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!

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!

No YOU'RE a cylon!

Zhwummmm... zhwummm... I mean, err, hello! Hello from your totally human and not-at-all cybernetic blog-writer! Please ignore any possible, hmm, unusual redness in my eyes; it's all perfectly normal and nothing to do with robots. NoBoG was a bit thin on the ground this week, but of course, no less fun than usual. Games I surveyed this time round were Dead of Winter, Inis, Citadels and my own Spiel der Woche, Battlestar Galactica.

The start of the evening: not too many folks in.

The usually packed middle section

Even though Spring has been setting in in Norwich this past week, a cold bite returned though perhaps not quite leaving us in the Dead of Winter. When I arrived Chris (no, not me, a different one) said the team was working well together; though there could be a traitor, they had no concrete evidence and were close to winning. Chris thought it might have been easier due to the high player count of six. J-Dawg disagreed and declared that it actually gets more boring. (I considered asking why he was playing if it was boring but I suspected it was all a cover for being a traitor, and didn't want to ruin things.) At this point, Maddie (whose nickname I have deemed too difficult to type) was deciding her turn and was being called out for attracting the zombies after killing one. Now I'm not entirely familiar with how this game works but this did strike me as being a little bit out of the ordinary — maybe she's the traitor! When I inquired as to what kind of make-up or clothing might be used to attract a zombie I was informed it was best not ask. Thankfully my imagination was distracted before running away to dark and... disgusting places because Sean gave me chocolate. Whew.

Dead of Winter, teamwork in action.

In spite of the aforementioned teamwork, Gareth suspects that GaydogJ-Dawg (yes, this slip of the tongue actually happened, and yes, it had to be put in the blog. Journalistic integrity.) is a baddie on account of always screwing him over. J-Dawg counters that Gareth has been taking "outrageous risks!" and it all kicks off! Accusations fly left and right, that J-Dawg has been eating all the food, that certain people's mothers do certain unspeakable things for certain low prices and I make my exit. With certainty.

Would you like to attract these lovely lads?

When I return, I guess I'd missed the action because J-Dawg wanted to mime daggers flying through the air, piercing his back. This was a melodramatic way of announcing that Gareth had just shot him. I took some pictures and fled before I met the same fate.
Next up was pInis. This is a card drafting game in which you're trying to become King of the Island. Or the Inis. Pronounced "innish," which is where you go when you think you want to drink a beerish. I don't speak Celtic anyway (not Goidelic. Not even Brythonic, never mind Galatian.) There are three methods of becoming Kingish: you can become the chieftain of six clans, occupy six territories of the game board, or control six sanctuaries. The interesting aspect of this comes, though, because you gain a token for one of these victory conditions on your turn, but to win you have to not only still satisfy that condition by the start of your next turn, but you mustn't be drawing with anyone else who is simultaneously satisfying a victory conditions. The upshot is that while it's not that hard to get a victory condition, it's very easy to lose it, or to be tying when your opportunity to win comes around. In addition to the above, if you control the island's capital and possess a victory condition, you win even if someone else has one, too.

A board game...ish.

Inis has nice pieces.

As Tom put it to me, they'd got to the point, when I came by, where they were all quite close to winning but everyone was cock-blocking everyone else. Tom was, at least according to Emma, the biggest cock of all (or maybe the biggest block?) For the sake of balance I must also include that he protests that what befell Emma was not entirely his fault and that it would have happened without his interference. Then he and Dave fought each other too much and pissed away all their action cards, which are your only means of defence and of course throwing them away limits your possibilities, perhaps throwing your carefully laid plans awry.

The players contemplate their options in Inis.

I then swung by a game plaid by those men (and women) in the ivory towers of several Citadels, a game I love for its sometimes agonising layers of social deduction. The aim of the game is to have the most point-value of built districts at the end of the game, by paying that same point value in money to build them. Added to the mix is the fact that each round you take on a different role, chosen from a selection that is passed around, dwindling until the final person chooses from two. The trick here is that the special abilities of two of the roles which I will describe as the "fuck-you" roles target roles rather than players so if the most advantageous role for you is the merchant and you pick it, you may find yourself skipping your turn or losing all your dollah.

The citadels being built... and destroyed.

Joe seemed to be close to winning and his strategy was "just trying to go into 'game over' while everyone else does trying build big things," in other words trying to end the game by getting eight districts built, even if they're not worth so much. He'd also been the biggest dick, stealing all of Monika's money and other people's besides. "Crime does pay," he said, but it did turn out that he got his just desserts in the form of brutal murder for all his thievery. (In case you're wondering, after being murdered your city is taken over by your heir(s) in your stead.) Sam reckoned James was also doing pretty well, and I inadvertently aided him on his path to victory by clearing up his misunderstanding of the Warlord's special ability, pointing out that he could destroy one of frontrunner Joe's districts for free. The pot suitably stirred, I ran off.
And that brings us to the 5+ hour epic consisting almost entirely of pot-stirring that is Battlestar Galactica! Ahh, what a game. A special place it has in my heart, and I'd not played it for nearly a year. If you think you might watch the TV show, be warned that mild spoilers will follow.
The premise of the game, as with the show, is that humanity is trying to escape the blasted nuclear wasteland that was their home and strike out for the legendary Kobol, dogged all the way by their chrome-plated former slaves, the Cylons. Hidden amongst the humans, however, are sneaky skin-jobs who appear indistinguishable from good honest people with organs and souls and whatnot. They try to sabotage humanity's efforts by subterfuge and trickery, aiming to drop one of four resources to zero, to damage the titular Galactica six times, or to sneak a boarding party aboard her and have it disable the ship from within. These hidden agents can always do this by making or suggesting bad decisions, but secret actions complicate matters severely. Each turn the current player draws a crisis which must be resolved in an attempt to avoid or minimise its negative effects. Some of those are simply a choice for a particular player, often the President, between, say, losing a resource or discarding cards — skill cards which represent the particular skills of each character, like Leadership or Piloting. Others are skill checks, where each player in turn secretly contributes skill cards in an attempt to bring the total value of correct skill cards minus the incorrect ones to a given target. At this point, secret cylons may announce sweetly that they are single-handedly flying the planes, rallying the pilots and all else that is needed, whilst in fact contributing precisely the wrong cards. Once two random cards to reflect the hand of destiny have been shuffled in, it is no longer so easy to tell who has been telling the truth, and the accusations are let loose. In the midst of all of this, the cylons are typically sending raiders and other ships to damage galactica, threaten the fleet and generally screw things up — as things become increasingly chaotic, the humans must make tricky decisions about what to prioritise in order to avoid succumbing to any of the loss conditions.
In our play-through, everything started off swimmingly: there was not even an oily whiff of the cylon fleet, and we sailed through the void of space managing at first to even scavenge more fuel than we were using on our way to our mythical new home. At the four-distance mark, all resources looked peachy in spite of Madame President Meltem's insistence early on that food was not really so important, losing us two points in rapid succession. Our record on the skill checks had been patchy too, attempting and failing far too many for our liking. Yet the pilots were sitting in their ready room drinking ambrosia and playing cards with nothing to do; the enemy raiders weren't coming, and without that there was just no need to do better.

Just got to the half-way point: everything looks peachy,
though Chief's shown his true colours.

Kaan, looking sympathetic.

Four distance is the half-way point which marks the sleeper-agent phase where more loyalty cards are handed out to represent those who'd been cylons all along but who only now realise their true identity. It was here that the first signs of strife began to appear, as one of the humans turned to be rather sympathetic to the cylon cause; Chief Kaan slipped away from the human fleet and joined the cylons on our tail. Soon enough, the third jump had been made, bringing the fleet to 7 out of eight distance, guaranteeing a human win if they can just jump twice more, and still only fuel was in the red, with more than enough to close out the game. It was at this point, though, that the first full-on toaster-top revealed himself in the form of yours truly, Vice-President Chris Zarek, who first used his friends in low places to force the rest of the team to exhaust themselves in keeping another cylon suspect locked up in the brig. Zarek then blew himself away in a suicide attack that left Commander Lewis severely wounded. Respawning in Cylon-heaven, robo-blogger joined Chief Kaan in trying desperately to coordinate the cylon effort, which had as explained, been sorely lacking up to this point. The next round revealed also that Sam "Boomer" Valerii had been a sleeper agent all along and, though locked up and unable to cause any damage, she too offed herself and ended up on the resurrection ship.

This is what the board looks like when
the shit is hitting the fan.

With three toasters turned all the way up, defrost mode engaged, the humans' days were numbered. A massive assault was the all but the first sign of any real activity from the cylon fleet, orchestrated by Zarek. The erstwhile Chief used his connections to organise sabotage, damaging the hangar bay and preventing the launch of more vipers to defend against the amassed enemy. Boomer then coordinated every single cylon ship to attack, blasting the remaining meagre defences apart. An error in fleet management brought on by the chaos had left a dozen civilian ships unprotected, slaughtered almost to a man, and the humans finally broke, lacking the manpower to continue.

Cylon Centipede 2
Starbuck did not escape this encounter unscathed.

Cylon raiders, civilian ships, and their viper defence.

The cylons had won, proving the superiority of machine over man once and for all, but what had we learned? Well, first of all, never trust Adam "Starbuck" Thrace with the loyalty deck — if it weren't for good luck with the order of cylon reveals, we would have had four out of six players trying to screw the humans! As it happened, the third chrome-dome to be revealed had two cylon loyalty cards which doesn't turn him into some kind of super-cylon and has no further effect. He could therefore ignore the extra one without affecting the game at all. Second, it is extremely important that everyone read their loyalty cards for the exact same amount of time, especially if there are new players. I knew with almost certainty that Kaan's AI was malfunctioning because he spent a long time referring back to his loyalty card when others had finished reading — the "You are a cylon" cards having far more text. It would even be an idea to have everyone read these cards before the loyalty deck is made up to ensure familiarity. Luckily, this too didn't affect the game much as Kaan disposed of this card very quickly (giving it to me) on account of the rapid onset of the sleeper agent phase.

Cylon victory!

The destroyed civilian ship that ended it all.

And that's all for this week — citadels being built up and torn down, islands being fought over by great chieftains, the zombie apocalypse being defended in the bitter cold, and the inexorable march of the machines. Hope you've enjoyed it!

In which NoBoG nicknames get a little more ridiculous.

Happy Lententide, board gamers! What awaits us in this divulsion of board-based diversions? I'll tell you what: a veritable trove of tabletop treats. And speaking of treats, Lewis gave me a rolled up chocolate crepe thingy to celebrate pancake day. What a time to be alive! And what a time to be attending NoBoG! I was tardy to the Tun — not, this time, because of any pancake-related procrastination but due to the rather mundane delay involved in waiting in a queue to get cash, and then typing my PIN in wrong. I'm not good with numbers, OK?! But this was not enough to stop me getting in on a game — oh no! — I arrived to the main room, pint in hand (I had to put that cash to good use, after all) and immediately bagsied a spot in Dicenstein. I then discovered that all the spots had been bagsied already so I sort of dithered a bit, but then two other people un-bagsied their places and the resulting polite-off culminated in my playing it. But more on that later — read on to find out to what everyone else was getting up.

 

My first excursion was to a game I can't think of a decent pun for because it's called bloody Tash Kalar which just doesn't lend itself to jokes in the English language. All I've got is something weak to do with moustaches, so leave your suggestions in the comments. Anyway, my first impression of this game was that it looked pretty complicated. This was confirmed by Sam whose first words to me were "I'm enjoying it but it's fucking hard." The basic gameplay consists of what he described as "combat Othello" — placing tokens in certain patterns which allow you to activate cards, each of which requires a certain pattern of tokens, summons something special and potentially has some special effects. The more powerful the effect and summon, the more complicated the pattern is that you need to have already. Sam wasn't feeling to confident about the game because Alex already had a fire elemental out which had wiped out a whole bunch of stuff all at once — the potential for chaining things together and wreaking destruction seems quite high.

A rather unclear shot of Tash Kalar. In the
middle is the grid on which you put your tokens.

I checked back just after the game had ended and now Sam was rather enamoured with it as "it went brilliantly because I fucking won!" Monika accidentally took victory from the other two players and handed it to Sam. They both insist that she would never do anything nice to Sam on purpose so this was not a deliberate coronation, but kingmaking is obviously a possibility. It seems like it could be a bit of a mind-bender — "You feel you could do a lot better if you were a lot smarter because you have to think so many jumps ahead."
The game looked really interesting as well as the card designs being gorgeous and I'd quite like a go at some future NoBoG (hint!)

 

Next I was off to spectate a race where the prize is the whole galaxy! Quite high stakes. I've played a couple of times before but apparently I've forgotten all the symbology of it, which is (famously) intense. I should be ashamed of myself really — we mathematicians are supposed to be good at memorising and understanding crazy abstract symbols. The players had an embarrassing situation of their own though; Joe — a first timer! — looked set to win! "If he's developing, I'm definitely developing, said one nervous player.

It's a race! Newbie Joe is middle-left with
more developments than everyone else.

J-Dawg (the nickname has apparently stuck!) revealed "for the record" though, that "this is not the real game" and was just a practice. Why? "Because there are new players" — like Joe — who "might be accidentally succeeding." Well that's a new euphemism for beginner's luck! And a very cruel slander to someone who could already articulate a clear strategy of "build cards. Game." He did seem to have about ten times as many cards as any of the other players, which even I can remember is a good sign.

In front of the bar the mild week was nevertheless experiencing the Dead of Winter, a game which I still have not played (they tried to convince me this week, but I wanted something a bit more duck-outable.) They'd already experienced one unpleasant eventuality in which one character found insta-death on the exposure die which you have to roll when you go a-wandering. I unsubtly inquired about the existence of any early suspicions, and even though Meltem copped to "always having a suspicious face" they weren't ready to properly finger anyone and thought there might not be one.

Dead of Winter set-up.

Having still not played this perennial favourite I asked for a quick run-down of the gameplay. Apparently the long and short of it is: feed the colony, search piles of equipment, avert crises, do/fail the main objective (delete as applicable depending on whether you're a baddie) and do your secret objective (or skip this part if you're Matt, according to post-game facebookery!) The end — simple! Given the quantity of bits I suspect it's a bit more complicated. The moral dilemma of what to do with the survivor tokens, which represent food consuming babies and old people, had not been resolved — and apparently my suggestion of just letting them die/turning them into Soylent Green was no good as you'd lose morale and then everyone gets sad and you lose. Bleak.

Serried ranks of soldiers in Dead of Winter.

On my return the game was getting close to completion and the survivors were worried about not having enough tool cards to complete the objective. Recent turns had been fairly quiet due to not moving much (staying holed up is safer of course, just sitting in front of your fire fueled by zombie-parts and doing some knitting I guess) but Meltem was still suspecting Adam of being a traitor ("because nine times out of ten he's a traitor!") Unfortunately I didn't catch the very end of the game so I may never know what befell the four!

Things hot up (cool down?) in Dead of Winter

 

At this point I interrupt your regular programming to relate a tale from the Epic Spell Wars table wherein Hannah loudly lamented that, "he had three wild magic and I killed him before he had to use them! I'm so terrible!" For those not in the know such a card requires you to shout "WILD MAGIC!" whenever you activate a spell with them, hence being seen as something of a forfeit. We share your sorrow, Hannah. Though to be fair there was quite a lot of extremely wild magic being flung back and forth!

 

So, to return to the regular schedule, I went exploring! Specifically I explored the little alcove where they were exploring early 19th century America just like Lewis and Clark. In Lewis and Clark you are trying to get from one side of the continent to the other first by river, then over land, then by river then land then river. (If I have correctly remembered the precise sequence of river/land which I may not have...) You do this by acquiring lots of little hexagons. (Actually hexagonal prisms...) Effectively it's a "really complicated race" in which the hexagons represent canoes, horses, logs, meat, tools and skins. They're not really called skins, but these particular players want to sell four of them at once. hehe. The player possessing Lewis from the start was a bit miffed that this didn't confer any advantage, but when I asked what it should give you, he said it should make you automatically win, so I'm not sure he can be trusted to devise balanced house rules. You also have Indians whom you can hire to help you, but they slow you down because when you break camp to actually do some movement, the more Indians the less you move.

Hexagons! More than four skins!

The fundamental means of making progress is paying resources in order to use cards, to do which you actually have to play two cards together — each in a different role, so you have to choose which of the card's sides is best to use. Tim, whom I am now required to quote as Timbelina, said the game was "a bit brain melting" and this effect seemed to already be underway as he was already talking to himself, asking why he was only playing a one-power card when he had something that needed more power! Goey Joey (what have I got myself into with these nicknames, seriously?!) was the only one who'd ever played before but wasn't exactly racing ahead as when I looked in for a second time they were all stuck on the mountains. The reason for this is that you tend to grab a load of stuff which is useful for progressing through the river and have a bunch left over when you get to the end of the river section, but it is apparently avoidable if you plan ahead well.

Trying not to let his mind melt onto his hand
and ruin the cards.

I wound my way back around the tables to find a heavenly game of Celestia in the offing. A quite unbelievably cute airship is captained by a new player each turn who may or may not be able to pilot it from its current station to the next one. If you think the captain is capable (which is to say, possesses the right resource cards), you stay aboard in the hope of a far-off land flowing with milk and honey (note: not actually sure what the resources you pick up are; probably not milk or honey.) If successful, you, the captain and the other True Believers move on and the captaincy moves to the next person. But if you are too trusting in your pitiful pilot, you go crashing down with the ship and get nothing, and the ship returns to the start. You do always have the option, though, of expressing your lack of confidence in the captain by simply disembarking. You then get whatever meagre rewards await where you are, which are of course not as delicious as those at loftier destinations. It seemed a neat, simple concept with lovely pieces and cards.

SO CUTE! LOOK AT IT!!

Trying to decide whether to trust the captain.

And that brings me roundly back to the spooky graveyard of malformed cuboids forming the Dicenstein! Now an iniquitous past in Warhammer has given me a love of games with ten trillion dice which is exactly what Dicenstein is. Though as I will explain, there are some missed tricks here, but all those dice, each having little pictures and weird symbols printed on them, make a cool first impression. The figurines, too, are quite nice, though the size seems a bit off — they don't stand up well and laying them down doesn't work well with all the dice that clutter the board at the beginning.

My goodness, that's a lot of dice! Note fallen-over
Dracula-figurine, because trying to keep them
stood up was just too much effort.

The aim of the game is to accrue points by digging up graves containing monster parts (represented by dice) and either cashing them in or using them to create your own, better monster and battering the other beasts with it. You start out as a craven hunchback which will automatically melt into nothingness after three turns, but when you melt, die by being clawed to death by a mantis-creature or return to your lab, your monster disintegrates and you reform it by rolling all your acquired dice and selecting four (one head, one body, one each of arms and legs.) Each die has stats that you add together to make your terrifying hybrid beast of brutality, and then you venture out again. Each type of dice also confers a unique power on your new monster, like being able to move diagonally or to re-roll some of your opponents' attack dice. Before you do this you have the option to return a set of dice — but you have to balance getting cash with having enough dice left to make a good monster.

Lewis tries to serenade a swarmling.
I don't think it's working.

Our game proceeded in two clear phases: in the first, two of us made monsters with huge amounts of "dig" stat which essentially cleared the board of dice. Then we focused on making the most horrifying and deadly mutants of mayhem and went on to clobber each other to death as violently as we could while trying to sneak back to our labs before dying ourselves, in order to regain health and cash in dice.

I acquired quite a lot more dice than this over
the course of the game: you can see why it got
hard to roll them all at once!

So how was it? The game is fundamentally fun but pretty limited. There are clearly quite a few different tactics to explore given the many different powers and stats, but I suspect the majority are dead ends. A simple example is that the dig stat is totally useless once most dice have been dug up. The clown parts seem to have poor stats and a weak special power. If you have a gargoyle part you essentially no longer need to care about your speed because the arena is so tiny (just 4 by 4 squares) that, coupled with the diagonal movement from the gargoyle, you can move anywhere in one turn (and often you can move back in the same turn.) The game might have gone differently if anyone had tried to interrupt the shambling mole-creatures which just dug up the entire graveyard stuffing the invisible man's limbs (how do you see them once you dig them up?!) into their hamster-like cheek-pouches, though in the end this didn't make or break the game. Nevertheless clearing the board of dice severely limited my opponents' options and if I hadn't made a couple of tactical blunders (including forgetting one of my special powers which could have allowed me an extra go at scoring some dice) I suspect it would have got me a win.

Once mostly cleared of dice, the pokey size of
the 4x4 game-board is revealed.

My main gripe though is with the dice — for starters you just don't spend enough time rolling them! This surely is the most satisfying part of any dice-rolling game but you only do it when re-forming your monster. They also have tiny symbols and are often hard to differentiate from one another, which you need to do to work out which special power they confer. This means you spend a lot of time sorting and hunting through the dice to work out which of yours you want to put in your creation and which of those on the board are best to snatch up. Though it's undoubtedly cool to form your monster out of the dice, it would perhaps also do more justice to the promise of a name like "Dicenstein" if you could acquire a bunch of dice in different stats which you then had to roll to perform each action. The fact that you can only form your monster out of four dice also seems a bit underwhelming. Imagine if you could create arbitrarily large monsters by laying out dice according to certain rules, but then had to decide when to start dismantling it in order to cash in the points, while still not becoming too much weaker than everybody else so as to avoid becoming fish-man food.
Still, for this first game it was definitely enjoyable — perhaps could have done with some refinement to the mechanics, but we suffered no terrible frustrations. So hurrah! John won, and then only bloody won Port Royal too, continuing a winning streak he said stretched into last week! So your task for next week, NoBoGgers, is clearly to beat him at any game you can. Not that I'm bitter for coming two points behind him in Dicenstein and three in Port Royal. Shush!

Lewis selects from some pirate ships and shipmates
in a final quick round of Port Royal.