It's just a step to the left

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

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

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

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

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

On with the games !

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dead of Winter. And no sign of Jon Snow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Smart Fascist app detects its first positive

Imperial Assault

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

Carcassonne Star Wars.

Betrayal at House on the Hill

Imperial Settlers kicks off

Mission Red Planet 2

Duang Good Gaming

As the internet debates whether blue is white and black is gold, and further afield many ponder what on earth the word duang means, which to be fair are the most gripping problems the planet currently grapples with, here at NoBoG we carry on sublimely unaware of such trivialities, preferring instead to tackle the much more serious and important playing of games down the pub.Without which the entire German board game industry would no doubt collapse.

As Bill Clinton was prompted to say - It's all about the economy stupid.

This week we had a raft of never seen before at the pub games on offer, starting with the very lovely Lewis and Clark.

Lewis and Clark is a Euro 'racing' game all about getting your expedition to be the first to plot a course across the North Western part of the US and hit the pacific coast based on the historical expedition that started out in 1804. Which is quite shocking to realise - that in 1804 a great swathe of the US was largely unknown. Makes you realise just how young the US is.

Lewis and Clark is a very mild deck builder, in fact so mild that I am loathe to even say it is one - but the fact is you start with a set of cards which you will almost certainly be adding to. Albeit you'll probably only add a half dozen cards at most to that hand. Each card allows you to perform a certain action, and along with spaces on the board also offering actions, allows each player to gather resources, improve their expedition and for the true goal of the game - push their expedition further up the trail towards ultimate victory.

The delightful Lewis and Clark

Hand management is crucial in Lewis and Clark - each card doubling as both action and strength, meaning players must choose wisely which actions to sacrifice as strength in order to play other actions, as cards played stay played until a hand reset in the form of an optional encampment action is called. Getting the timing of this right - as well as being able to dip in and riff from other players played cards is half the art of the game.

The other half of the art of this game is resource management. Which has a severe wrinkle in from the usual play action, spam resources, use hoarded stock. Lewis and Clark punishes you for having too many resources. Likewise you won't be able to do what you need to do unless you have enough resources. Meaning that a player must walk a goldilocks tight rope between too little and too much. Too many resources will see your fat expedition going backwards with time penalties, whilst too few will see you struggling to efficiently use your actions to set a good pace.

Hand management, tight resource control, interaction between players in first come first served action spots, duplicated actions played and a changing route that forces you to switch resource gathering strategy means that Lewis and Clark is no slouch. Indeed Mr Bond declared the game to be somewhat brain burny as you sit and work out just exactly how many resources you need, what actions you are going to play, which cards you can afford to burn, and just where every other player is right this minute.

Overall the game is lovely. The artwork is absolutely beautiful - each card is unique in art, and apart from the start deck, every single action card is also unique in function. The game is steeped in historical theme - all the characters within it are research and accurate, and as for the mechanics of the game - they really are very well done and a step up from the usual. It must be said one important errata has been published for the game - nerfing an otherwise spoiling strategy of sitting on your arse at the start, ignoring penalties and accruing ever more crap for a single devastating burst of speed.

Highly recommended - Mr Bond won an otherwise incredibly close race with a final burst of speed taking him across the finish line to setup camp first on the pacific coast.



Sam II brought along the next new thing  - Super Motherload which is all about mining. Why it's not called Super Motherlode I couldn't say. Perhaps it's an illiterate publisher, or perhaps they are making a very clever point - so clever in fact that it seems dumb. Or perhaps because it loads. As in computer game loads.

Blurry shot of Super Motherload

Super Motherload is a fairly simple deck building game where the results of your playing your ever improving deck are placed on a community board that represents you digging ever deeper into the surface of Mars. Play a bunch of cards to mine some spots on the board, get rewards for mining those spots, use those rewards to gain new cards. Rinse and repeat. Along the way win victory points for achieving various goals - the first to use four cards to mine, the first to dig a four length tunnel and so on. The small wrinkle here is the community board which allows all the players to interact in the same space. If one player digs deep for a reward the next will be able to mine from their tunnels to get somewhere else - thus you need to  not only keep an eye out for what you can achieve, but also what you might be offering to others by doing so. There's also quite a nice board revealing malarkey going on, in that you can't actually see the lower depths until you've completed certain aspects of the current depth - the person that achieves completion gets a small advantage in being able to pick exactly what the next depth will look like, even though its a binary choice.

Spot the difference - Super Motherload artwork

The artwork is sumptuous albeit somewhat wacky in style. I can pretty much guarantee that looking at the card art will not in any way give you a mining vibe. It might give you a 1970's cop show vibe. Say, CHiPs for those of a certain vintage. But mining... not so much.

The game actually looks quite fun in an easy going kind of computer game mimicking type of way - and that's no surprise as the game originally started life as an easy going laid back computer game available for your console and pc couch gaming. I failed to get the opinion of those playing it at the time to see if it was as cool as it looked. I suspect the computer game is more varied and cool, and the board game is slower but more social.

The last newness was taken with the world premiere of Orctions a game that Elliot has been mulling over in design for more than a decade. I have no idea how the game plays. It has auctions. With orcs. But what can be said is that it attracted 8 players who all seemed to have a fantastic time playing it, and such was the good vibes it generated that Lewis became an instant evangelist and is not only buying it as soon as its released but was promising to go to the UK games expo to help with its launch. You can find out more about this at the somewhat in development orction website http://orctions.co.uk/

Pandemic. Going well ? Maybe not...

Elsewise the G man was in the house again - this time playing Libertalia, Ra and something else which I forget with the ever diplomatic Stu. Stu's group kindly played a filler game of Forbidden Desert as a kick off game to allow the late arriving G man to join in.

Betrayal at House on the Hill had a return play, having been absent for sometime, with a Frankensteins monster being burnt to death - again. It seems Frankenstein isn't so hard to put down in Betrayal.

And finally Pete got Lord of the Ice Garden to table again, this time with Tom and Rich IV providing competition, of which the wily Tom gained victory.

Lord of the Ice Garden. Pete didn't win.
I think he subtly blamed RichIV for ending the game too early.
Know Your Players - Rich IV is not beyond delighting in explosive suicide

Filler type games and other things rounded out the week, with an impressively strategic Sam II pulling a great victory in Saboteur as he got all the Saboteurs to help him out - having early been thoroughly sabotaging, only to turn the tables at the end to reveal the gold and himself as a good guy - not a saboteur. Sam put this down to actually not looking at his role card until most of the way through the second game and thinking he was a Saboteur when he was not. Regardless of this it allowed him to place the winning tile and grab the lions share of the loot. Perhaps hes hit upon a great, albeit risky, counter saboteur strategy - pretend to be one of them until you can lay the winning tile.

Blockade Runner. Hazel contemplates the awfulness going on.
Never mind. Cheaty Mages afterwards was much better.

The week before that ... Hal brought a never seen at NoBoG game to table - Blockade Runner, a game about shipping cargo into the Southern States during the American Civil War. I'm not sure what it is with Hal but he seems to have a penchant for some really obscure games - which certainly does make an interesting change to the usual faire.

I'm not entirely sure what goes on with this game, but suffice to say its something of a Euro with a map of the Southern US, some auction mechanics going on, deliveries and some card play.

I have to say when I looked over at this game the thought crossed my mind that I hadn't seen such a drab board since the 70's. But all that glitters is not gold and all that. Unfortunately when I asked the players what the game was like, Hal was first in with a single word - abysmal, and everyone else followed with milder but equally unglowing terms. Unfinished. Nice ideas but doesn't quite work. Needs refinement. And so on. Uh huh.

Walk like an Egyptian... Imperial Settlers

I got to roughly teach a group how to play Imperial Settlers. Which I am really liking and wouldn't mind picking up for myself - we were playing with Mr Bonds copy. Netrunner Sam who is something of a 51st state veteran quickly picked up the game ( the games being by and large the same thing ), and with a strategy of large card flow went on to a good win with the Romans, with me trailing a dozen points behind, and Stu and Nicky a good 20 points behind me. With a little kick here and there I'm sure I could have taken it, but as the Egyptians I was fannying around with stone and building funny monuments - no swords to be had.

Cash and Guns 2 - Lauren Birthday Edition

At the other end of the room Lauren brought her birthday copy of Cash and Guns 2. And engaged with a full group in an extra noisy game of gangsta shooting and looting. Pandemic got a play upstairs. As well as Powergrid. And possibly some other stuff I really cannot now recall....

Fillers, Netrunner Sam busted out a new game to me - Cheaty Mages. Which is a pretty basic bet on the final result of a card type game - where every player gets to - mostly - secretly dick with the value of the result. This is a nice filler game with a high level of interaction and table backchat - as most filler type social games are wont to do. I'm not sure its classically cool enough to be up there with the greats, but it is a solid filler and a welcome extra choice in the field of quick high player social games.

The classic Powergrid still doing its thing.

Guillotine is having something of a ... *cough*.... renaissance, and with a few copies floating around is being played quite a bit. Simultaneously on two tables at one point. So thumbs up for guillotine. And well done Tim for introducing this quiet winning game to everyone.

Whilst everyone seems to be on a guillotine love in, Hal for one still hates it. It fills me with rage he confided. I am not sure why this is. Perhaps he has some French Nobility in his genealogy and still harbours a grudge towards the filthy Robespierre. He does have a liking for fancy wines. So maybe there's something in that.

Colt Express Beer Goggles

Twenty Nine last week at the ribs, numbers declining from the heady heights of the previous weeks 38, although given the pub was more busy than usual at game time, it felt - to me - just as busy as last week trying to get everyone sorted.

This week Lewis is guest writing for his own table experiences - without further ado...

Ticket to Ride

On our table we first played Ticket to Ride: Europe, teaching Sam how to play for the 1st time (still some learners!).

A close game throughout, but I pulled off the win having taken first with the longest route bonus.



I then drew out my two new additions to my collection.

Le Guillotine

First, Guillotine, which featured a short 2nd day due to Jamie (@JEndlessraining) playing a card that allowed him to end the day after his turn, picking up two nobles adding up to 6 points. He ultimately won, though I stole 2nd from Sam. Teehee.


We finished off with Pickomino, which had me controlling most of the titles throughout the game, but after a brief moment of confusion over the French rules over certain die results and a struggle to trigger the end of the game, James (@JamesHayward92) took the win by one more worm than me.

Three satisfying games, with Guillotine and Pickomino being described as "slightly frustrating" but great fun. What game isn't, at the very least, "slightly" frustrating?

Meanwhile upstairs...

XCOM. Tom II wonders where it all went wrong.

Despite there being no evidence for the presence of aliens on planet earth, apart from dodgy videos of some dude in a skin tight leotard prancing around like an idiot , the ribs played host to XCOM again last week, four intrepid commanders swearing to defend the pub from any ill looking alien. Which is very public spirited of them. And you would imagine involving standing at the pub door with a clipboard and a menacing look. Tom II, Richard IV, Davey and Ewan headed up this enterprise with an early game status report providing troubling news - the entire ground infantry / door bouncer force had been eliminated to a man, leaving only the tea boy and the caretaker left at XCOM HQ. Who was the commander in charge of this debacle ? Tom. Tom was in charge, so I blamed him for the mess.
The buck stops with the C in C.

By the end of the evening however the team had turned things around and seen off the aliens, Tom proving his quality leadership skills after all, albeit one presumes with a large marble plaque commemorating the lost Poor Bloody Infantry.

Imperial Settlers. With Deans thumbs and not his face.
Which is either a framing error, or sparing viewers a horrible sight.

On the next table over a nice game of Imperial Settlers was afoot - I say nice, but this was nice as in Mr Bond doubling down on his raiding capabilities and burning everyones stuff to the ground. Particularly Dean who was the Japanese. With those oh so burnable buildings made of wood and paper. Elite Ed ( the artist formerly known as Writer Ed ) confessed he didn't really know what was going on, and had only got to grips with the game about two thirds of the way through, his Romans bringing up a very poor rear score. Nevertheless by game end he had sorted himself out to bring himself within touching distance of the others, but the brutal barbarian Bond won the day, with his victory points for earning swords malarkey going on.

Nice game Imperial Settlers. If you haven't tried it, you should.

On our table we opened with Colt Express. With Luke relating to us the drinking game version of Colt Express that he apparently regularly plays. When anyone gets shot you take a shot. As it were. This ends up doubling the penalty of getting shot - not only do you get a duff card in your hand, your mental clarity also takes a hit. Colt Express Beer Goggles. Luke then told us how he often won such games, but this turned out to be not so much excellent tactics, but telling everyone else the wrong rules and filling everyone with bullets that never ran out. Sam won this. A reasonable haul of loot and a bonus for shooting everyone dead.

We then had a blast of Sheriff of Nottingham, which surprisingly seemed to revolve around 5 guys offering or demanding cocks. I'm not sure who started this cock filled innuendo, but when Martin started demanding that he wanted to hear Sam say he wanted his cock we had reached Peak Cock. Luke displayed some dubious tactics again, claiming that anyone taking 2 or less goods had to be searched - which he duly did and thus proved easy bait - and was endlessly goaded into searching goods and bankrupting himself. By the end he had lost most of his money and carted a sorry collection of items into the market. Martin won this with a policy largely consisting of honesty. And cock baiting. Um. Ok.

Archipelago. I think Med Ed is quietly signalling me to
sabotage the deep in thought Pete.

Downstairs Archipelago got another wheeze. This time Pete was not picked at the post by an evil Separatist and took a convincing win as the Pacifist, managing to pick up or even come first in almost everyone elses categories too. Very good. The other players looked a bit shell shocked over their beating.


Powergrid got a play with six I think. I like powergrid, although I find myself always shying away from playing it, but Powergrid with six is... heavy. Not sure how this worked out. There looked to be some confusion from the new players half way through. Which sounds about right.

Powergrid aka FUNKENSCHLAAAAG. Sounds better in German.

A very shortened game of Saboteur 2 took place. A single saboteur won the day. Mostly because every single other faction was busy kicking the crap out of each other. A shameful display.

You Win Second Place in a Beauty Contest...

... in a lineup of one. So goes the Monopoly inspired joke. More of that later.

Did you know ? The most popular day of the year for holiday
hunting is January 5th. Just after lunch. One can only assume
this is because everyone is miserable being back at work after
Xmas.

Since Christmas the NoBloG writing goblins have become slack. Weekly issues are failing to get out, news is being missed, and all the while the slacking goblins have been eating the last remnants of festive chocolate, complaining about having eaten too much, and using their office time to search the web for cheap winter holidays. What can you do ? I have sent them all off to a recuperative post christmas blues tropical beach, and been forced to do my own typing in their absence. Pfft.

The last couple of weeks have returned to a busy pub of gaming with 34 people turning up on both weeks ( with a huge variance of *who* actually turned up in the differing weeks... should everyone instead decide to turn up at once ... ), with Resistance having a resurgence in popularity and returning to its regular-ish slot of end of night play.

Stu and Tom were with us this week, both of whom like nothing more than the meta game of the Bargain Bin Rummage. I think they must have some competition going on as to who can find the cheapest or most obscure game. In the past this has brought us classics from Giants, a euro game about shifting giant heads around Easter Island... and putting hats on them.... to Felinia, a game about sea going medieval cat merchants. That is to say, cats, who are merchants. Stand up on their hind paws. And engage in conversations about... fish ? As opposed to merchants who deal in cats.

This week Stu ( or possibly Tom ) had managed to dig a bit of serious retro gaming out of one of his secret bargain bins. Waddingtons Formula 1. Which with an initial release date of 1962 is I am going to guess, older than every single NoBoGer currently in irregular attendance.

Formula 1, Tom roars into the lead with a bit of
judicious picture taking timing

At first glance the game looks suspiciously monopoly inspired. A dice. Two decks of cards bearing an uncanny resemblance to Chance and Community Chest - except of course, here they are Pit Cards and Tactics cards. And a carefully measured track with spaces to move your playing piece around. There are no second place beauty contest wins here however - but instead varying advantages of moving faster, accelerating to top speed, careening around a bend without incident, or the reverse, missing a turn because.. well.. you have been subject to poor pit work. Such are the advanced game design machinations of the 1960's family game. If it doesn't have a random number generator lurking in a deck of cards, you are doing something very wrong.

Five enjoyed this hark back to a more innocent gaming age, with Caroline roaring across the finish in first place. And despite its age, everyone really did seem to enjoy it.

Elsewhere Mr Bond brought along one of his Christmas presents - Imperial Settlers, a full table of four spending the evening standing up and poring over the wording on cards. No idea who won. But seemed fun.

Lewis, Tom, Lauren and Andrew had a go with Takenoko, followed by Get Bit and Love Letter. Lauren was on the warpath and taking no prisoners, bashing her fellow gamers with expletives, threats, yells and anything else. She ended up winning Takenoko and Get Bit, although whether this was due to great game play or just banter intimidation it's hard to say. She took her losses on Love Letter hard. I think she wanted a clean sweep victory.

Downstairs Caverna was given a whirl, with it has to be said a group that was probably thrown to the

A busy Wherry Room full of gamers

lions. Just about all new to Caverna, and in some instances new to gaming. A trial by fire. I'm not sure how this went down, but highly experienced Euro gamer Guillame wiped the floor with everyone apparently. Hmm. We might have scared off some new people there.

An epic six player game of Lords of Vegas was on the table over, and over from them - I think Room 25 got another bash.

Upstairs I got to take a couple of completely new gamers on a tour of what's what, starting with Colt Express, of which the programmed movement seemed to at times really mess with their heads, before moving onto Sechs Nimmt, which as I suspected, they really warmed to and took a picture of it at the end so they could go buy it themselves. Scratching my head for easy finishers we settled for Loot Letter, which almost earned a ban from Mr Bond because it had Munchkin in the title.

Last week Bondy threatened NoBoG legal action against the players of Munchkin on the grounds of Bad Taste Gaming. Despite having taken photographic evidence of the deplorable activity and posting it to the NoBoG twitter feed, the threatened Official Letters of Warning have yet to be actioned. A lucky escape perhaps for the transgressors.

Lastly downstairs they had an epic game of Avalon Resistance - they were frightened off of using the new chiefs and spy hunters malarkey and instead stuck to swords and sorcery. Pah. Luke performed the tricky game intro spiel with morgana, merlin, percival and the kitchen sink and did a good job getting it all right. However. You could hear his brain whirring as he paused at each step, thought about it, thought about it again and his voice steadily slipped into BBC English. Watching Resistance can be nearly as much fun as playing Resistance.

Upstairs I got to enjoy a quick filler of Port Royal with Hal and Mr Bond. Stealing the win right at the end away from the many be-pirated Hal, Mr Bond declared the game to be awesome. Because he had won. With a strategy of... doing everything not particularly well. Except possibly capitalising on everyones failures more than anyone else. I had personally gone card draw crazy - ignoring victory points to.. I don't know. Show off with how many cards I could take ( which helped me not at all ). Hal had a very solid heavy pirate strategy. But somehow. Pushing his luck just... never... worked. Greed ! Without it, he could probably have won the game a good few rounds earlier. Fun game. Funny banter. Always a laugh with Hal and The Bond.

Port Royal is a really nice little filler game, a push your luck, build up a simple tableau, earn victory points piratey card game. It's not long enough or deep enough to become some card memorising synergy monster like Race for the Galaxy, and its shorter and less prone to breaking than Glory to Rome, but shares a few elements with those games... in a piratey themed way. And let's face it. Pirate themes are the best themes. You can take your Race for the Galaxy Uplifting species and.... uplift them. I'll stick to pirates.

Last week Mission Red Planet showed up for its quarterly airing. Newbies all. And for once I managed to capitalise on my experience, and romped to a 3 point hoarding win. We then had some Frank's Zoo. Which I totally failed at. Although it has to be said this was more to do with my partners than myself - both of whom flopped out in last place for zero points, and despite me finishing first in the last round, I had the worst score. Bah.

Suburbia was also on show. Resistance. And err. Other things. Like Munchkin. And Seven Wonders ( which James had never played before... ! ). And Tragedy Looper. And more stuff. Which I forget. And the goblins are all away at the beach. So who knows.

It's Christmas !

It's Christmas !!!

Christmas has arrived !

*checks watch*†
 *checks it's still November*

 †watch - an archaic device that was used in pre-internet-azoic ages that strapped to primitives wrists and allowed a person to tell the time, possibly the date, and boast that they could tell the aforementioned time and date in depths of water up to 30m - something that no one, ever, in the history of 30m water depth watches ever used. Latter age watches worn by particularly flamboyant and misinformed primitives also had calculator functions provided via buttons too small to use - which like the 30m water depth were never actually used other than to spell Boobies - at the time rated as cutting edge humour before the enlightened internet wisdom of youtube taught us that dancing cats are actually the cutting edge of humour.

This week the Ribs was resplendent in its Christmas attire with tinselly tinsel and apparently the entire European stock of twinkly lights stapled to every surface that wasn't a table.

All the Christmas regalia had a surprisingly subduing effect on the patrons of NoBoG where a room full of people managed to be almost entirely silent - except for James which goes without saying. James loves a good chat - probably something to do with the fact that he spends all his time working on fish ear bones which are notably 1) incapable of chat and 2) not great conversation starters unless you happen to meet someone else who works on fish ear bones. I think James might be the only person in the world that works on fish ear bones - I can make this claim safe in the knowledge that I have only ever met one person that works on fish ear bones - which therefore makes the chances of meeting someone else into fish ear bones remarkably unlikely. Thus he is starved for chat.

And with the theme of Christmas and shiny new presents to open, this week a whole slew of new games were on offer to partake of.

Imperial Settlers

First up Darren brought along the new Imperial Settlers, a 4 player civilisation card game that sees asymmetric sides competing to build their society up into the most VP earning society. Along the way you might get to steal or even burn your opponents stuff as well as the usual Euro type things of producing things, paying for things and deciding what action you want to take. This plays fairly quickly and is open to more player screwovers than is typical in VP engine building type games. It seemed to go down well, Elliot gave it an initial 7/10, mainly docked points because Ewan - as the Barbarians - was stealing his stuff. Mr Bond also gave it a thumbs up, but with some provisos about it being dependent on what cards you pull and how powerful they are for scoring opportunities.

Hansa Teutonica... Brittanica ?

Upstairs Pete had a play through of Hansa Teutonica with the new Brittania map. Hansa Brittanica ? As well as being a new map to play Hansa Teutonica on, the Britain map also introduces a new mechanic or two, and tweaks some of the balance of the different scoring capabilities via some clever map design. Hansa Brittanica brings in a rule about area domination - certain areas can be vied for dominance control with the winner gaining some victory points - which is a really nice idea that could have easily been implemented into the other Hansa maps. It also brings to the table the concept of only allowing placement in certain areas of the map if you have control of the right city spot.

Needless to say Pete really enjoyed the new map and its new balancing - but he's a pretty big fan of Hansa full stop. He went on to capture a win - also not unusual, this despite Rich IV attempting to pick on Pete all game to prevent him winning. It can be hard to pick on people in Hansa - doing so often just makes them stronger in other ways, and Pete adapts very well in Hansa.

Colt Express - Get outta my way ya no good varmint !

Sam finally managed to get his copy of Escape from Atlantis to table, which went down well, and then got the new and shiny Colt Express out for a play which has possibly one of the greatest themes for a game ever - deperados shooting, punching, roof jumping and stealing their way through an old West Cowboy Train Express. Yes, it's a train game, but I think you can forgive it of any Euro cube shuffling sins, in favour of the rootin' tootin' treasure stealin' gameplay.

Players get to romp through the train, shooting others - and filling the action card hand with bullets that serve no purpose other than to fill up their hand with chaff - punching others, making them drop a loot, stealing loot and avoiding the sheriff.

Not only does the game have a great theme, but it also looks great, with a nice 3d train to leap around on and punch your fellow robbers away from their loot. I really want to give this a bash myself to see how it plays - not sure what the feeling about the game was.

Three new games in one evening ? Phew ! But there was one more to try, as Nate brought along Stefan Felds latest design - Aquasphere, a hardcore Euro with one of the largest point Salads seen thus far in Euro design. This was a real pleasure for me as I have been itching to give Aquasphere a go for some time since I read about it in the Spring.

Aquasphere is a game for up to four, where each of you play the role of a scientist doing... sciencey things in an underwater research facility. Choose your actions, deploy your scientist and robots and accrue resources, tech, VPs and a long the way vie for area control. So far so Euro. There are some twists however.

Aquasphere. A cacophony of iconography and meeples !

First is the action selection - you'll get to pick three from a total of eight - but which ones you can pick is not set and varies based on a card that shows the layout for a round. This is tricky to explain unless you can see the action selector, but basically at any one stage you have a choice of one of two actions, until the third choice, when you have a choice of one of four. Just which actions are mutually exclusive varies - and the timing of when you can get access to each action also changes. This means game to game, and round to round, the actions you can select and the interactions you can perform on the board are ever shifting.

Put simply, you never have full access to all the actions available. Their timing and exclusivity varies. This obviously has major consequences for what you are doing.

Aquasphere - my board and the action selector / score track

As well as that action selection malarkey, your actions are actually selected at least one round before you get to play them. Effectively you are playing ahead one round - and, here's the important thing, everyone else can see what you are shortly about to do and thus plan around it, or against it, or otherwise. This adds another layer into the whole action planning stage.

Finally the board is split into six segments with a first come first served capturing of resources, and a last come mechanic for scoring the control of a segment - everything you do interfering with everyone else and their plans. A scrum of scientists and robots milling around the underwater station.

As for points. This is where the crazy point salad comes into effect. Points can be scored for

• Placing submarines
• Placing robots
• Obtaining research
• Killing Octopods
• Performing actions that synergise with your research
• Segment control
• Resource overflow
• Completion of a lab
• Completely deploying all subs
• Segment listed lab sections 

 But there's a number of subtleties beyond that with scoring limitations and time gathering - which is used to move about or gain access to extra actions. It has mechanics from Hansa / Terra Mystics with its removal of meeples dictating what you score / what you are doing, and a scoring somewhat similar to Lords of Vegas or perhaps Suburbia where to keep on scoring you have to pass certain requirements - in this case paying a crystal to breach the next scoring range.

Although a pretty easy game to understand the basics, the sheer amount of variability and permutations on offer mean this is a monster of plans upon plans and options. I could well imagine that with the wrong people this game could be the mother of all analysis paralysis games as someone sits there and works there way through hundreds of variations. Even without that, the a game turn can often be lost in a bit of thoughtful silence as each player tries to grok the layout and come up with a semblance of a good plan.

This game just about has it all - with the notable exception of bidding ( which if you were a glutton for punishment you could introduce as a variant for bidding for turn order ), and if you are into 'proper' crunchy Euros that have high variability and good player interaction, then this game could be for you.

Personally I thought the game was great, and is one of the best Euros I have played. Its variability in action timing and choice means that no two games are going to play the same, and it will always present an interesting challenge to even the most well versed player. The theme works really nicely, it's an attractive game to look at, its simple to grasp and hard to master. Excellent !

Nate won with a strong score, with poor Stu doing really well but failing to have enough crystals to keep on scoring and thus hitting a glass ceiling, without which he would have won. Moral victory to Stu then. I came last by a whole score range - I was brutalised a few times early game - the game can be brutal - and my sub strategy didn't do well for me at the end.

Elsewhere Max and Emma returned with Dead of Winter, Max turned out to be a bad guy, convinced the good guys to give him a rifle - which he promptly shot someone with before breaking the gun and throwing it in the trash. The colony now hopelessly tanked voted him out in a fit of revenge, causing his betrayer goals to change - turning him into a repentant bad guy which ended with everyone losing. Huzzah. I think Sparky the Stunt Dog played a prominent role once again. At one point I am sure I heard Emma stating that Sparky was one "suave bastard". The James Bond of stunt dogs.

Tokaido, Incan Gold, Sechs Nimmt were also played, and quite possibly some other fillers which I missed.

A great evening, looking forward to seeing some of those new games turn up in the coming weeks.

28 if you are counting. Which my mom - like a lot of others - has started saying is a quiet week. Yes. My mom comments on the numbers at NoBoG. Don't ask me why. 28 is not a quiet week. You quiet nay sayers - and my mom - should stop spreading such quiet nay saying innuendo.