Sucker Punch

The month of Christmas rolls on, Black Fridays have been and gone with blood and limbs cleared from shop floors, Cyber Mondays too have passed us by which left us with the most important day of the week, NoBoG Tuesday.

If you were NoBoGing upstairs, you might have seen that the Ribs was busy this week. Full of business attired people drinking, which I am going to assume was some sort of Christmas Work Do shenanigans. A ritual that has you going out and sharing drinks, food and then more drinks with people you half know, don't know, sort of know, but in any case have never felt even the slightest urge to socialise with, but winds up with you inexplicably copping off with the girl from the mail room, or worse, avoiding the advances of some inebriated colleague, and finally ends with you avoiding all of them socially for another year. Or is that just me ? Just me ? Ok. There's probably a gem of a board game idea in there anyway. No need to thank me. You're welcome !

Onto the games - this week more new and shiny appeared in the form of the Sheriff of Nottingham, a bluffing and bribing kind of card game which sees you trying to make as much money as possible by shipping goods into Nottingham in preparation for a Kingly visit. Despite the title of the game and the theme, there is no Robin Hood ambushing shenanigans going on - it's just literally about getting goods to market under the watchful eye of the Sheriff.

Which is weird if you ask me.

The main shtick for the game is the premise of the goods bag - you secretly place two to five goods in a sealed 'bag' and then hand it over to the sheriff - a role which rotates amongst all players. You then get to declare to the sheriff what the bag holds - but here's the catch, you can only declare it to contain one good, and they must all be legal goods. If you are caught shipping more than one type of good, or illegal goods, the sheriff can confiscate them. Shipping five goods is great for your score - but you strain credibility asking the sheriff to believe there are five of the same type of good contained. There then follows some gamesmanship where the sheriff may not believe you and threaten to inspect your bag, or possibly be open to a bribe, or you may try all these things in the hope the sheriff does inspect the bag and find nothing amiss. If the bag contains what you said it contains - the sheriff pays you. If it doesn't then the goods that don't match are confiscated. Goods that got through are placed on your marketstall.

At the end of the game the person with the most value in goods - and there are some set collection rewards to pick up - wins.

I utterly failed to get a picture of this in play, or ask how it went down as I was wrapped up upstairs. Seems like a solid game though, and one open to a bit of social engineering. These are not the apples you're looking for. Move along.

Elsewise Elliot brought one of his regular items along - Settlers of America, the elongated slightly deviant version of regular settlers - and as he wasn't ranting at game end, we can safely conclude that he won. That and the fact he cheered himself as the winner as he left the pub.

Cash and Guns, Tsuro, Werewolf and Fluxx all got a mix up at the final table downstairs - but Fluxx ended up exhausting them and they called a halt to its chaos at 11pm. That's what you get for playing Fluxx.

Odd Village

Upstairs hidden in a corner of the pub, a group took on Speicherstadt, a game I have never heard of, but is apparenly one of Mr Felds efforts - this one a card game. No idea how this played or who won, I can tell you however that it had fantastic glittery cardboard coins which resembled nothing so much as the old gold foil wrapped chocolate money. Conspicuous at this time of the year - and possibly lucky that someone didn't try to eat any of them.

They followed this up with the cool looking Odd Village. No idea what that's about.

In the other corner of the room Pete managed to cajole a group into Lord of the Ice Garden - its welcome seems to be running out at the Ribs if the enthusiasm of who wants to play is anything to go by - then again if you took the enthusiasm of who wanted to play what at NoBoG as a judge of anything, then you would conclude that NoBoG wasn't a board gaming group at all, but was in fact a secret society of performance artists that liked to turn up and stand around in a crowded room for 10 minutes displaying epic levels of choice apathy. Like a flash mob. But without anything exciting or enthusiastic going on. Which rather describes any kind of rush hour public transport.

Bondy won the Ice Garden as the black dudes as the red dudes - Pete was even more loudly muttering about Black possibly being unbalanced, over powered, yada, possibly covering his multi game experienced ass getting wooped by a newbie, but regardless Mr Bond declared the game to be great as he had won. On asking Hal, he paused, hesitated, then said it was good. I'm not sure if that actually means it was good or was just being polite. Perhaps he had just zoned out.


Myself I got to play Aquasphere again - with a few rules corrected, and a clear idea of what was going on in my head, I taught it to Tom II and Sam II. And utterly failed. I am not entirely sure what went on - there were points where, much like my first game, I was horribly brutalised, but I was doing ok until the middle of the game, and then everything fell apart. Consistently shafted for area control. Out of time. Out of place. Wrestling with idiot squids. It all went downhill. Sam won this and declared he liked it better than Glass Road - which I thought was rather surprising given that Aquasphere is a fair bit less welcoming than Glass Road. Sam said it was about knowing what to do - Glass Road he struggled to get an idea of where he was going.

Colt Express - a better picture of it this time, the
passengers have just got fed up of being robbed and started
shooting, causing all the desperados to flee to the roof...

Afterwards we got to play the excellent Colt Express. And it really is excellent. Such a fantastic little game, Luke joined us for this and seemed to be the target of a fair few punches. Everytime he clambered on top of the train he seemed to get sucker punched for his trouble. Hilarious for everyone but Luke, who ended up with no loot at all due to all the punches. Desperados jumped back and forth, shots were exchanged, and right at the end Sam managed to pip the win by picking up the strong box and its $1,000 prize. Pfah. If it hadn't been for that I would have been in a comfy loot stuffed lead. Luke made a great comeback, won the $1,000 reward for being the shootiest of desperados and beat Tom into last.

Whilst the mechanics for the game are extremely easy, move, punch, shoot or loot, the joy and coolness comes from the way the orders are placed - everyone piles their orders one by one onto a communal pile - somtimes facedown, sometimes face up, depending on if the train is in a tunnel or not, and then at the end, the orders are flipped over and played out. Something of a Robo Rally or Room 25 program your turns dealio. This can lead to stupid, funny and cool moments as someone does something unexpected in a tunnel, you end up punching thin air, getting shot or captured and so on. Fab little filler with just one downside - it's a little too small for fat fingers. Fiddly is the word that springs to mind. It needs a deluxe version twice the size... but that really doesn't hamper the game. If you haven't tried it, you need to. It's great.

Poo, huh, yeah, what is it good for ?

As Edwin Starr never sung, Poo, huh yeah, what is it good for ? Absolutely nuthin !

Which is not strictly true as we found out this week with Adrian finally bringing Poo to the table. Fortunately for all concerned this wasn't Adrian acting out some display of trousers down table top defecation, but instead introducing us to Poo the card game, which sees players acting out as Monkeys flinging poo at each other and utilising it to humiliate your foes.

Poo - a card game, not a dinner party lighter trick gone wrong

At this point you might be wondering if there is any topic that could not be made into a game. Given infinite, ahem, monkeys, or an infinite amount of time with finite monkeys, is Poo the Card game what they would come up with ? It's probably a fair bet they would come up with it before getting around to writing the entire works of Shakespeare.

Poo is a quick filler game that sees you playing a fairly limited set of cards to either do poo damage to other monkeys or defending yourself from flung poo. Poo totals can go up and down as some cleaning can go on, and in practice this can lead to the game dragging its heels at times as the merry go round of flung poo, clean poo, flung poo, defend poo goes on. There isn't a whole heap of strategy or depth to this, hang onto those handy defences, try and play some good poo flings when someone is on the ropes, but by and large it pretty much plays itself.

A handful of poo. The game writes its own jokes.

I think the main draw to this game is the humorous and offbeat game and art and fulfils something of a novelty niche. In many ways the game plays out like a simplified Nuclear War, where instead of firing nukes and other complex weapon systems at each other you are chucking poo. Indeed there is even a card that is straight out of Nuclear War - the final retaliation card that allows a defeated player to play all his remaining poo cards at his enemy. A mutual poo destruction card.

Caroline won the poo flinging contest with quite an OCD cleaning run. She revealed at the end that her win was quite true to life. I gather she meant the OCD cleaning and not the poo throwing. You never know though.

Elsewise we played a nice game of Glass Road, where my last round met with some disastrous results and I missed two building actions to stumble to a poor 15 points along with Adrian, whilst Sam and Caroline scored a slightly better but still off 18 points. Both Sam and Caroline attempted to claim the moral victory, with Sam stating he had half a point of sand over everyone else, and Caroline attempting to count overlapping sand pits twice - which the points building didn't actually rule out as illegal.

We finished with some more cows from Sechs Nimmt, where as per usual, Round 1 and 2 I was in the lead, and slumped to an atrocious score in Round 3. Mr Bond was the greatest loser however, and Sam was the winner. Quite a good evening for Sam even though he continually professed to having no plan.

Meanwhile downstairs they played a wonky game of Tragedy Looper - Hal won again as the bad guy I believe. Hal is getting far too much practice as some evil doing time traveller. It's funny what board games end up training you for.

A Wherry room of Gamers, Room 25 front and centre.

Room 25 was also played. Lauren promised that she wouldn't kill me this time if I played. I wasn't falling for that however. And left them to it. Which was a good move as Lauren turned out to be an evil doing guard once again, and managed to win the game in preventing the hapless prisoners from escaping in time. Andrew as another evil guard won post humously after he blindly walked into a room of death in turn 3.

I think James got a blast of Five Tribes - can't quite remember, and I recall seeing Incan Gold out afterwards.

The seminal Settlers of Catan

Upstairs Mr Bond had a blast of retro Euro with Settlers of Catan. The title that kick started the board game revival and introduced the world to Euro / German gaming and the phrase Wood for Sheep, amusing countless numbers of American gamers. Mr Bond won this despite Lewis looking like he was in a strong position. Perhaps too strong, inviting everyone to ignore him with avengeance ? Who knows.

Pete got Lord of the Ice Garden to table for the fourth consecutive week. Everyone seems to be taking an exploratory stab at this, and this week it was the turn of what I rudely dubbed the old farts. Tom, Stu, Owein and Pete. I couldn't quite grab a thumbs up or thumbs down from this, from which I can assume it wasn't universally cheered as the next awesome sauce or the worst of the worst.

Werewolf had some blasts downstairs. I think the wolves won it. Richard the IV even went so far as to twitbrag about it. A lesson for werewolfers at NoBoG in future - check twitter for tells.

25 for this round of gaming. Giving rise to more than one person noting how quiet it was this week. 25 is quiet. Apparently. Just so you know. The stats reckon its average. This time last year 25 would have been a record attendance. Pfah.

No Planes, No Trains and No Automobiles

After all that NoBoG statistic compilation of what was played where, I had to go have a lie down for a week. And so missed last weeks blog.

Mr Bond was attending the Beer festival, turned up for half an hour at the Ribs to say hello, and then went back to boozing taste testing with a vague promise to be back for the fillers. Which he failed to materialise for. Presumably by this point he was asleep in a shrubbery somewhere between the festival and the Ribs with a happy beer blissed face. So he wasn't going to write a blog post either.

Before we begin, if you've been keeping an eye on other NoBoG channels you might have noticed Owein has launched his own board game retailing enterprise. Here in his own words...

For those of you who couldn't make it to the club this week, I am really excited to announce that last Sunday saw the Grand Opening of my online games store www.kingbeegames.co.uk

King Bee Games stock a wide range of games at great prices, with an emphasis on middle and lighter weight games. If there is a particular game (or games!) that you are after that we are not currently stocking, please don’t hesitate to contact me and I can check whether I am able to source it from our suppliers and let you know how much it would be.

I am also happy to bring along any games you would like to buy to the club and offer a 10% discount on our normal prices. If there are any games that you are interested in, please drop me a line at info@kingbeegames.co.uk and I can let you know how much they would be!

Thanks
Owein

Last week we had a record equalling 33 turn up - 34 if you count Mr Bond who didn't play and was asleep in the shrubbery. A few new games were on offer - Fletch had a virgin copy of Planes on the table which regrettably no one seemed to be fantastically interested in playing. This is no slur on either Fletch or the game, but if you've been to NoBoG you will know that by and large everyone is so laidback / indecisive to the point that although everyone has turned up to play games, no one really is any rush to actually suggest or play a game.

Elliot also had some new still sealed game to play, and despite a great marketing introduction ( where it wasn't entirely clear if he was trying to sell it or play it ) the game met with little enthused response. If it's not Lords of Waterdeep, expect no one to have an opinion !

No planes. And no Ticket to ride trains. And you'll be lucky to find a game about automobiles.

At this rate we will be giving mandatory play orders to those who can't name a game to play in 30 seconds. Punishment games will include, Race for the Galaxy, Munchkin, Ticket to Ride, Hansa Teutonica and Advanced Squad Leader. You will play the one you hate / sneer at. Which should cover everyone. ASL for the newbies and pacifists. Munchkin for the hardcore Euros. Ticket to Ride for the wargamers. And Hansa Teutonica / Race for the Galaxy for the thematic Ameritrashers.

Pete too was grasping a new game, Igglepiggle of the Night Garden Lord of the Ice Garden, but whether it's Pete's unique silver tongue/weaselly diplomacy, his amazing spectacular ever changing hair or possibly the game itself, his new offering quickly found some players to give it a shot.

Lord of the Ice Garden.
Peter ( top right ) appears to be giving a shakespearean
monologue / epic rules explanation to set the scene.

And what a pretty shot it is, the game is a real looker, possibly because of its Kickstarter heritage ( which in my experience all tend to have bling to encourage you to spend your moolah on an untested prototype ), and also possibly because it comes from an existing IP of a series of Polish fantasy novels. However, unless you are Polish the chances are you will have never heard or read it, as I don't believe it has ever been translated from its native language.

Lord of the Ice Garden is an area control game between competing players, where combat is distinctly deterministic - there is no dice rolling or randomness here. Pay to activate your troops. Get what you paid for.

Players get to choose what actions they will take in a turn via a typical worker placement / action drafting stage, before enacting those actions during gameplay. Combat occurs, influence can be placed, which allows players to change the domination of an area. Resources and victory points are gleaned from what you control on the board at the end of a turn.

Pretty, pretty models. Fletch however is unmoved.
All that glitters is not gold.

The four different factions are asymmetrical with differing special goals to secure for a goal win, so if you like being a special snowflake in a game, this will appeal. The problem with very groovy and interesting asymmetry in games is the multi headed hydra that is balance. It is balanced ? Good question. Pete has played this two weeks in a row, and for two weeks in a row the same faction has won. The straight forward, smash you in the face, melee orientated faction. Whether this is a bit of group think going on as Pete suggests, or is simply a faction easily accessible to newbies who don't quite grasp the depth of possibilties, or is a genuine balance issue only time will tell.

For the time being almost everyone that's played it has liked it. Fletch in particular did not enjoy it. His game had an epic rules session where Pete spent so long going through rules to the new game that other tables had actually just about finished their first small offering. Long rules sessions can be tiring. I am terrible for them - I tend to switch off and daydream instead of listening. I think Fletch also made a few mis-steps and as is the nature of some games could never really recover. Uh huh.

Richard IV on the other hand gave it a big thumbs up. And as is his recent trend played the new shiny in back to back weeks. Richard is becoming the Leader of the Cult of the New.

Elsewhere I got to play Legendary Villains - another of the Legendary deck builder variants, this time spinning you as the bad guys against the disgustingly upstanding heroes. Although we seemed to be a rather modest group of evil doers as our all powerful most evil globally devastating plan for world domination and suffering turned out to be.... spoiling the X-Men graduation day.

Legendary Villains. Not so Legendary in our case.

I bet they don't make a film about that.

See Wolverine have to cope with removing TP from a tree ! Watch Professor X deal with annoying prank calls to Hugh Jass. Gasp in awe as Storm deals with a sabotaged PA system. Flinch in horror as Rogue checks for the evils of chewing gum on the seating.

Despite our very modest, some would say almost schoolboy level of evil plot, we failed to defeat Odin. Who apparently had something to do with the graduation day. I don't know. What do you mean it's unreasonable to expect a near immortal king to be mucking about with a school graduation day ? You know nothing. It was a super hero graduation day. With super cake and everything.

The game was cool. I was disappointed with the ending. It just all went a bit damp squib. No grand speeches or failures. Just a shuffle of cards back into the box. Serves us right for losing.

Castles of Burgundy

Nate brought out Castles of Burgundy, and prised Elliot away from his trains and settlers. Elliot enjoyed the game, didn't win. I suspect Nate might have won.

Betrayal at House on the Hill got a play, with something of a very awesome haunt about all the players being shrunk to the size of mice and hunted by cats. Very nice ! Which if you know your Neil Gaiman is something he riffed on with the excellent Dream of a Thousand Cats. If you haven't heard of it check it out, it's very good.

Betrayal at House on the Hill.

Other games were played. Ave Caesar. Lords of Vegas. Fillers. Family business. Tim brought along a lovely little filler that I hadn't seen before - Guillotine. A number of aristocrats are lined up for the chop, each with a point score, and the idea is for each player to execute as many points worth of aristos as possible. Cards are played to alter the queue order hopefully manipulating good aristos for yourself, and tanking everyone else. Set collection, special powers and a bit of screwing around is the order of the day, and the theme is comically great. I've put this on my buy list, and if you get a chance you should check out - simple and fun for all, including gameophobes.

This week there are no pictures. The camera was out of juice. Deplorable. We had 35 turn up - a record, but Elliot and Caroline went to see a film instead as no one wanted to play Ticket to Ride Marklin reducing us to 33. I take this as a personal failure - even after offering to play as a third, Elliot sadly declined, game clutched to his chest. Ah well.

Instead I got to introduce 3 people to Glass Road. Three people who had in fact never played a Rosenberg game before. That's right. No Agricola. No Caverna. No Ora. No Le Havre. Shocking. Which went down well. Secretly I would have preferred Ora and Labora - I have been itching to play it for some time. But given a choice between the heavier Ora and the more streamlined Glass Road, it was the Road which took the play time. Martin had a great start with Glass Road, whilst I had a terrible one. I managed to make ground up in following rounds - at some expense to Martin it has to be said. I had predicted new players scores to be something of the order of 15 or 16 and a winning score somewhere around at least 20. As it turned out Tim scored 15, Martin scored 18, myself 19, and Byron 23. The game was great, and seemed to provide just enough head scratching and thunkery to be a challenge but not an obstacle.

Lords of Vegas got another outing. Fletch had his first go of this. Enjoyed it. Noted there was quite a lot of dice rolling. The lovely Random Number Generator. Tim, Stu and Nicky joined forces to play Revolution. With an exclamation mark. Revolution ! Which seems like a nice game of blind bidding for control. Nicky humbled all competition with a face slapping win that saw her some 150% or so above the next player, and almost double the last two. Yikes. Well done Nicky. They then played some old school Ra.

1775 was played downstairs, where the upstart yanks were handed their marching orders by the courageous Brits, and the Kings Colony of New York remained. Although Ewan seems to think the Dutch won it instead. Lies.

The relatively new King of New York got a blast from an enthusiastic King of crowd, and all really enjoyed it. The maniacally grinning Lewis won. You can always tell when Lewis wins. He grins like a demented Victorian bad guy.

Dead of Winter got played. Not sure if the colony collapsed or not. A bunch of fillers. Incan gold. Sechs Nimmt ( where I went again from leader in round 1 and 2, to abject last place by round 3 ). Hamsterrolle. Cash and Guns. Avalon Resistance and classic Resistance. Classic resistance turned out to be a triumph of the bad guys. With all three bad guys going on the mission and tanking the two fails to lose. Epic. Myself and the two Sams were triumphant in our evil doings. Sam II played a great but very risky mid game play, playing a card that allowed him to see if someone has failed or succeeded the mission. Two spies and two good guys were on the mission. He chose the good guys card and revealed it was a fail. Risky. If none of the spies had put a fail in he would instantly blow his cover. Which given there were two spies on a single fail mission was not unreasonable. As it turned out a single fail was revealed, badly incriminating the good guy who had refuted he had included a fail. A masterful ploy that sunk one of the good guys, and by incrimination sunk another suspicious good guy. Leaving the ring leader good guy to completely trust two spies. Oh dear. He looked so confident in the last round too....

His sad little shell shocked face at the end was a picture. Shame the camera was flat.

*Cackles evilly*