Random Number Generator - RNG

Random Number Generator. A device, process or action that can generate a "random" number, or at least close enough to random so as to be indistinguishable from true random to a human observer, used for encryption, scientific study, games, and upsetting certain gamers with it's non deterministic bullshit. See reference Roll to Move is a travesty, Monopoly blows, and This Game makes no Sense. Most popular physical incarnation - dice.

A quiet week at the Mash Tun last week, possibly due to Halo 5 releasing on the very same day, or possibly just those random fluctuations, in any case a very Douglas Adams 42 turned up to get their gaming on. And yes. 42 is now officially a quiet number. Previously this same number may have been viewed as "bonkers busy", but context is everything. 42 for the population of your bathroom would be "unacceptably busy and there's no bloody hot water left"*. 42 for the population of China would be "there's no one here".

Cthulu and friends go on a world tour.

Pete had Cthulu Wars out on table for a second week running with Richard IV also joining in again declaring he knew what was going on now and would fare much better. With the heady scent of chinese plastic permeating the air ( it really was very apparent... that's what you get for having all that plastic ) Richard was the man to beat, getting into a strong position and fending off attacks from all comers. The game went on considerably longer than it's first outing, mostly due to a good deal of trepidation about deploying gates for fear of having them stolen. I think Richard won this in the end, clearly he did know what was going on.

Whilst Cthulu and his chums were devouring the world, on another table a whole different kind of

Zombicide -A sim for teaching you the basics of the Zapocalypse

devouring was going on with Zombicide, a game all about tooling up and killing zombies B movie horror style. Mechanically there is not much to look at here and it follows all the other point shoot, roll a dice type games, but thematically does a great job of having nice miniatures and an attractive modular board setup which really looks the part. If you ask me this is about typical for many of those kind of kickstarter games. Long on the eye candy. Short on everything else. Perhaps I am getting kickstarter fatigue. Nevertheless Zombicide looks good fun, and who doesn't like gunning zombies down !

Last week I got to partake of the Francis Drake euro board game ( another kickstarter ), which pits the players into a competition of exploiting the West Indies in the 16th century of gems, goods and uhh looting towns and castles and sinking ships. It was an ambivalent age, what can you say. The game runs for three identical rounds, so you get three cracks at the Euro puzzle, where first you pick up "stuff" which amounts to fuel for your upcoming worker placement, with things such as guns, crew, trade goods and barrels, and after everyone is done loading their ship you get to place your actions out - up to four of them by default. Actions are then resolved in player order and action number order, with a competitive edge of the first person getting to act in a place gets the bonus rewards.

There are the usual spread of Euro things going on here - points for set collection, points for action set collection - as well as just plain outright points for doing things.

Nothing we haven't seen before, and packaged and themed in a nice way.

Except.

One huge bugbear for me.

The game has a small RNG contained within it that determines whether you'll actually be able to afford the actions you are selecting or not - they'll vary in "price" from 0 - 6 resources ( and on average you'll probably pick up 3-4  resources of a particular type, less in some, more in others ) And you won't know if you can afford it until it's too late - you've already collected your resources, and picked your actions. And therein lies the rub.

For all the usual careful euro calculation and plotting of X actions, and Y points ultimately your game can hinge on whether you've luckily or unluckily hit a roadblock. And this isn't trivial, a full fat 10 bonus points await someone who can get all their planned actions swinging correctly, 4 points if you can half do it, and a single point if you limp across the line. This unfortunate RNG to see whether your plans work this turn tends to make everything else a bit of a sideshow.

And god forbid you actually have bad luck to foul of this two turns in a row ( out of three ).

Which is exactly what happened to me. You can only look on and watch as someone else picks up mucho victory points whilst expending ass all, and your own action cripples you for half as many victory points.

Blah. In our game, my third turn was spectacularly good as I managed to get into an area uncontested, and then sat back and let the turn play itself. I literally had no choices to make - and earned big points from doing so.

Nevertheless, it's an enjoyable game, nicely turned out, and if you can avoid or just plain ignore the lurking RNG devil waiting for you in the background, then it's a nice race to see who can grab the most things.

Agricola however, it ain't. Perhaps Agricola should put an RNG on each of its action spots for extra excitement. On a 4+ sorry pal, you trip on the way to plough a field. No ploughing for you this turn. And on that day, a thousand Euro gameplayers cried out as if in pain. . .

We finished with Isle of Skye which went down very well. Darren and Dave got locked in some mental high priced bidding war between the two of them, and switched lands on just about every round for outrageous prices.

BSG. In a surprise to no one move, Monika was the cylon.

There was also some fantabulous Battlestar Galaticaing, which rather confusedly went from four players to six, to five, to four. But through all this. The inevitable. The perpetual. The predictable. Monika was a cylon. It's amazing she still plays the game to be fair. Anyone with any experience would just push her out of the air lock. But you just... can't... quite... tell... I mean. Surely. SURELY. No one can be the Cylon that often. You're a good guy this time, right ? Wrong. Pete suggested she rigs the cards to always be a cylon.

7 Wonders. This table is a wonder in itself.

We also had the most epically large table 7 wonders on the go. It was fantastic. With a crazy seven people. There were so many players that some were in different weather systems and time zones to other players. Amazing. You couldn't even tell - or care - what the player on the other side of the table was doing. Lots of military ? Who cares ! I am 3 neighbours removed from that filthy warmonger ! Good stuff.

Elliott brought along Cauldron again, and on the front tables some Lords of Waterdeep got a bash. It's been a while since Waterdeep was out. Once upon a time that was almost a permanent fixture on one table of the ribs. That and Betrayal at House on the Hill.

Some end of night Resistancing went on. And Lewis complained that there wasn't enough time left in the evening to play fillers. Despite this, Lewis left early, and played his own main game til late. I noted he was actually just complaining about himself rather than anything else . . . .

The gallery...

* making the assumption that you do not have Roman Emperor levels of bathroom space and aren't in the habit of inviting 50 of your closest allies, senators, their partners, their offspring and assorted livestock around for a bath.

Twofer

Two weeks blog for the price of one this week, you lucky lucky people.

Summer has truly arrived in Norwich - you can tell because for the last week or two it has pretty much rained every day. I feel nature is weighing heavily in on my side about the ongoing tosh of East Anglia being reputedly the driest place in the UK. Tell that to the fens !

Two weeks ago we had thirty people turn up, and first quickly subscribed to was the fancied Nations game making its first appearance at t'pub. Nations is an abstract civilization game where each player gets to lead their nation through the ages and attempt to score more victory points than everyone else. The game is pretty much entirely card based, with each player building their own area up by buying in new cards to give them certain capabilities - resource production, military strength etc.

Nations - Another Civ the computer game brought to table.

Unlike say Sid Meier's Civilization The Board Game, there is no map here, the topography and army mechanics are abstracted away into waging wars that require a certain level of military, and taking a limited amount of areas as colonial territories. In fact there is just a tiny pinch of Seven Wonders here, with the values of your military cards indicating how strong you are, and your resource production cards telling you just how much you can produce.

Overall the game is a pretty slick civ game without getting bogged down in map logistics, and instead focusing on building and planning efficiency. Like many civ games, it leans heavily on the Civilization computer games for inspiration, and there's even a cute difficulty factor ( Chieftain, Prince, King and Emperor - just to really hammer home the Civ game link ) that acts as a handicap level for each individual player.

If you like civ type games you need to check this out. Punk Rich was so impressed with this that he went out and bought it right after - always a good sign for a game.

Over on the next table Terra Mystica got a blast, and Tom managed to get his experienced hand into this amongst all the first timers.

Terra Mystica, Pip points at something, Phil glares at me.

Of course he romped to a win in this, being a fairly mean hand at the game and knowing just what to do when. Tom is keen on the game and has played it a fair few times, whilst I think it plays out pretty much the same way every time, Tom thinks its always different. For me, after a few games it's just a bit meh, a bit dry, a bit samey. It's a solid euro, and the asymmetrical races are nice ( although arguably unbalanced in some cases ), but eh, I don't feel it quite has enough going on to be a classic.

Elsewhere Lewis lead another long game of Kingsburg, rolled crap dice all evening, and began to see the flaws of a game that relies singularly on dice to power your decisions.

Kingsburg. Lewis has a sad & laments his inability to roll dice.

Of course, you win some, lose some when the Random Number Generator enters the fray, but I think by and large the odds in Kingsburg even out, and it's unusual to be completely hosed by the hand of fate. I personally quite like Kingsburg, it seems to work quite well, and I like it as a medium length game - not sure about playing with all the expansions and turning it into a 3 hour grind ( particularly if your dice are being crap... )

This might be another case of a fairly solid game becoming slightly fat and wobbly when expansions are added to it - it's not unknown in my experience for expansions to take the streamlined sublime and add clunk.

Upstairs Mr Bond lead a mad full table of Fearsome Floors - the game of running your guys away from terrible logical rule following monsters. Fearsome floors is a fun game, but six people is utter bonkers !

Fearsome Floors. With six players aka
London Tube Rush Hour Simulator. Here a remarkably
accurate looking 3D Ticket Inspector stalks fare dodgers.

There was some shouting and at one point screams of being murdered or somesuch, so, it was emotional if nothing else - but after the game I think everyone exited the pub/table quickly and Mr Bond was left on his own.

Smash up and a bunch of others were played on the table over - I think Got Bit got played again, and finally on my own table, people were keen on playing Mission Red Planet which ending half way through the evening was then followed by Istanbul.

Neither of which I won. In fact I think Sam won both games, with Istanbul coming down to a real close finish of a turn or so difference. I was hopeless at Mission Red Planet, my guys failed to get a good purchase anywhere, I was bumped off early, and I failed to score much of anything. Still fun tho. I really like Mission Red Planet - a game that Tom Vasel in one of his recent top 10 lists has controversially noted has "murdered" Citadels.

Mission Rrreeeddd Planetttttt ! An epic 4 ships blast off.

IE, Mission Red Planet supersedes Citadels to such an extent there's no need to play Citadels ever again. I can see what he means, but Citadels is still cool, for me, I love the victorian Martian steam punk theme in MRP, the lovely card artwork and it just plays so nicely with a lot of player interaction to be had.

It's always fun to see someones astronauts end up being re-routed time and time again, and ending up in some martian armpit of a landing zone. In fact this week, Mission Red Planet got played again, and this time Lewis found that just about all his mustachioed victorian explorers kept landing in the dubiously titled "Utopia" for which he had spiked with a discovery card. In something of a sneaky double buff however, Lewis had actually planted a high scoring card and whilst bemoaning his continual landing in one spot, actually successfully bagged extra points at game end.

So this week, Mission Red Planet was indeed played again - and this time I won, huzzah - and before this we had another go of Kingsburg - but without any of the expansions. With new players and a rule session to fit in, we still managed to buzz through the game in under two hours - which I think is just about right. I won that too in an embarassingly strong kick ass womping ( just about double the points of poor trailing Lewis ), which I feel gives a lie to the statement that Kingsburg is just about who rolls the highest dice ( by and large we all rolled pretty similar ). Whereas we finished with just about the same number of buildings each, I garnered a stomping 33 points in bonuses, and everyone else struggled to get out of the teens.

Snowdonia, battling fog and rain to do something useful.
That'll be a typical Welsh day then.

 Robin brought along Snowdonia, a game about building a railway up a Welsh mountain ( I say mountain with all due respect to actual proper mountains in other places of the world that are impressively massive, rocky and take specialist equipment and possibly days of traversing in appalling conditions - mountains in the UK amount to modest swellings of earth that possibly make you break out in a sweat by the time you reach the summit somewhere around afternoon tea, and my goodness if it gets foggy we might get lost a bit ).


This is the second time Snowdonia has been at NoBoG - it first showed up brand spanking new from Essen in its release year, one of Jimmy's ( long lost NoBoG vet ) many Essen delights. Despite its dubious sounding theme, the game is pretty cool, and if you are an age to remember such things, contains Ivor the Engine ( cue Ivor the Engine impression... chhh chi kuff chi chi kuff... )

Francis Drake was also played - another quickly subscribed game, I have no idea what this is about - something Francis Drakey I presume - sailing ships, taking Spanish treasure and defeating invading armadas. Actually I believe it's the first two and not the latter - you get to explore the Americas and the Caribbean a bit and do some lovely pirating.

Francis Drake Hero of the English. Filthy Pirate to the Spanish.

Making another return to favour, Betrayal at House on the Hill was played ( and no less than two copies turned up at once ), and the usual fun and shenanigans was had there. I wouldn't mind betting that Betrayal is now possibly one of the more well owned games amongst NoBoGers - not Agricola, not Seven Wonders, but instead Betrayal. Uh huh.

Ground Floor also returned - the game of hardcore corporate speak, vying for better storage closets, better advertising campaigns and in general being more of a corporate douchebag than everyone else. Owein won this with a strategy of producing nothing, but being wildly popular and having a very successful tv advertising campaign. As ever I fear this game is way too close to the mark of reality for comfort.

Ground Floor. I see your storage closet and raise you a
meeting room. Pfah, just wait til my internship program starts!
Oh dear.

Sam continues to extoll the virtues of the game, but its theme gives me the willies. I am too corp scarred perhaps. I do however really like its graphical design, and one day, I might even sit down with it and try to build myself one of them there storage closets. Surely the only board game in existence where you get to build a storage closet.

After all the excitement of that gaming nonsense was dealt with, I believe one or two fillers might have been played, in particular Ultimate One Night Werewolf, where a thoroughly cheesed off Luke being continually lumbered as a boring villager began to have delusions of grandeur and started acting out at random. A flaw to the game perhaps ? Villagers are boring ?

Until next week bat fans, same bat time, same bat channel.

Oh. And 25 people this week. I didn't actually have to raise my voice in the initial game organising to be heard for once.

Betrayal at house on the Hill

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