I'd go so far as to say it's if not game breaking, then game disrupting. You can get the same thing happen in Battlestar Galactica ( of which Dark Moon is the stripped and dipped clone ) when Gaius manages to luckily pick a Cylon to reveal on one of his first turns. In BSG the impact can be even worse as by and large the revealed gets to spend the next 3 hours apart from everyone else.

I was the other infected in Dark Moon, but there was little I could do to help my fellow traitor, and the survivors had a remarkably good knack for rolling positives on their dice and passing all the challenges. Despite a good deal of suspicion going around the table, the survivors cruised home without hardly breaking a sweat, but the table talk was still great, and laughs and accusations were had.

Spyfall. I have seen less bad answers and more bad answers.
I'd say there were an average amount of bad answers here.

Sam also picked up Spyfall and we gave this a go with an expanding and contracting group for the rest of the evening in something of a marathon session. Spyfall has visited NoBoG before but surprisingly it's quite a rare sight and almost all the players at the table this time were newbies. The challenge of figuring out a question on the spot was as ever a fairly tough proposition until at least half a dozen games had passed and some stock questions started doing the rounds... along with some stock answers that turned into a running gag..."I have seen less X, and I have seen more X. I'd say there is about an average amount of X here"... and an easy way for a spy to evade detection by playing for a laugh. At one point during play we also had Luke the off duty barstaff at the Tun to join in and fielded questions about what to do if a squirrel was present and the unspecified horrors of what happened at the "show at 4". Great fun.

Castles of Mad King Ludwig

The castles of Mad King Ludwig is getting to be very popular at the Tun, several people have picked up the game for their own collection, and this week we saw two simultaneous games of it being played. I still haven't played this, looks good fun, and judging from its popularity, it must be getting something right ( as it stands it's now much more popular than Suburbia of which it bares a passing resemblance ).

The Imperial Assaulting team got their fortnightly game in too, but in something of a bid for worlds shortest Assault managed to finish the game before you could say "scruffy looking nerfherder". I think they took as long to get themselves sorted and setup as they did in playing it. They then decided to bust out some flicking type of game - Flick 'em Up I think - which looked great, however I have something of an aversion to game pieces flying off tables - too many scenes of people scrabbling under darkened pub tables with the flashlight on their mobile turned on ( and the things they can return from Under The Table with ) have scarred me.

Terra Mystica

This week Pete busted out Terra Mystica to teach a whole bunch of people who had never played it. Despite Chloe having the broken over powered halflings ( which are now errata'd to not be as over powered ) and Pete taking the less than spectacular Giants, Pete inevitably won. In a post game commentary he declared that against any decent opposition he would have lost, I laughed at his attempt to downplay his score whilst inadvertently and hilariously insulting the capabilities of everyone else. Possibly this was made even worse by Hal - one of his fellow players - standing next to him at the time. It's a good thing Hal is so laid back.

Also this week I got to play three cracking games, all new to me, Lewis and Clark Discoveries, The Grizzled and Harbour.

Lewis and Clark Discoveries is to Lewis and Clark The Expedition, as Roll for the Galaxy is to Race for the Galaxy. Same theme, approximately the same mechanics, but replacing the key bits of the engine with dice and dropping everything else. And it works really nicely for Lewis and Clark Discoveries.

The ideas are roughly the same - a journey that requires traversing rivers and mountains and encountering native tribes along the way which will provide aid. Instead of the fixed race like board you get in the original Lewis and Clark however, Discoveries simply uses victory points for each leg of a journey you complete. So for each journey leg card you complete, you get to add its victory points to your pile. If you step back and think about it, the race board and the legs for victory points are in fact the same thing - the difference being that in L&C the original it's a sprint to reach X victory points first, whereas in Discoveries the game timer is the globally available number of journey leg cards.

Lewis and Clark Discoveries.
One of Joe's workers has come to work for me.
Our expedition has cookies.

There is some elegant re-use of cards going on with the game ( something FFG designs could woefully do better on ) where the cards are double sided and fulfill native tribes and journey legs ensuring that no two games will ever be the same, and exactly what mix of natives and journeys you get is very open ( this is important when you are going for the exploration set collection ).

Dice form your workers for worker placement, and with these you will be able to befriend natives, change dice, or complete journey legs. Some of the time the dice will go back to a global pool, and sometimes they get to be recycled back into your worker pool. The interesting - and somewhat borrowed from L&C - thing here is that the global pool of workers can be picked up by *anyone*, meaning you can swag other peoples dice and use them in your own placements. However. At any time instead of placing workers a player can retrieve all dice of their colour regardless of where they are. Natives are extra neutral coloured dice - and hanging onto these as opposed to having them recycle into the global pool for others to grab is a key part of the optimising and decision making you will be doing.

The global dice pool is a lovely little spin that means picking up a whole bag of dice from the pool can be very enticing but also situational. If you can get in and out, use someone elses dice before they are ready to pull all their dice back all to the good. When someone has just one or possibly two of their dice out of their pool, is it really worth them doing a recall ? Probably not. So if you've got their dice, you're probably safe.

Great game. And it's really interesting to start seeing these dice games where dice are being used in clever ways - not just some yahtzee / King of Tokyo variant ( yeah that's right, I went there, I dissed King of Tokyo ).

Second up was The Grizzled, a French co-operative card game set in the trenches of World War I, with some lovely cartoon art done by one of the gunned down Charlie Hebdo artists ( Tignous ). Which, although passes unnoticed by many a gamer, is probably something to think about. Legacy. Mortality. Tragedy. Murdered man's work in your hands. Cheery, I know.

The Grizzled. We failed. Tim's fault.

The Grizzled is fairly simple - try to collectively exhaust a deck of cards before the game timer runs out - the game timer being either exhausting a different pile of cards or one of the players receiving too many wounds. Set *avoidance* is the order of the day with players playing into a global tableau trying to avoid three of a kind of anything. Failure to do so shuffles all the cards into the Pile That Needs to be Exhausted, whilst success bins the cards to the discards. Keeping cards in your hand at game round end will put them into the Needs to be Cleared pile - and one of the key balances of the game is how many cards should get dealt out at the start of a round ( it's up to the players ), and how many are going to be forced into play or onto the needs to be done deck.

The sets have a lovely theme, well, lovely is the wrong word, they are lovely pieces of art about a miserable existence, bullets, whistles, snow, rain, gas masks. Players each get a unique solider to play who have their own one use powers - clearing certain set types from the tableau - and also a speech power up which can do the same. Injuries can be picked up which have varying impacts on gameplay and your choices, such as forcing you to play all cards from your hand whether you like it or not.

A nice little filler game with lovely art, and one of those games you should definitely get round to playing at least once. And if you're into your French themed fillers, then this and Guillotine could be the start of your collection ! Now if only there was a Napoleonic filler...

 Lastly I got to play Harbour with Joe, which is another nicely condensed Euro squished into the size of a quick filler. Even though the games are utterly different, this reminds me of Artificium, which condenses a lot of Euro goodness into a very quick and simple filler based around card and resource management. In harbour the order of the day is worker placement and resource gathering / selling. In some ways it feels like a super cut down version of Le Havre in so much as the goods interaction is global and changes turn by turn as to their attractiveness, and behind all that you are trying to build things and score points in a port kind of theme.

Dare I say, it feels better than Le Havre to me ?

Le Havre is a cool game, and something you can sink your teeth into, Harbour is a filler, light weight, less complexity, and yet, by and large the games hit the same spots - resource collection, optimisation, building synergies, build to win, yada. Harbour plays in 15 minutes. Le Havre, not so much.

Check it out anyway, Harbour is a lovely condensed euro filler.

A study in Emerald - a study in cube placement. With tentacles.

 Last week I got to play Study in Emerald, a game I have seen occasionally pass through NoBoG but have never got to sit down and play. It's something of a collectors item these days with some seriously inflated prices ( although a second edition reprint is on the way which will no doubt pop that balloon ) which I am kind of at a loss to explain - perhaps because it has a passing tie in to Neil Gaiman - the game is based on a story of the same name.

Study in Emerald is a Cthulian Victorian Sherlock Holmesian mash up set in a world where the Cthulu lot rule the world, and an underground anti Cthulu lot want to depose them. The game is a simple area control and deck building game with a couple of twists, but by and large it comes down to having more cubes in a location than anyone else - which allows you to draft a new card into your deck and or score points. The cards form what kind of action you can peform - but there isn't a huge breadth of options here, you will be picking up cubes from the stock, placing them down into areas, cashing areas in for cards or assassinating someone else at a given location.

So the game comes down to place cubes, pick up cubes, cash in areas removing all cubes and obtaining a card. Rinse and repeat.

The main twist to this game is that the players are split into two teams, the pro cthulu and the anti cthulu, and the way you score points for each team is different - some things will only score for one side or the other and a global track of victory points for each team also adds into your personal score. Despite this team aspect, the game is won individually - and for an extra kick, the lowest scoring person penalises everyone else on the same team by a handful of points.

The game has excellent presentation and a cool theme, mechanically it does its job, but realistically there is only a certain amount of wiggle room you have in promoting your team - and your fellow players - and demoting the enemy. So, your hands can be tied if someone on your team is struggling and pulling your points down. No one likes to have their points pulled down in public. There is a balance there in trying to help your team whilst kicking the other AND also making sure no one else is beating you points wise that you get to play out, but, it's muted, the actions largely play themselves, and your influence on what is going on globally is limited.

Codenames

The filler codenames has also been doing the rounds. James was somewhat miffed when I couldn't help but describe his clue as possibly the worlds worst codename clue ( the clue was heel 2, one of the answers being socks, the other being part.... because a heel is PART of a foot.... um... that logic means that just about any word would fit PART ... leaf... well its PART of a tree innit... money... well... its PART of the global economic model innit... ), and post round demanded I be made spy master as it wasn't so easy. For the record I guided my team to a win - helped enormously by the opposing team continually getting our answers. Good work lads. That game session also saw Sam pull an answer out of his ass in 5 seconds flat with "satellite" for the clue "desynchronisation". Satellite and belt. Huh. And that won them the game too. Outrageous.

Lots of other games played. Cthulu wars again. Blood Rage. Machi Koro. Luna. Blood Bowl Team Manager. Steam punk rally. Phew ! So many games, so little time.

32,36,42 for those who are counting.

I'll leave you with an epic three week sized gallery.

Luna. With a very thematic blue cloth for the sea.

Lords of Waterdeep

Cthulu Wars

Machi Koro

Blood Bowl Team Manager

Ticket to Ride

Cyclades

Castles of Mad King Ludwig

Blood Bowl Team Manager

Ticket to Ride India

Game of Thrones LCG

Yet More Castles of Mad King Ludwig

Lords of Waterdeep

Takenoko

Galaxy Truckers

Blood Rage

Steam punk rally

Double Trouble

Before we start, James wrote up a lovely little segment of his experiences this week - you can go read his exploits over on his blog.

With a line of NoBoG regulars texting, commenting and getting word in via yoghurt pots and taut string that they could not make it this week, I presumed that like last week it was going to be a quiet evening - which at the moment amounts to an attendance in the mid thirties ( half full for the Tuna ).

Turns out I was wrong and this week we hit 53. At least 53. I stopped counting stragglers coming through the door after 9pm.

And what a splendiferous evening of gaming it was ! What sights to see and wonders to behold !

For starters it was special hat night ! Charlotte the ever on duty bar maid commented that she was looking forward to seeing a mad collection of hats, and noted she had a beanie herself she could put on to get in the spirit. Alas, special hat night amounted to me wearing a rather fetching dragon hat, and as promised, Ewan actually for once removing his hat instead of wearing one. There were some rather poor excuses about not being informed when I quizzed people where their hats were, rather poor form, although someone suggested we should make every week special hat week. Food for thought. One suspects however this would be repeated weeks of again just me, in a hat, and Ewan without one. Pfah.

Elliot was in resplendent attire as he cut short his Other Duties and attended NoBoG in fine dinner

Lords of Waterdeep. Why is everyone staring at me ? Is it the hat ?

wear. It was like a scene from Casino Royale. Except instead of poker they were playing Lords of Waterdeep. And everyone else at the table was distinctly less well dressed. And there were no fancy palm trees and expensive cars outside. Just a small blue fiat and some classic British weather that couldn't quite be arsed to rain, might later, but would make you think about taking an umbrella only to annoyingly forget it and leave it somewhere, which would then properly leave you without an umbrella for the next day when it could actually be arsed to rain and isn't that bloody typical.

But apart from that. Just like Casino Royale.

We also had visitors from afar all the way from the US vacationing and working ( depending on which one you asked ) in Norwich. And of course, being in Norwich, the top place to be would be NoBoG ( bite it Norwich Cathedral ). So Erin and husband sat down to play some games, taking our American count up to 4 for the week. Rather alarmingly the trend in Americans attending NoBoG has steadily been on the rise for the last couple of months. At this rate we will all be Americans by sometime next year. Good news if you like large food portions. Bad news if you don't like the idea of Donald Trump possibly being your next leader. But regardless of American trends, NoBoG is clearly the international vacation spot to be given we've had Australian vacationers and all sorts. I plan to start up an in NoBoG novelty shop to cater for the flow of tourists - possibly a line of NoBoG Special Levelling Devices for holiday makers to take back home with them.

Sam was one of our regulars that couldn't make it this week, and he lamented that Mice & Mystics was probably going to be played whilst he wasn't there - a game that he wanted to have a go with. So to spite Sam we decided to play two simultaneous games of Mice & Mystics on one large table with both groups right next to each other ( largely because I was the only person who knew the rules, so I just shouted a bit to teach the two groups at once - Joe's clever idea that ). Double Trouble !

Mice & Mystics, Joe's group use "tactics" to win. Pah.

Our group of Mice didn't confer about what to take or skills to match, and piled in all dashing swords and bluster and quickly made it into the corridors beneath the castle. Two rooms in, and two mice down, we were slightly delayed having to rescued the downed mice before we walked into a torrent of spiders and centipedes. If you've never played Mice & Mystics before, then this is hardcore mode. Rats and Roaches are for wimps. Only truly heroic mice deal with the bigger spiders and centipedes. Surge after surge hit us, and in hindsight, a poorly timed dash into the next area left us reeling and bloodied and Tom as our spell caster, running desperately around a pit firing off magic bolts at chasing bad guys. Tom was last to go down, a mouse trap snapped shut on him after one too many dices with death, and as he brushed himself to get up, a centipede finished him off.

Game Over.

The other Mice & Mystics group used ridiculous ideas such as "talking to each other about what good synergies of powers they could use before selecting characters", and moving around so that the healer could always heal the hammer wielding tinkerer who kept multi smashing enemies. Pah ! They also set the game on beginner mode and removed some of the nastier events from the Search deck ( in our game it was one of these that ate a mouse ). They battled through the entire first chapter and successfully reached the tree roots - and had barely moved their time ticker on at all. I think they played it wrong. Real heroes do not discuss tactics. They spend their time coming up with rousing battle cries instead. I think we all know who the real winners were here.

Elsewhere Sean brought some possibly dodgy wrestling game to table and had a blast with that - Richard asked if you knew the winner of the game before anyone had even started, and everything else was just scripted. Sean said the game was good - or at least wasn't an abject failure, something which Andy agreed with when he noted it could have been a lot worse than it was. I'm still not sure if that was a compliment or some kind of back handed compliment insult thing. The game has some rock paper scissors action going on, with a bit of deck buildery shenanigans built into it according to Sean - the only down side being that only two of the four players could ever be in the ring at once. Why you couldn't have all four going ham is an open question. Seemed cool though. A tentative thumbs up !

Game of Thrones. Note ground zero of the Great Eastern Sea Coke Spill.

Game of Thrones was busted out yet again - and Martin and Davey were back with us at the table after a hiatus of a month ( I thought we had lost Martin for good ). As Lewis was also playing, it was necessary that a drink was thrown over the game ( it is now customary for any game Lewis is playing to have even odds that a drink should be thrown over it ), but to be fair it wasn't the fault of Lewis - but perhaps just his drink throwyness aura. They failed to finish the game, but everyone seemed to have a good deal of fun, except for perhaps Lewis who was beaten into a corner, and didn't really gel with the game. Don't worry Lewis, I'm not a big fan of the Shuffle Bits Pointlessly Between Three Areas for Five Hours game either. Game of Thrones. It's like diplomacy. But Winter Is Coming.

Hal brought along the new-ish Churchill game, which sees three players take on the roles of the World War II Allied leaders of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. Although the game is about WW2 it

Churchill. Looks. Twiddly.

is not a war game, but instead something of a political animal about which Allied Leader will come out of WW2 with the most clout. Which is a point that is not that often touched upon when talking about WW2, and marks the point where the British Empire and any kind of British world power was finally extinguished - bankrupted and exhausted. Even before the war had ended at the beginning of 1945, Churchill began to refer to the meeting of the Big Three ( the common term for the three leaders ) as The Big Two and a Half, realising that the post WW2 stage would be set for the US and the USSR. Britain would no longer be a world power. An outcome he lamented and dwelled upon post war as one of his worst failures ( along with the parlous state of the world with the US v USSR stand off )

I managed to stick my head in half way through the game, and both Hal and David commented the game was strange. Good. But strange. Difficult to get a grasp of what was going on.

Pete got his much favoured Tzolkin to table - something that hasn't been out in a while, and proceeded to thump his two fellow players ( Alex and... someone... ! ) into the dirt, then jumped up and down on them for good measure. To be fair to Pete, as something of a challenge to himself he

Funkenschlag aka Powergrid. Admit it. Funkenschlag sounds better.

went for a risky strategy that he has viewed in the past as either being untenable at worst or at best very difficult to actually do well with - going for maximum workers, and therefore, maximum maintenance costs. However. Grabbing a couple of buildings early on that made sure all his maintenance costs of food were then covered  no problem meant that Pete could steam roller through his usual efficient scoring practices. Oof. I looked in halfway through to see Pete with an apologetic look on his face, and one of his opponents declaring that he had built at least one building and he would take that as a victory. Oh man.

What has been seen cannot be unseen. Is this guy
teabagging the recently deceased ? It certainly looks like it
Shocking behaviour ! And it's labelled indifferent public !
Indifferent to teabagging ??!

A whole bunch of other things were played - Blood Bowl Team Manager, Powergrid,  Legendary Encounter, Takenoko and more ( there were 12 tables of gaming in total ).

I got to squeeze a couple of games of Guillotine in, and Richard played a card he described as the "teabagging" card, possibly of someone teabagging a recently guillotined victim. Decide for yourself !

As ever, a few pictures left over for the gallery. Not so many this week. I was busy herding two tables of Mice. Or Mystics. Whichever.

James in the fore, and deep in thought David plays Churchill in the back.

Blood Bowl Team Manager. But have you bought Blood Bowl 2 yet ? Ewan has... crazy... keen.. fool.