Game Night - Heck! It's the Fearsome Time Travelling See-Saw

🕑 8 min read

Zoinks! It's Game Night! For the purposes of this post, all player's names have been changed to protect the pillaged and hen-pecked worms. 

On this eventful Tuesday evening in August, almost 30 NOBOGlins turned up and played on 6 tables! After the usual introductions, several of us broke away and managed to pull out and play 4 medium/light-weight games. Our 1st game was with 3 players; 2nd game with 4; then our final 2 games were with 5 whole NOBOGlin players! Like I said, it was eventful.

Let's GO!!

IT'S ALIVE!!

First up was Fearsome Floors, with Shaggy, Fred and I. Now, this game only usually takes 30-45minutes however we found the slow-lane and finished our session after a gentleman's 90 minutes of play (including a 10 minute intermission - more about that later). Our mission was to escape a dungeon with as many of our party members as we could (beginning with 4 each) before a monster caught up with us. Shaggy was the 'monster standee' builder this game, and what a handsome businessman monster 'Mr Conjunctivitis' was. The race started out pretty standard, an orderly wave of kidnap victims emerged from their cells slightly dazed and confused. Then quickly followed by a forced 'skedaddle' when Mr Conjunctivitis unexpectedly ploughed into Fred's escaping party, ultimately sending 2 victims back to the beginning. Good start. 

3.2.1. SKEDADDLE!!

From then on, Shaggy and I slowly but surely sneaked towards the exit, however, my 'Old Fonzie' stumbled and was captured; back to the start with you old man! Shaggy was now the one to beat. I tried my best to divert the attention of Mr Conjunctivitis towards Shaggy's party members, but the all I could do was claim yet another one of Fred's characters and bring the monster toe to toe with one of Shaggy's escapees. Rats!!

It was at that point we had our intermission. A fire alarm went off and all of us NOBOGlins vacated the bar and onto the street, leaving behind one metric tonne of cardboard and wood to feed a potential fire. Luckily the alarm turned out to be false, thus saving our games from either burning to ash, or becoming water damaged. 

It's Behind You!!

Returning to the game with a renewed vigor, we had to confront the fact that our pal Shaggy was on a cakewalk to victory, but not on my watch! I immediately went into action sacrificing my 'Zombie Fonzie', who went to the big 'garage apartment' in the sky along with one of Fred's party; before lining up yet another 2 kills, my 'Fonzie Fonzie' and at last, one of Shaggy's. I was playing for a draw! Unlucky for me, Fred was having none of it, and saw a way where they could win the whole game by sacrificing their puppy (who exactly IS the monster in this game Fred?). My 'Old Fonzie' bit the dust permanently and the pressure was now on! I was excited because from here on in, the game was Fred's to win or lose. C'mon Fred!!

Fred lost. Shaggy won.

HOORAY!?! All my machinations came to nought. It was at that time Velma joined us, and we went into our 2nd game of the evening with 4 players.

The Viking See-Saw. 

Our winner from the first game, Shaggy, brought along a BEEEEeeutiful stacking dexterity game by the one and only Dr Knizia. This game is very simple. Each player starts with identical piles of cargo, then in turn, places one of their pieces onto the tipped up (high) end of a pink viking boat. Yes, after a busy campaign of dating and pillaging, nothing says gender neutrality better than sailing away on a powder pink boat of peace and love. #NotAllVikings

Japaneses Viking Boat

IF, you manage to place your piece of cargo safely onto the boat, NOT tipping it over, then congratulations - your stolen (sorry, re-distributed) items may actually make it back...to... I wanna say Sweden(?), but it could easily be Norway. Nope wait, apparently these are Japanese vikings, all the way from Japan. That's kinda terrifying actually. 

Next player then tries to balance their loot on the boat too. This continues until a player tips it over and/or unsettles the boat, thus dropping some cargo into the sea. Now they have to pick up a mystery box (brown crate), and/or any items that fell into the drink, adding it back to their pile again. I think you get the idea. First player to stow-away all of their loot (or 'luggage' if you want to gas-light the entire UK - thanks BGG) wins the game.

This game was a lovely and exciting puzzle, especially since the pieces of cargo (luggage - lolz) are a variety of sizes, shapes and weights. Unfortunately I think our new player Velma ended up with more cargo than they started with, obviously due to the choppy waters of the North Sea... and our current champion Shaggy, managed to get another win under their belt. The scores so far: Fred 0, Shaggy 2, Velma 0 and Me 0. Next game please! 

I like being centre of attention

So the next game started and ended pretty fast as it was Timeline, the game made infamous (not a thing) for making some of us look incredibly well read and studious... and others (me), look stupid and ignorant. Our resident cargo kleptomaniac Velma brought in this game, and explained it very well to us all....including our new player Scooby!! Now we were 5. 

The idea of this game was to empty our hand of 4 cards into the timeline in front of us. Each card depicts an event of historical significance, all we had to do is place it in chronological order, without knowing the year shown on the back. As the timeline gets longer, the chances of getting rid of a card becomes tougher. If you fail to guess the right place in the timeline for your card, it gets discarded and you draw a new card into your hand. I enjoyed this game, and it was educational for about 30 seconds (my memory span). Velma won, closely followed by - I wanna say Fred. However in this game, being second is just the first loser, Fred. Look haven't you got an adorable puppy to kerb-stomp somewhere?! I didn't manage to take a photo of our game, however I did an artist's impression of how the game looked and went. Enjoy. NEXT!!

Past game photo

Lastly, but by no means least we played Pickomino (or Heck Meck if you're cool like the Fonz). Another Reiner Knizia classic; this game is a push your luck, dice rolling, take-that extravaganza of groans, hubris and victory dances. I will cover the rules better in a WHADIYOB post at a later date. It's a game not to be dissed or missed. I brought this game in, so was quietly confident that I could get a win in, to save some face...

All you need to know are these rules: 1. Roll some dice (Yahtzee style) but you can roll as many times as you like - or until you bust. 2. Bank only dice of the same number (or worms). 3. When adding up your banked dice and taking a tile, a worm counts as 5 points, and you MUST have at least 1 worm to have a legal total or go bust 4. Collect the numbered 'worm tiles' by rolling the their exact number and create a single 'stack' of them in front of you. 5. Rolling higher numbers is great, as it earns higher value worm tiles and protects your 'stack'. 6. You can steal tiles from other players by rolling the exact number of their uppermost tile on their stack. 7. If at anytime you 'bust', then you lose your uppermost tile to the table again and the highest numbered tile on the table gets flipped.

Shaggy rolls dice fine.

Let's Roll. The game started out pretty well for both Shaggy and I. We immediately captured tiles in the low thirties! Amazing start. Fred, Velma and Scooby were not quite so lucky though, and Shaggy and I proceeded to steal tiles from them, quite profusely I might add. Shaggy finally moved into the lead after a particularly vicious onslaught of Velma's vulnerable stack. Velma impressively kept their cool though. Good on them. 

Eventually, as always, someone flew too close to the Sun and just as Icarus famously did, they had their worms stolen and/or busted. That 'someone' was Shaggy. Their screams were not of anguish at all, they were of course, screams of delight. Delight for an exciting rollercoaster ride of both victimisation and hubris.

The next Icarus in the line of fire was me. Yes, I had slowly been building up my stack, diligently protecting it from foreign hens, coming over here and stealing my worms, blah blah blah...then I lost. I stumbled at one of the last few hurdles of the game, but not only did I lose, I came LAST. I had no worms and was hen-pecked to oblivion... not even dust remained! I think my opponents would have pecked out my soul if the game allowed them to. To be honest, I think they did - they stole a part of me that evening. Especially Fred. 

Against all the odds, our very own Velma won, by a healthy margin. 

The final scores were as follows:

1st (Joint with 2 wins each) - Velma and Shaggy!

Last - The rest of us losers.

Well I had a great night, and I'm pretty sure all the rest of the gang did too. Plus it is worth mentioning that no-one was made fun of or belittled at all. Just in case my jokes fell flat. 

..and they celebrated.  

So there we have it; my preference has usually been for getting several light weight games on to the table and then finish with a filler, but that's not for everyone. Fred remarked that they regularly chased 'gaming nirvana' via the route of heavy, crunchy euro-style games.

"..one game to rule the entire evening!"

However, they did confess that they really enjoyed the bloody, salty, aged and wormy 'palate cleansing sorbets' which were served up this fine evening. Hooray for everyone, we did good!

See you all at NoBoG* another night!

*Please feel free to drop by the Google listing for NoBoG and review it :)

Raining Stars

Our second week at the Mash Tun brought fifty two into the pub for NoBoG, which needless to say is a new attendance record. This worked out to 12 tables of games - which is almost all the gaming table space that the Tun has. With half a dozen newcomers turning up, but a good deal more than that veterans not present. So fifty two is by no means a high water mark. Pete has jokingly suggested that newcomers are welcome to join in future, but must all bring a table with them as their one off joining deposit.

Longer games are definitely creeping into NoBoG now we have a bit more time and a bit more space, and this week we saw a double play of Forbidden Stars, the new hot game from FFG.

Forbidden Stars. And some very non grimdark happy commanders.
You're ruining the theme guys ! It's nothing but war !

Forbidden Stars is a 3X (?) game where you command a faction of military bad asses to go forth and expand your space empire, exploit resources and ultimately exterminate your foes whilst trying to grab your game winning objectives. So, collecting income from your territory, churning out armies and throwing dice at each other to eliminate those armies is the order of the day, like a lot of the more modern deeper rehashes of Risk ( or Risk itself if you insist ) have you do.

Forbidden Stars in very many ways - if not all - is simply a refinement and re-release of an earlier FFG game - Starcraft, and a lot of the mechanisms are exactly the same in both games. Something of a tidy up has occurred in the design of Forbidden Stars over Starcraft and of course aesthetically the theme has changed from Blizzards universe to that of Games Workshops Warhammer 40,000 universe of Eldar, Chaos and all the other grimdark gothicness. ( Ironically Starcraft the original video game started its life as a Games Workshop game, but Blizzard failing to come to an agreement with GW over IP dropped references to GW's 40k universe and came up with their own eye wateringly close, but not close enough to get sued variant. It's all the same. Dudes in power armour. Hungry aliens. Enigmatic other aliens in fancier power armour. Lots of space pew pew. )

More Forbidden Stars. Pete is lost in thought.

For my money, one of the fairly unique, elegant ( gasp ) and interesting mechanics that both games have is the issuing of orders to Do Stuff. A limited number of orders are placed on the board round robin style, indicating something is happening in a given area - however, the neat thing about this is that any number of orders can be stacked in an area, and the order they are stacked in is the order they are executed in - so player turn order if you like is determined by who placed what when. This means care has to be given about what order you play orders in - you'll need to do them back to front if you are chaining them - and beware others then putting on order on top of yours effectively getting the jump on whatever evil play you had in mind.

The game has some lovely production values and comes with a metric ton of plastic, bits, cards, dice and yada, enough to make any materialist board gamer very happy.

Both tables of this as the Tun said they enjoyed it, although David noted that there was some downtime for combat, and the game does run long - both tables managed to finish, but took the better part of 4 hours to do so for 3 player games. There is also some questions about its viability with four players ( the game supports 2 - 4 players ) as this would make it play very long and incur even more downtime for others. But it was a thumbs up from all involved.

I haven't played this so can't really comment wholly objectively ( I do own Starcraft however ), but to my eye despite it being overhauled from the unwieldy Starcraft, it still retains a lot of clunky inelegance evidenced in multiple decks of cards, dice, chits and the kitchen sink being brought in to realise what is in essence a fancy Risk - culminating in the sharp pointy end of combat having dice thrown, cards played against those dice, reinforcement chits thrown on top, and then working out the relative strengths of the models involved to get a result. The critical question for me remains whether any of that is really necessary to get you a deep and nuanced combat game, or whether its just a case of throwing more crap on the pile to muddy the waters ( and if you want to see an elegant but horribly deep and complex combat system, then look no further than old school heavy wargame ASL which proves far much more depth without half the crap - although it's no innocent itself ).

I would actually say something like Axis and Allies is a much better variant of this kind of game - less fiddly, more elegant and delivers the same kind of experience, resource earning, army building, territory conquering, tech upgrading, albeit you are stuck with WW2 - no fancy space pew pew.

Yeah that's right. I went there. I rained on the parade of the new game. But seriously, Starcraft itself was a cool game - if you could handle the endless fiddly crap of it - and Forbidden Stars has improved on this, and is no doubt a good game itself. Just some patience with fiddliness required I suspect, so it's probably much more down to the preferences of the players as to whether it's a great game than the actual design of it itself.

Betrayal at house on the hill !

Elsewhere in the Tun we had two simultaneous games of Betrayal at House on the Hill. You thought Betrayal was popular before. Oh boy. With fifty people it gets played with MORE THAN ONE COPY. It's a pity there wasn't a third copy to play really. Luke related his epic 3.5 hour game of Betrayal in which he narrowly pipped a win securing his victory where I think everyone else had failed. He was very chuffed ( they were playing against the doppleganger ).

Lewis played Smash Up and utilised some overpowered robot malarkeys to thrash his way to a win - helped by top decking a card at the last moment to secure the win. Ah. Top decking. The 'skillful' art

Lewis and Davey head up International NoBoG with Smash Up

of pulling the exact card you need from a deck of cards at the exact moment you need it - a great phenomenon in things like Magic and *cough* Netrunner. Yeah that's right. I'm raining on your parade too Netrunners. Lewis also had the honour of playing with our most far flung newcomers - a couple all the way from Australia. This seems rather a long way to commute for a weekly board game session, but clearly NoBoG is the place to be. Lewis thinks we should start pitching some International version of NoBoG. Well. We did have International Tuesday Tabletop Day.

Marvel Legendary. Heroic failure is nothing to smile about.

Ewan brought along Marvel Legendary, the deck building super hero capering co-operative game. Apparently it was on Tabletop this week, always a good move to bring a game along that's recently done the rounds on Tabletop as there is usually interest from some in playing what they see Wheaton playing. I think they had a quick success game of this, followed by an abject defeat.

I got to play the relatively new Bring Out Yer Dead, which is a lightweight euro that sees players competing to be the best buried family in the city. Uh huh. The game revolves around a very simple simultaneous hidden action selection which allows you to bury coffins into scored plots. Along the way you'll get to utilise special actions that mix the play up, get up to various shenanigans by bribing gravediggers to shift coffins, switch places, and also gain point riffing cards to get you in game scoring or end game bonuses. This is no brain burner by any means, but there is high player

Bring out yer dead. The finger pointing was not staged !

interaction, just about perfect information, and therefore a some planning and backstabbing that can be done. An easy inoffensive game, some think it could be garnering some awards attention, but I don't think it's quite at that level.

Other games - lots of them, too many to go into detail, but Dean brought along Myrmes, a much award nominated game from a few years ago all about leading your colony of ants to better... ant-ing than all the other ant colonies. Looked cool, missed playing it by a hair. Stu played the excellent Machi Koro followed by Camel Up, Hal got Spectre Ops to table ( which rather bizarrely had James seemingly doing a crossword whilst everyone else actually played the board game ) and before that Hal played his prototype, Luke got China to table, but

Ant action with Myrmes

lamented people didn't seem to be into its old school charm and vanilla Resistance had a couple of super noisy big sessions. I also caught a glimpse of Le Petit Prince - which I assume is based on the very cool book of the same name, the game of which seemed to revolve around building a planet ? There's a few other games in there I know I missed too.

Despite our high numbers everyone fit in nicely with room to spare, it didn't feel cramped at all, and everyone seemed content with the space, although Tom was ambivalent and noted it wasn't as cosy as the Ribs. Very true. But then fifty is hard to consolidate with cosy. Whatchagonnado. Although I think a few areas of the Tun are very cosy - it depends where you sit.

I will leave you with the gallery.

Roll Call - what games ya got ?

Hal's prototype, Unfeeling Creatures

Ankh Morpork

Nations

Machi Koro

How many Saboteurs does it take to change a light bulb ?

Excluding the James pre game bingo game the other week, last week saw the biggest single game ever for NoBoG in the form of Saboteur 2 played by a crazy 11 people.

Did you know that Saboteur could even play 11 people ? Apparently it can play up to 12 people. But, I wouldn't hold your breath about getting a turn. Or even a share of the gold. What does Saboteur look like with 11 people ? What do you think Saboteur with 11 people looks like ? Chaos. If Chaos had a mind to sit in orderly fashion around a pub table ( and it might, because Chaos being Chaos, anything is possible, including sitting orderly around a pub table ).

The Ribs of Beef AGM. aka Saboteur Chaos.

Joe and Adam both reported that Luke showed a particularly cynical view of politics during Saboteur when he complained that with the more people involved,  the less of a say you get - just like democracy. Clearly Luke won't be voting this election and will instead be preparing his militia for an armed takeover - Fortress UEA.

They didn't manage to finish their Saboteuring, and Joe noted that he wasn't entirely sure the extra roles in Saboteur 2 did much for the game - Saboteur 1 was better. A common sentiment.

Earlier in the evening myself, Darren and Pete paid another visit to Alchemists, the game of potion deducting pre-science, where in a hopelessly incompetent showing all three of us managed to get results wrong and end up with frantic scribbles on our deduction sheets. Pete romped into a strong lead from an early start of making some good bets on a range of 50:50 guesses, whilst Darren actually managed to end up on fewer points than he started with.

A good game, but I am still unconvinced about the games depth - and that if you take away the fluff you are left with a game of luck of who gets the best early test results / ingredient mix. Despite that, still fun so far.

On the table over Lewis got to table with Sheriff of Nottingham, and despite telling everyone that honesty was the strongest strategy - a sure fire opening bluff gambit if ever I heard one - proceeded to then get called out continually by Monika - even when she wasn't playing the Sheriff. Lewis came last for the record.

Guillotine and Pickamino followed, with more tales of woe for Lewis, finishing last and second from last, and with a few notes that perhaps Guillotine has some game flaws after all - quick finishing days spoiling the game flow, and Pickamino coming down to Yahtzee with some dice squabbling. Oof.

Nicky was back with us this week after being notably away around the Easter month, and she brought Alhambra along for Tim, Stu and Tom to fight over. I think they played Wurfel Bohnanza again - and yet more comparisons with Yahtzee were made.

There was also some six player Lords of Vegas-ing going on - with some hard lessons about the dubious wisdom of engaging in betting, and I definitely walked past the ever excellent Galaxy Truckers and the sorriest bunch of looking collapsed space trucks I had ever seen.

Betrayal at house on the hill

Betrayal at House on the Hill was also being played when I visited downstairs, Luke was taking delight in calling himself a blob ( I am guessing he was the bad guy, and this wasn't just some crisis of self image going on ) and there was some discussion amongst the players about divided loyalties and actually volunteering to join Team Blob as it looked pretty hopeless for the good guys.

There was also some inventive roleplaying going on about hopeless librarians throwing themselves into the basement in fits of despair only to turn up with an item of Hope in hand. All very deep and allegorical. Who woulda thunk it ?

Raising the euro bar on the table over from the riff raff of narrative ameritrash of betrayal, Concordia got a run through again with Hal at the helm, and this week he decided to write up his experience.

Downstairs, people quickly snapped up all five chairs for Concordia. We promptly piled the broken furniture limbs into a small pyre and burnt them in honour of the Roman goddess of harmony. We all won, if you judge victory by smoke inhalation.

Uhm, maybe I should say five people were eager to play the game Concordia, and sat in a very safe and non destructive manner on the kindly provided chairs and benches. Much clearer. Concordia was released in 2013 to muted praise, an unsuccessful bid for Kennerspiel, and much scoffing at the box art. David mentioned he was keen to try it out as it has apparently been climbing steadily up the BGG rankings since then.

Hal ponders what is good about Concordia. He doesn't know.
But at least it isn't Blockade Runner.

The players are all playing competing Roman somebodies, spreading their settlements around the empire, so that they can produce goods to turn into money or more settlements. How you do this is controlled by your hand of cards. Each card lets you take a specific action when you play it, and each aspiring Roman somebody starts with an identical hand of cards. On your turn, you play one card from you hand, do the action it says on it, and put it on top of your discard pile. You keep doing this until a somebody has built their final settlement, or all the extra cards have been bought. Oh yes! As you become more and more of a somebody about Rome, you can buy extra cards from a market on the board to put into your hand, giving you access to more actions, or more powerful actions.

Each individual action is kept quite simple: when you play the merchant, you trade two types of good for a fixed price. The interesting part is sequencing these small actions so you're able to make the most of each one. Once you've played a card, that action isn't going to be available to you for a while, until you play the card to put your discard pile back into your hand. The game moves at a brisk pace, each action is quickly achieved, and there's enough to think about while the turn comes back round to you.

At the start of the game, players spread out across the board. Richard IV made a beeline East to the tool rich Syria, Guillame had eyes on the crown of Hispania, while Chloe, David and I shared the spaces around Italia & Germania. The board is split up into regions, with two or three potential settlement sites in each. There is some benefit to sharing a region with others, when a region produces resources, it produces resources for everyone present there. When you share, you're more likely to have other people making regions you're in produce goods for you.

How do you make regions produce goods? Play a card. The answer to almost any “How do I...?” in Concordia is “Play a card”. Everything that happens is going to be the result of someone playing a card and taking its action. This really gives a strong feeling of control in the game, everything has a very direct and obvious cause. It also means Concordia has basically no admin. There's no point at which the game pauses, and you have to run some algorithms and shuffle pieces about.

So we carried on playing cards and moving pieces around. Chloe struggled to expand for a while in the midgame, David longed for brick (required to build anything, except brick producing cities). Guillame achieved the throne of Hispania, Richard IV declared the entirety of Asia undesirable and headed to North Africa. I decided to colonise the cloth rich cities either side of the English channel. I had decided to try and go for my winning strategy from the week before again – get spread out and try to be in as many provinces as possible.

I was hoping to please Saturnus, the Roman god of putting on a good spread. Each card you buy also has at the bottom the name of a Roman god, who at the end of the game bestows favour (and VP) upon you based on how well you met their very well defined wants. Saturnus will give you 1 point for each region you are present in. I ended up being present in ten. Importantly, he will do this for every Saturnus card you have managed to cram into you hand. I had five Saturnus cards in the end, for a total 50 points from the god of the buffet.

This scoring system is interesting, and makes picking up cards tough, weighing their action against their scoring opporunity. It is also completely opaque, you have no idea how well anyone is doing until the end of the game, when you stop and spend ten minutes doing sums. Somebody announces their winning score, and t isn't quite the climax you'd hope for. The victorious somebody was David, although most of us thought King Guillame of Hispania (and a bit of Gallia) had it won.

Everyone seemed to enjoy it, probably more than I think I do. It's a solid, streamlined game, with a decent gradually rising arc of power for each player as they grab more cards, and the choices you make matter and the timing is interesting. It lacks a central hook though, if someone asks me “What's good about Concordia?”, I can't ever think of anything excellent to point to. I like it, it's good, but it doesn't attempt anything great. Although I made people play Blockade Runner, so my taste in games is forever suspect.

Qwirkle made - I think - its first appearance at the Ribs, a game that manages to bridge the divide between those happy safe family type stalwarts, and those slightly more esoteric games that your Nan has never heard of. Qwirkle is a solid domino type game and if you haven't played it you need to, it's a nice easily pleasing filler type that will get even the most ardent game nay sayer having a go.

Adam relates :

Our table (James, Sam, Deano, Joe, Mel, Adam) played a quick round of qwirkle. Scoring highly wasn't a problem for some in this one. So simple in concept we didn't even bring the rules-creating lines of either colours or shapes and scoring points based on their length. Sam's score increased at an exponential rate at the end of the game, but it wasn't enough to catch Joe, who was convinced his tactical skills (and not drawing the right coloured tiles) were the reason for his impressive score (for 6 player) of over 100. Players were convinced the choice of shapes by the game designers were less than ideal, but decided a swastika wasn't a suitable alternative. Seemed to be enjoyed, and a very quick game with little explanation required. Although I did have my hands full keeping score.

That's all for this week, the NoBoG writing goblins are complaining about working on a Bank Holiday and demanding triple pay. Until next week, nobog fans, same nobog channel, same nobog time*.

Thanks to all the contributors this week, there were a good few of you, your input is appreciated.


* Lies. All lies.

The First Rule of NoBoG is...

This week the Ribs of Beef was full to the rafters as an epic 44 people turned up to partake of the NoBoG extravaganza. Personally I blame the inflated numbers on Mr Bond who advertised NoBoG Tuesday as #InternationalTableTopTuesdayEvening and offered free swag. On the other hand, if #InternationalTableTopTuesdayEvening isn't a thing, then it should be a thing.

Bondys promoted SWAG

The elevated numbers caused Pete to slightly panic* and give out the advice to newcomers that if they enjoyed themselves to remember not to tell their friends.

All very fight club if you ask me. The first rule of which is to not talk about it. If you haven't a clue what I am talking about, then your homework this week is to immediately go watch the 1999 film Fight Club.

Aside from Pete's comedy advice, it was great to see so many people down the pub playing games, and personally I had a great night, playing some new things, some old things, and introducing The Cow Game to those who had never heard of such a thing before - and were suitably delighted by it.

Chloe also pointed out that this week quite a number of gaming ladies turned up, by her count as many as ten of them, which marks another record for NoBoG. Back in the day, ten people would have been the whole of NoBoG, male or female.

Gah, a blurry shot of Mysterium and its screen.
Super low light level and a long exposure are to blame.

The G Man was in the house on Tuesday, and being the collector of the sometimes whimsical, he brought along a game called Mysterium, which after some wrangling, I ended up joining in to play. Mysterium - and I'm just going to go right ahead and assume you've never heard of it before - is a game best summed up as a cross between Dixit and Cluedo.

Funny vague artsy picture cards ? Check.

A murderer in Some Place with Some Murder Weapon ? Check.

Guessing who was where doing what to whom ? Check.

Unlike Cluedo however the game is a co-operative affair where everyone is trying to work together to solve the puzzles you are given - namely murder suspects. One player takes on the role of The Ghost, or, if you like, The Murdered, and it's their job to communicate to everyone else just who killed them and how.

Which would be lovely if the Ghost could just send you an SMS with the murderer's contact details.

Predictably things aren't so easy however, and instead the ghost must rely on sending dreams to the other players - who are allegedly psychics and sensitive to such things. Either that or they just have really vivid imaginations and a habit of eating cheese past midnight ( my mom always used to say eating cheese late at night would make you dream. Science ! ).

The dreams come in the form of cards with a lovingly artsy illustration, albeit random and often surreal. Spread on the table are another bunch of lovingly illustrated cards and it's up to the player(s) to make a guess as to what refers to what. Every player gets their own card to think about, with the end result being that the Ghost is going to tell you about X number of suspects, X number of murder scenes and X number of murder weapons, where X is the player number.

So you get into Dixit territory. A boy riding a bicycle through some woods ? Well clearly that

Mysterium ! It was.. the ghost boy with the candlestick !

indicates this magician chap over here. What ? The whole effort is further complicated by the Ghost only have a limited selection of cards to choose from each turn. So. The clues could be super vague.

The game is won if everyone manages to solve their person, location, murder weapon in a given number of nights, and after that, if everyone then manages to select the right person, location and weapon out of those that have been highlighted.

An interesting game. All about getting into the head of the person playing the ghost. And trying to find some connecting particular that links one series of pictures to another.

We failed for the record. The G Man kept apologising to me whilst handing me my clues. In the end a wolf was filling in for a unicorn, and most of the other clues were pointing at a small picture on the wall of one of the choices. As it was I actually did succeed in getting all my details right, but Pete and Sam failed. And so the ghost was not avenged.

Note to future murdered ghosts. Learn how to use email.

Small World, Chloe and David with some new NoBoGers

Meanwhile on the table over, a group of new NoBoGers learned to play Small World which came down to a very tight finish again, relying on a tie breaker to actually determine who had won. The game was given a thumbs up, and they liked the way that the races and traits made the game variable - they could see good replayability in it.

Behind them, an excited Jay Van Zee ( his newly annointed NoBoG street rap name, formerly known as JJ ) busted out a fresh from the kickstarter presses game of Shadow of the Elder Gods.

Given which name is a game that is contractually obliged to be about Cthulu type shenanigans.

Anytime you use Shadow and Elder God in some combination, you have to be talking about Lovecraftian Shnubbling, and Shoggotholling.

The Elder Gods of the Shadow Supermarket. See ? It's a game about a Cthulu infested supermarket. Easy.

Shadow of the Elder Gods. Aka Pocket Arkham Horror aka
James Mapp's Punch Yourself In the Face !

So what's the game all about... A co-operative game, players take the role of investigators, or just plain schmucks, who are wandering about the city of Arkham in a game of tentacle whack a mole.

Along the way you get to pick up things to help you fight off the nasties that keep cropping up, and hopefully by the end you will have enough experience to see off the Elder nasty himself. If this sounds remarkably like Arkham Horror, then you'd be right, it sort of is.

But it's condensed down into something that doesn't take between 3 and 6 hours to crank out and has wayyyy less of a footprint in terms of endless decks of crap. I like Arkham Horror, but it does suffer from early FFG designs of "Lets just make another deck of cards / pile of tokens / endless crap for that mechanic, and then we can big it up on the box how much crap is in here, and how much crap your money is buying - bargain !" which typically end up with you playing the Setup The Crap game for longer than you actually play the game.

I'm not sure how the game went down, it sounds pretty cool, albeit James who did play it spotted some dubious flaws he was less than happy with. A key component of the game is the Ring of Shadows, an item which allows you to tackle the unseen enemies that lurk beneath the seen ones and is the key to winning the game. The price of using this item however is a hit in sanity ( of course, no self respecting Cthulu game leaves out a Sanity mechanic ), and here's the issue. Certain random cards in the game will deal 5 sanity damage to the wielder of the Ring of Shadows. Which is enough for insta death. So. Draw a card. Die. Game Over ?

Are there mitigations to this ? No idea. But James was not a fan and stated that at least the game was short, and therefore wasn't too much of a pain to put up with before inevitably dying from the RNG insta death. On thinking about it more deeply he related the experience to be like punching yourself in the face. "Draw a Card, Punch yourself in the face that many times". I dunno. Sounds like a winning party game to me. COPYRIGHT !

Alhambra - vanilla style. Circa 2003

Away from the Cthulian Horror, Stu guided some people through the ways of Kingdom Builder, whilst the table over enjoyed a blast of classic Alhambra which I think was just the pure vanilla version - no expansions ( I tend to always play with the treasures and markets and yada these days... )

Downstairs Martin took some newcomers through the halls of Betrayal at House on the Hill, Hal gave a group a zip around Powerboats - which to my eye looked really cool ( I think its all those lovely hexes lighting the wargaming gene in me ) - and apparently played really nicely - a game all about managing your speed dice and trying not to ram into things from going too fast.

Power boats. Race around the islands and manage your speed.

Lastly, Darren got the new and sexy Xenoshyft Onslaught to table, yet another co-operative type game ( there were three and a half co-ops played this week - I am counting Betrayal as a half co-op ) which is a deck builder horror survival malarkey that sees your group of swaggering future troops defending your base from the evil alien Hive.

Marines versus Aliens you say ?

Yes. In co-operative deck builder format.

The very nice looking Xenoshyft Onslaught.

Which sounds in theory like a cool idea. What's not to like about the familiar Marines versus Aliens trope ( although I have to say, a bit like the whole zombie malarkey, it's probably getting a bit too done at this point ) ? No idea how this panned out. Tim noted it was very difficult to win. The game certainly looked gorgeous on the table - and surprisingly for a Cool Mini or Not game did not come with a bazillion miniatures.

After all that gaming a horde of smaller fillier games descended.

Artificium

I got to try out Artificium on my table - a highly rated light euro resource manager filler, all about turning one thing into another for points. Sam languished in last for the first half of the game before showing off outrageously to overtake everyone and fall off the edge of the scoring because he was just scoring so damn well with an army of wizards.

We declared him loser for running off the edge of the score board and therefore having no score.


After this we changed tables up and busted out The Cow Game to some newcomers - where there were some interesting aberrant plays going on.

Sechs Nimmt. Well. The next move is certainly tricky...

Firstly, one of the newcomers managed to score an enormous 50 points in his single first round. 50. That has to be a record of some sort. It makes Tim's previous week Cow collecting extravaganza look positively amateurish in comparison. Also. We had a full board situation occur. Which I can't remember ever seeing.

Too many fillers to mention. Pickomino, flaschenteufel, yet more Cows, werewolf. Gosh.

Thanks to those who submitted something, David, Chloe, James, short or long !


*our veteran members can be a fragile bunch that are sometimes to be heard muttering about how it was all different in their day, when there was just chess, counting the leaves that floated down the River Wensum, picking peanuts off the floor and flicking them at Crocker and Settlers of Catan.

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.

Professor Plum in the Library with the Candlestick

Two retro classic name drops in as many weeks. Shocking. But no, Professor Plum of Cluedo fame was not present at NoBoG this or last week ( don't take that as a challenge to bring it next week... ), however the new and vaguely reminiscent game Witness was.

Witness is a slightly odd cooperative game that sees four - and only four, no less, no more - players investigating a crime that has taken place with the goal of everyone coming up with the facts of the case in an end summing up question and answer session. Think any ending to an Agatha Christie novel with everyone standing nervously around a period drama set waiting for some amateur to tell them whodunnit. If everyone has the facts of the case clear then everyone should be able to ace their questions. Or failing that you just send any poor innocent schmo to prison instead. Because you're awesome like that.

Despite the whole thrust of the game, the mechanics have very little to do with solving mysteries or deducing facts. The game is in fact Chinese Whispers ( telephone for you yanks ) with a score sheet at the end. Each player has information they know - and in the rounds of the game it is up to them to transfer this knowledge on via whisper to the next player along. In theory as you gain more information from others, you pass ever more information that you know on, until after three rounds, everyone should know everything about the case.

As is clear then, this is a game of Chinese Whispers played with four starting messages, which hopefully by the end have coalesced into a single combined message known by all.

The game is short sweet and different. Well. Different to other cooperative games, but perhaps not so different to Chinese Whispers. Definitely one to get a play or three of, but tricky to fit with its exacting demand of four players. One for the bridge / Tichu club perhaps.

After this they played Tragedy Looper... for... a change of pace ? Or just another cooperative deduction type game, but this one with Anime characters rather than 1940's belgian cartoon characters.

Fletch gets 5 player Agricola to table

Sticking on an old school theme, James threatened at one point to bring Totopoly along - to get into the whole occasional retro gaming vibe. Totopoly. Man. Another family classic. Although this one always felt a bit sexier, a bit more out there than monopoly, with its funky horses, double sided board and rampant gambling. Some 70 odd years old, it hadn't even heard of the terms Euro or Ameritrash when it was being diced over. But boy was the first board boring as hell.

Ignoring Totopoly - moving from the new Witness to the old but not as old as Totopoly Alhambra. Nicky brought along this classic in its Anniversary edition guise with one of its expansions ( the treasure chamber ). If you are going to play Alhambra then there's no finer way than with the Anniversary edition. With a nice board and pieces it really does make the experience better - don't ask me why, it's just... tidier. Nicky ended up pipping me by two points, which if I hadn't ballsed up and placed an illegal tile I would have taken. Not to mention she stole, blatantly stole, the towers from me to pilfer the win. Cool game which still stands up to play over a decade after it was released.

A blurry shot of Imperial Settlers

Mr Bond brought along Imperial Settlers again, with the ever optimisting Pete laying his hands on the Japanese and stumbling to a final win despite everyone kicking the hell out of him. Pete liked the game, noted that the Japanese were strong in scoring but weak against aggression and that the game like a lot of others, probably needed people to gang up on them. Khorne in Chaos in the Old World, I am looking at you. Pete likes a good engine building synergising type of game, and loves to employ clever efficiencies to get the most out of his virtual workers. Perhaps that's why he's also not keen on destructive interaction in such games - having someone walk over and kick his meticulous sand castle down makes him sad. There's no being clever in the face of a bullet. Or sword. Or heavy weighted object. As the nameless suit dude in Robocop taunted 'think you're pretty smart huh... think you can outsmart a bullet ? '

I got to play Imperial Settlers myself this week and it's a real fun game. It really riffed with Race for the Galaxy or more appropriately Glory to Rome again for me, but I dont know, every game I play lately seems to be riffing on them for me. Perhaps I have gone Race for the Galaxy insane.

Speaking of Race for the Galaxy, Punk Rich has laid his hands on Roll for the Galaxy, the sort of

Roll for the Galaxy.
With custom baby sippy cups for dribbly players

follow up game to Race that employs dice rather than cards. Thomas Lehmann takes us back to the uplift Universe of David Brin with players once again balancing, shuffling and earning resources to get ever more stuff. Some familiar stuff is in there. The calling of phases that are then shared for all players. Exploring, Developing, settling, producing, consuming are all here. But this time around the dice are powering things.

Punk Rich and Pete, the unofficial UK Race for the Galaxy Evangelists for World Peace, have both given the game a big thumbs up, and there are even some mutterings in the wings that it - *gasp* - replaces Race for the Galaxy.

Video Game High School

Darren finally managed to turn up this week, and grasped in his hands was Arcadia Quest and Video Game High School. Arcadia Quest proved to be so quick I didn't event get a shot of it, but all enjoyed its cutesy dungeon crawling / PVP action before turning to the Video Game High School. Which I have no idea about whatsoever.

Jeff also returned to us this week after a hiatus of... a quarter of a year. Injuries and work had kept him away, but this week he got to play Ora and Labora, which huzzah, I finally got to table. I really enjoyed my time back with this Rosenberg title, and Rich IV who is becoming something of a Rosenberg vet having played Agricola and Caverna for the first time recently, enjoyed this one too.

Ora & Labora. With Fimo Monks.
Luke however was not impressed with them.
"They look amateur modelled. And not in a good way"
I'll remember that Luke... I'll remember...

He went on to win the game by a single point, pipping me at the post when we packed up slightly early - we had some slow turns.

I think poor James III really struggled with this game. The overload of information was too much and the sheer number of buildings and interactions seemed to flummox him. Ora and Labora certainly can do this. When Bondy played this first he had a permanent pained expression on his face from all the thunkery.

Personally I like giving the game a whirl a couple of times a year. It's crunchy. And I love my fimo monks. Everytime I see them I want to make more....

James likes turning up with the odd weird and wonderful game. In the past it has been things like the

Colourful wacky Zendo.

difficult to get hold of HamsterRolle. Or the hipster cool Loopin Louie. Last week it was the turn of plastic surplus reuse scheme Zendo. A game in which you try to work out what arrangement of weird bits of plastic James has deemed correct. I think technically you don't have to be James to actually make this game work, anyone can decide what's right. It helps if you have James though. Not sure what that says about replayability when James is not available. But basically one master player decides on a ruleset the pieces follow, and then the other players build random placements of pieces for the master to mark. And hopefully you deduce what's right and what's not. So a simple master rule might be - it contains blue pieces. More difficult - it contains blue pieces and all pieces point at each other. Constructions are marked in a vaguely similar way to the old Mastermind game, and players can take a guess if they wish - first player guessing correctly wins.


Lauren was again taking no prisoners last week and continued on her rampage victory streak, being

Machi Koro. Fletch is on a roll getting games to table.

very evil and sneaky in Room 25 to pull the win, and either getting close or winning everything else.

Fletch finally got Planes to table, taught a couple of newcomers how to play, and then along with Elliot got his arse kicked by said newcomers. After having lost two or three times in this manner, Elliot declared it enough, and left. Ha ha. Busy departure, or refusal to be bludgeoned by newcomers ?

A whole bunch else got played in the last fortnight, Takenoko, Colt Express, Betrayal, Machi Koro, Agricola and more. All in all January has seen some awesome gaming sessions, and some interesting new titles stuck on the table. And famous people turning up. Yeah. That's right. See what you miss when you don't turn up ? I'm certainly not going to tell you who though...  Such is the star studded spectacle that is NoBoG Rich IV has started talking about inviting the Queen in for a gaming session. Although Resistance could be tricky - you might get accused of treason and thrown in the tower for being a filthy lying spy.

We. Are Not. Amused.

Off With His Head.

Kingdom Builder played with the Under the Table Amongst The Peanuts expansion.

31 last week. 27 this week.

(17,13 over Christmas... )