Beta Site Protocol - Activated !

An important message first up this week.

Next Tuesday, that being 25th February 2014, the usual gaming at the Ribs is going to take a slightly different format. The pub is hosting a quiz night on the 25th and given our current numbers this is going to cause us a critical clash where there is simply not enough of the right kind of room to partake of the usual cube pushing delights.

It has therefore been proposed that whilst we meet at the Ribs as per usual, depending on numbers the group will then split into two - one group will remain downstairs in the Ribs, whilst the second group decamps to Site B - Take 5.

Take 5 is some 50 yards up the road from the Ribs and is a cafe pub type establishment that has potentially more room to accommodate us. Mr Bond has had a preliminary scope out and quick word with them, but nothing concrete has been agreed.

It could be in future that Take 5 may become a better venue for NoBoG, and thus next week may provide a good trial of what people think of the place, beer, welcoming atmosphere etc, but this also may depend on what they think of us, and whether they appreciate people coming in and drinking and eating. You wouldn't think so, but. . . .

If you are keen on seeing what Take 5 is like then make sure you get yourself into the B Group - and you probably want to hold off on buying your first beer at the Ribs.

If anyone has any opinions, solid suggestions or other commentary on the matter then speak forth, and also have a word with either myself - John, or Matt  ( Bondy ).


Back to this week. This week saw 24 attendees split over five tables and two floors. Luna got a blast of a play downstairs - a slightly bizarre but cool game about throwing religious novices into the sea. Although it's your usual worker placement Euro, it's wacky enough that it feels quite different to the usual meeple fest - and there is certainly plenty of scope for competition and screw overs, something that some Euros lack.

Mid downstairs table had an in depth outing of Kingsburg - another cool game where the worker placement mechanic is scrambled by a dice assignment - but whether it was the clash of mighty intellects or the four out of five new players at the table, they took most of the evening to get through it. It should play shorter than this, but there seemed to be enjoyment of the experience, so, that's all that matters. I believe they then had a mad half game of Cthulu Fluxx.

Lastly for downstairs Sam managed to get Level 7 Omega Protocol to table once again, challenging myself, Rich, Ewan and Fletch to meet the threat of his unspeakable aliens.

The Marines approach the final room with its objective...

Sam had a pretty torrid time of it playing the Aliens, as the Marines did a great job in eliminating alien scum and then pacing themselves to get to the mission objective in good time. 

Last ditch assault against the Marine position...
but it proves to be too little too late.

Sam struggled to even scratch the Marines, let alone cause them problems, and by the end the Good Guys stood amidst a pile of alien corpses with barely a mark on their shiny armour. Full props to Sam who took it all in his stride, and played a very good natured game right to the very end, even allowing the Marines to back a played turn order up to get a better flow of actions out. Sam - the nicest of unspeakable alien overlords that are trying to kill you.

In hindsight I think the alien placement in the rooms could have been handled a bit better - avoiding Marines rather than engaging them to slow them down and bring the crises points closer - and also the placement of vent spawn points, whilst at first glance reasonable, meant that Sam couldn't build his forces up out of sight to then overwhelm the Marines in a wave.

As it was the aliens engaged in piecemeal fashion, playing right into the strengths of the elite forces, and wittling away abominations for no gain.

Upstairs Bondy gave everyone a thorough lesson in Taj Mahal, teaching everyone that yes, Bondy likes this game, and yes is experienced enough to give you a drubbing. A bit like playing Pete at Race for the Galaxy.

Caverna might also have been played ? If I haven't got my wires crossed then this game saw Pete stumbling across a horrific scoring opportunity / broken game aspect. Which is not an uncommon thing for Pete to do. If you want to see if a game has a broken scoring mechanic, give it to Pete.

Start of a new year

The first NoBoG evening of 2013 with a very healthy 13 in attendance giving us 3 full tables.

Luna was up first at the far table for Jimmy, Sam, Rich and Nicky. I think this is a bit of a favourite of Jimmy's as by my limited reckoning it's the game I have seen him most playing down the pub. It's a cool game of crazy neophytes jumping into the sea and doing various vaguely priestess related things in order to garner as many points as possible.

The islands of Luna with a number of supplicants
already swimming in the dark waters.

If you haven't played it you probably should as for once the theme actually kinda works, there is a fair bit of player interaction with opportunities to screw people over, and an interesting spread of things to do and ways to go about it.

It is of course a worker placement game but for me it's slightly more wacky and interesting than the usual placement stuff.

Kingdom Builder was up on table 2 with Stu, Shaun, Alina and Matt. Kingdom Builder picked up a slew of awards for itself in 2012, including winning the Spiel des Jahres, so, quite hot.

 The game involves players placing settlements down on varying terrain types of the board in order to pull off synergies of placement or to fulfil conditions of the Kingdom Builder cards.
Superficially at least it has some small similarities to Terra Mystica - except Terra Mystica has more involvement with the actual building types.

Alina could best be described as Pleased that she won the first game of Kingdom, with Matt hauling into second place, and for the second game the positions were reversed for the low cunning pair, Matt winning and Alina in second. Stu looked on downcast, and muttered about having a dreadful second game being stuck in a corner.

Pete explaining his latest (and only) plan to kill as many
things as possible this round. The goblins pointed at shortly
vapourised in an explosion of magic.

Table 3 was the stage for derring do and heroic actions in the second edition Descent. The derring do actually consisted of gathering crops for the first outing - not so much heroic as agricultural. Ewan, Dean, Pete and myself took on the role of the heroic farmers, which left Evil Bondy to quite naturally be the Evil Overlord - and voice all the hapless NPCs that required our help. Stopping a combination of goblins and spiders from raiding the crops, we met with a very suspicious farmer whos accent appeared to travel all around the country before finally dropping altogether. A play acting spy if ever I heard one.

The Evil Bondy did not fare well on the crop raiding - his goblins eager to get in and do mischief all stood a bit too close to each other, and were caught off guard by an explosive bout of magic which had bits of goblin raining down to fertilise the fields.

The second half of the outing found the heroes push on to the goblin lair, only to find that where we had been fighting goblins and spiders before, there were now two dragons in the way. This seemed something of a challenge too far, but with some excellent stun hits from Ewan to offset the woeful trail of inept misses from everyone else, the dragons were brought low and the Goblin King caught and killed just as he tried to run off.

Descent 2 feels lighter than Descent 1 - a bit more streamlined, a bit faster, the scenarios are in shorter bites. But as Jimmy pointed out it also feels a bit less epic - searching for treasure got us a few unremarkable potions and a mouldy sandwich. As I had been handed my ugly spell casting ass twice on the outing, I pondered what my reward was for the days work... Next time I'll demand treasure up front.

Three Cheers for the New Year

Happy New Year, dear friends! It's still January so I feel I am well within my rights to say the aforementioned phrase. Unless I take my Chinese heritage seriously, in which case I am a couple of days early.

We are back in full swing at the Ribs of Beef, with three sessions completed since the festive break...

There is always a bit of a hangover in January, so it was no surprise that the first session of the year was a bit quiet. This suited Tom as he was allowed drag out his home-made variant of Small World. It's made from hacked up bits of kitchen floor tiles and the finished result is like a crazed Settlers of Catan map, with large hex tiles. The idea is that the custom game provides random set-ups, but also accommodates six players rather than the maximum of five in the published edition. I couldn't say who won as I wasn't there, but I imagine it was Tom as he probably built in some sort of filthy hidden cheating mechanism.

Last week we were back up to two tables of games. The majority were entertained by the old stalwarts Cuba and Hansa Teutonica, while Jimmy, Nicky, Tom and myself played a new offering (though it's actually a year old) called Luna. It's all about a moon goddess cult on some remote island. Players have to hurl their priestesses into the lake in order to gain privileges. The soaked ladies would then go and read books whilst they dried off in the chapel. Luna is from the furtive mind of Stefan Feld, whose reputation as designer of quality euros has been growing steadily in recent years. This is another success and those that crave puzzle style/efficiency games will love this despite the unfathomable theme (though when has a theme got in the way of a good euro? Especially from Feld).  This was a close run game with Jimmy taking the dubious honour of nearly drowning his priestesses in the most efficient manner.

This Tuesday we had the privilege of welcoming newcomer Dean. He is an upstanding young man of the highest calibre. He joined us halfway through the evening for our second game of Hansa Teutonica. He made noises which indicated that he'd enjoyed Hansa Teutonica (clearly, it's fun to watch a true master at work, as I won both games), but also mentioned he would like to play Taj Mahal...this marks him as a fellow of impeccable taste. A thousand welcomes, good sir!

On the other table Pete was wrangling with his newest cardboard-love, Eclipse. No not the game inspired by the supernatural romance of Twilight, but a full-on space epic. This comes in a suitably vast box packed with miniatures, numbered hex space tiles and the neat stuff you'd expect in a 4X game. For those of you scratching your heads at the term 4X - it stands for explore, expand, exploit and exterminate. Players explore the map, expand into the discovered territories, exploit the resources found and then ultimately exterminate the other players in order to achieve further expansion. This was mostly a learning game for all involved (it reminded me of Twilight Imperium - once again nothing to do with vampire abstaining from sexy times) but I could tell that love was blossoming and I'm sure Eclipse will be Pete's 'plus one' at the Ribs for the next few months.

Beer: I guzzled a few pints of Woodeforde's Norfolk Nog.  Malty and rich with sweet flavours of caramel, chocolate and dates. Like Blokus 3D - a bit different, but it would go down well at Christmas.