For Sale : 10,000 sq/ft Industrial Unit - slightly war torn

This week for the most part NoBoGers elected to play the old* favourites** with Pandemic, Lords of Waterdeep and Betrayal at House on the Hill first up on the tables in the Wherry Room.

*old - in terms of board game fads and newness about 12 months at most
**favourites - in terms of fickle gamers some will really like, and others declare absolutely broken ( mostly because they didn't win )

Betrayal at House on the Hill in particular has now been played so often at the Ribs, it's a wonder the regular players aren't all thoroughly experienced veterans that can list all the betrayals from memory. There may be lessons to be learned here for budding game designers about the compelling nature of the game as for my money there are not too many other games like it in terms of mechanics and how it plays, plus as a bonus the theme really works well.

A full and buzzing Wherry Room

Betrayal had two plays, one with a Dracula bad guy who was roundly beaten by the good guys, and a second... with an invincible traitor that must be killed with a statue. Sounds weird. I guess you had to be there.

The world of Pandemic meanwhile was being threatened by the very twelve monkey-esque bio terrorist challenge, where one of the players instead of tripping around the planet curing diseases is instead actively working towards bringing the zombie / mutant / pathogen apocalypse joy to the world at large. Happy days. Richard the IV was the bio-terrorist with a grudge ( don't blame me if you're now on an NSA web search watch list Richard... ) but failed in his task to bring a slightly insane Bruce Willis into time travelling reality.

Lords of Waterdeep had a blast at the far end, Lewis complained he was getting his butt kicked by a bunch of newbies mid game, but by the end had successfully shown them what a bunch of newbs they were and had won.

Upstairs a table of six took on some shorter games. Firstly there was Space Cadets Dice Duel - new for everyone at the table except myself. A stressful hour of dice rolling passed with two games, some role switching and a single victory for both teams. Mr Bond was very chuffed with the experience and declared the game to be the best thing ever. I think he was still adrenalin pumped at that point from all the split second dice rolling decision making. If you want to know what the game is about, a small vid of our first outing of this was posted a whileback.

Sentinel Tactics : Uprising

Afterwards we had some crazy camel racing in Camel Up - my first go at this. Cool stuff, and a little more involved than it first appears. The game is a fun, quick and light betting / racing game that manages to keep any Randomness to a reasonable minimum, and the capability for planning and working out odds to a maximum.  Even half a lap behind, it's still possible for some ridiculous camel to gallop into the lead, albeit very unlikely. A game of calculating risks, managing them, and trying to make more money than everyone else whilst doing it.

Lastly we gave Sentinel Tactics : Uprising a bit of a test play. Sentinel Tactics Uprising is a tactical super hero combat game, where each player controls a super hero ( or villain ) type, runs around a hexagonal based urban landscape, and attempts to Zap, Pow and Ker-Splat others into non existence. The game can be played in a few different ways - co-operatively against a story based challenge or competitively in a death match style. If you've ever played or heard of Heroclix, then, you'll get the idea.

We played in two teams of three in a death match style, grappled with the rules of orders, movement, range and shooting, and sallied forth to beat each other to a pulp.

Sentinel isn't based on any mainstream comicbook IP, so it won't have any names you are familiar with, but they follow tried and tested formulas of heroes and villains. Mr Bond got to play the "Invincible Bunker" which looked to be a slightly fat Ironman. I on the other hand got to play some random computer name, and it turned out I was an automated factory gone bad.

Just how an automated factory turns bad and then goes onto terrorise a neighbourhood is a very good question that is not really addressed. By necessity we made up our own narrative for my "character".

Covering a sizable chunk of the board, and for 10,000 square feet of prime Industrial Zone, surprisingly fleet footed, I managed to rocket jump half the map and attempt to grapple with Nicky's "The Wraith". Who promptly slipped away... Wraith like. Then again, it doesn't seem like that arduous of a task to actually dodge a 10,000 square feet industrial building that has menacing feelings towards you. Indeed you might not even realise a factory is harbouring menacing feelings towards you, such is their lack of general mobility. Or sentience. Dodging an evil factory should be a case of just slowly walking around it as opposed hitting your head on its door jam. Less Wraith like to dodge it then, and more just observing the Watch Your Head signage pasted on the front door.

Rich playing a rather suspect Ra "The Sun God" ( I am too a Sun God, look at this lovely tan... don't rile me, I'll give you such a sun burn ! ) turned out to be no such thing, and just plain old Bob from the Melanoma Sun Tan Clinic in a stupid outfit. "Ra" or Bob as we now know him jumped onto a building in turn one only to be turned to goop by the Wraith and the impressive weaponry of the Bunker.

After burning Ra, everyone turned their attention on my prime real estate, and begin firing flak cannons at my offices. This was unfortunate as at that point, having failed to engage The Wraith I had instead turned my energies into producing iPhone accessories for the mass market. Nicky trying to shut down production for good started throwing knives at me. Hmm. Not exactly something large industrial units tend to worry about - throwing knives. Nevertheless she did some damage - we concluded that she must have killed the caretaker or security guard - but this time failed to slip away and instead got buried under pile of automated production line and masonry. Bits of her will be showing up in iPhone accessories for the next six months.

After Rich dusted himself off and tried giving The Bond a blistering sun burn ( failed, of course ) we halted the game with 1 knock out each. A cool game if you like that kind of thing, it seemed a bit ill balanced for player versus player shenanigans unless you really know what you are doing and balance the teams accordingly. I'm not sure there is enough in it to make it tactically challenging, it comes down to getting there first, having most of your dice hit, and pummelling someone into the dirt before they can return the favour.

This game to me is pretty much the same as Heroclix - it's a slightly larger map scale, and a bit simpler than Heroclix, but eh, I think if you wanted to play something like this, I can't see why you wouldn't play Heroclix. Heroclix has the well known IP, a deeper more involved range of choices, and does the same job. Maybe I am missing something.

The evening finished for some with Splendor and Avalon Resistance, where Luke got to make one of his now customary faux pas by announcing that we - the bad guys - only need one more vote to fail. Thus condemning him to be identified as a filthy spy. Another one of those, oh, did I say that out loud moments.

Love Letter might also have briefly appeared.

Next week I shall be bringing the new and spanky Dead of Winter - a semi co-operative ( yay ?! ) game about surviving the zombie apocalypse. Or possibly just bringing the whole camp down and being an evil zombie loving betrayer. Boo. Featuring one player character of a Mall Santa, who is so appallingly bonkers / annoying / drunk, that the camp actually has morale improve when he "goes missing". Dark.

Other weeks :
 Rex has got a play 3 out of the last 4 weeks which I find surprising but very cool - it almost got played this week, but we opted for shorter things instead. Rex still intrigues me - simple, yet tricky. Limited, yet lots of choices. I think the whole game works on two things - the very asymmetrical player powers ( that are amazingly balanced ), and the possible alliance permutations ( and seating order and turn order and what that means for the game at large ).

Bora Bora made a return visit - only the second time this highly thought of game has been down the Ribs. A mystery why it hasn't turned up more often. Still haven't played it.

Rich got to teach Caverna. And kicked ass. Predictable. Possibly one ( the only ? ) flaw in Caverna - its predictability.

Sam got to play Mission Red Planet, full of confidence on having won before. And crashed to a defeat his confidence balloon popped. He had got engaged in a bit of a power tussle. And distracted. It happens. Mission Red Planet is a nice little game. And is rumoured to be getting an FFG reprint.

The other Sam kicked ass at Kemet. A victory at his own game. Avoiding the embarrassment of being beaten by newbies - although Luke was also playing who has quite the experience with the game now.

Lastly, have some pictures from the last few weeks.

Camelot

Bora Bora

Camel Up

Caverna

Kemet

Takenoko

Numbers for the last 3 weeks - 20, 25, 23. Less busy than usual !
 

NoBoG.... TV ?

An overview of Space Cadets Dice Duel with a follow up of our first efforts at it down the Ribs... if you can manage it, watch it in HD !

Pew Pew Pew

A respectable twenty two for this weeks shenanigans, including Robin making an unexpected return after several months of being AWOL, and, of course, a few new people - Jodie and Mark amongst others.

A rather tough table for Castles of Burgundy was setup, wall to wall experienced players making the game a challenge. Wily Tom ended up being crowned the winner, with Pete lamenting his strategy of doing a bit of everything failing to bring home the Burgundy Bacon.

On the other side of the room to Burgundian Castles, the NoBoG classic Hansa Teutonica was wheeled out to four newbies and a single vet - myself. If you know anything about this abstract Euro cube cruncher, you will know that newbies can struggle a little at first getting their head around what works and what doesn't. Being the general nice chap that I am I gave everyone a run through of the strategy involved - ( although I know some that take satisfaction in it, I don't particularly believe in the adage of explaining the rules and only the rules to someone, then delighting in slicing them several ways from Sunday as I leverage my experience over their inexperience ) - with a liberal dose of make your own mind up and herded them around the pitfalls of play.

The game was enjoyable, tough and close fought, with everyone looking like they might have had a chance had things gone in a slightly different direction at game end. I struggled to make headway on points, but still managed to pip a win in a fairly low scoring game.

Funkenschlag - Powergrid. This time set in the lovely fjords.

Downstairs the venerable Funkenschlaaag ( Powergrid ) and Lords of Waterdeep were put up for play. A new to me Nordic board was on offer, with a lot of interest clustered in southern Norway. Not sure who won this, and for some at least the experience was somewhat bewildering, math heavy and not entirely a thumbs up - or a thumbs down. It's certainly true that Powergrid with players that kind of know what they are doing, can start to become an exercise in headbound spreadsheet mechanics.

Trains. Fletch is either confidently not viewing his hand of cards
- unlike everyone else - or is in the process of eating them here.

Lastly Ed and Fletch took newcomers and largely inexperienced Mark and Jodie through the paces of Trains. A game which by now we surely all know, is about Trains - as the now part of the furniture in NoBoG joke goes. Actually it's Dominion. Without any rioting peasants, endless expansion boxes, and with a lovely board. Which if you've played this with Owein will know is not a required part of interaction to win the game.

Fillers. After the Lords of Waterdeep lot finished, they embarked on a game of Love Letter. Which was possibly the noisiest most raucous game of Love Letter ever to be played. I am not sure just how you can play such a noisy game of Love Letter ( Ed gave a reconstruction demonstration "BOOM, yes I am the Princess BITCHES !" ) , but they managed it. Lewis blamed Luke for all the raucousity ( not a word, should be a word ) post game.

The last filler was Space Cadets Dice Duel. This is a game which splits the players into two teams, each of which gets to crew a starship with the sole aim of shooting down the other starship. Each starship has a crew station that controls one aspect of the ship, weapons, shields and so on, and if you've ever played Star Fleet Battles, you'll know exactly where this comes from. In fact, the two miniatures they supply in the box are even though not officially linked with any Star Trek IP, pretty much exact replicas of the Defiant from the Star Trek series Deep Space Nine. Coincidence ?

Unlike SFB, play proceeds in frenetic real time, with no turns at all - neither me go you go, or we go, just, just play as fast as you can - with dice used as the main interaction between a player and the game. Whilst this might sound utterly stupid and chaotic ( which may or may not appeal to you ), the action of having to roll dice - of which you always have your own personal stash - injects a delay into the game, wherein you are continually rolling dice looking for maybe one or two values that are useful to you.

The dice are the fuel of the game. The engineer player has six normal dice, and depending on the result of a die, he can assign them to a ship crew station. Once a player receives a power die from the engineer player they can then roll their own dice that interact with their station. Once a die has been rolled that the station player likes, they lock their die in, and hand the power die back to the engineer - who gets to roll it again.

The realtime nature actually works out well for this - whilst the engineer can give power dice away to crew stations to power up that station ( and let them roll their own dice ), in practice there is a time lag between assigning power to a station and something useful coming of it. Shoving power into the shields for instance simply starts the process of rolling a single shield dice. It might be 20 seconds or more before you actually get to raise a shield in the direction you want...

Gameplay is fun, frenetic and at times stressful if you have a lot to do. A great game to play, and a bit of a crowd pleaser given its wacky play, zero downtime and raucous chatter. My only concern about the game is of its longevity - once a crew gets skilled at using their ship the game could break down into a bit of a binary blah fest, where whoever gets the last best movement gets to win. I can definitely see this happening, at which point the game is a whole lot less interesting, but, it also has to be said there is quite a learning journey to be made before you reach those oh so jaded clued in cynical heights. Whilst there are less than perfect crewmen on station, fun and doubt is to be had.

I lost both games. I blame Fletch for our first loss and his frantic handling of shields, helm and tractor beam - I was the "no stress here" engineer just handing out dice. In truth, Fletch's job was by far the trickiest and most busy, and not an easy ride by any stretch of the imagination - particularly for a first game. And I blame Ed for my second loss - after he did a sneaky piece of manoeuvring  that flipped him to the shieldless rear of our ship and proceeded to blow the crap out of us. For my part I wasn't watching the sneaky move ( which in hindsight I should have been ) - I was watching Fletch and Pip trying to load the torpedos... and fail...

Fletch has now left us for six months of glorious touring with Her Majesty's Finest Flyers, we hope he has a safe tour, and returns eager for gaming around Christmas !