Everyone's a toaster

Battlestar Galactica. Unless you've been living under a rock for the last decade - or are a very careful non observer of anything sci-fi - then you'll know that a TV series called Battlestar Galactica came along to reboot what had been an of its time cheesey 1970's sci fi show and re-introduce everyone to the word Frak and also the popular theme that AI is really a very bad idea indeed - AI's tend to be implacable, oddly huffy and list as one of their favourite past times other than building robots, killing everything that isn't an AI.

So all of that. But in Spaaaaaaaaaaaace. With gratuitous levels of grit. And misery. And pew pew. And some new messianic malarkey which to be frank all gets a bit weird and makes you just want them to show more ships shooting shit at each other with it's charmingly jerky "dude who has no steadycam available realism" filter. Apparently you can have a society with technology to build massive battleships in space that can jump light years but also completely skip steady cam technology.

And of course someone made a board game about it. Well not the messianic or steady cam bit. Just the misery and paranoia and shooting shit and AI. Which as James - and to a lesser extent Pete - like to point out ends up as a 5 hour version of Resistance ( the difference between James and Pete here being that James inserts the word crap at several points in that sentence ).

Generally speaking however, people are keen on it. And some even love it. Whether that's because of the mechanic of not knowing which human is actually not a human and instead a secret robot ( cylon / frakking toaster, replace as you please depending on your geek level ), or whether it's the theme of getting to play your favourite character from the show or all of the above, the game is popular. Despite the fact that it is a little clunky in places. And can run appallingly slow at times. 7 hour games are not unknown.

Battlestar Galactica. Two base ships right at the start.

So this week we gave the game a run at NoBoG. Which in my opinion is not the wisest of all moves. Because it runs long. I blame myself for this - I jokingly noted that with the extra time available at the Mash Tun, it wouldn't be long before we had someone bring along BSG for a bash. At which point everyone got excited and demanded that BSG was brought along for a bash. Ironically this meant I was the one bring along BSG. Oh truth that is often said in jest.

I thought I'd set the thing up early to get us going - only to be stymied by the ridiculous football going on in the city meaning I was struck in traffic for 30 minutes behind people in yellow and green and claret and blue shirts. Don't talk to me about council traffic planning. Or the wonderfully complacent attitude of parking management by local footie clubs.

Six of us sat down to this - one a complete newbie - which as a result meant that Monika set all the resource dials to maximum instead of their usual 75% start mark. This makes the game hella easy for the humans. Ironically the newbie turned out to be the only cylon at the table initially. Oops.

As is not untypical for me however, I managed to cark up the role selection, seeding too many cylons into the mix - I blame a rushed setup, a Mutineer ( add one card ), Boomer ( add one card ) and Baltar ( add one card ) for the balls up. The game progressed smoothly despite the surplus of toasters - only one was present at the start, before Monika got given a cylon role at the half way point. Richard IV as the amazingly untrustworthy Mutineer Baltar ( he had a marvellous four role cards instead of the normal two ), cylon detected Monika and revealed she was a cylon with a single cylon card.

Surprise then when she revealed only to give me an extra cylon role card.

Either Richard IV misread the cards, and he swore he did not. Or Monika stuffed another Cylon role card into the mix just to shake things up.

The end game went a bit peculiar with multi Cylons being revealed, but to be frank by that point the humans despite their head start were struggling, and everyone had an enjoyable paranoid game. The humans lost. Richard IV upset that none of his four cards were a cylon - he loves being a traitor - declared the game a moral victory for the humans.

Thunderstone

So it seems that BSG is perfectly playable within the time frame of a pub evening. We had a couple of quick jumps of 3 distance to speed things up, but the game slowed significantly at the half way point as everyone started arguing about who the traitors might be ( before any revealed cylons ). All in all play time probably came in around the 3 hours 15 minutes mark. Setup time was a good 30 minutes.

Because of all those shenanigans I don't have much of a clue what else was going on at the Tuna. I remember walking past Thunderstone....

Eclipse with the hardcore guys

Lewis got to play Marvel Legendary ( I think his first time playing it ) and successfully beat off the evil Red Skull before having a go again this time with the rather spiffy Guardians of the Galaxy set.

Pete engaged in an epic 5 player Eclipse game - no ranting this week though - which was still ongoing as I left the pub and Elliott played one of his faves, Lords of Waterdeep and got to win.

And then there's James

Four of us sat down for Crusoe this week.. Last week was a lucky win it turns out, and the party was a glutton for punishment, so scenario 4 was selected..  Things went badly; very badly in fact and we quickly found out why this is one of the harder scenarios.  We had horrendous luck with the card draw, and the first few events made it almost impossible to actually get any food each round.  even when we managed to get a decent enough weapon level for our soldier to set off hunting we managed to draw the beast with the highest strength to food ratio. 

Robinson Crusoe & The Island of Endless Misery

We were hit hard in the 4th round, where all of a sudden our camp moral nosedived as we all took wounds; and on the turn after the carpenter took three hits from not having moral tokens to discard.. by the time the carpenter dies everyone was pretty low; and with camp morale at rock bottom our explorer decided to throw himself into the volcano in the center of the island.

we were 50% of the way through the time alloted for the scenario, and had completed around 30% of what we needed to.  maybe if we had remembered to use our starting items we may have survived a bit longer, but tbh i think we would have utterly failed..

Atta Ants

afterwards we settled down for a game of DIE FUCKER!   actually its called Die Fuegger (pronounced Dee Few-Gurr).  its a rather simple trading game where you play several rounds attempting to get to market some of the common items.  There are five resources that you are trying to get out: Silks, Gold, Sugar, Gems, and Red Wine.  But that would be boring, so instead we traded Cocaine, Baked beans, Heroin, Meth and Blood (Virgin blood in the case of the higher quality wines).

each action you draw a card or play a card in front of you. when there are five of any particular resource on the table (in front of everyone combined) the round ends.  The top three goods go up in price according to the number of them on the table, the remaining two go down one.  the catch being that prices range 1-9, and start on 5.  anything that goes above 9 crashes in price to 1, and nothing can go down from 1.  so you have to be careful, get to many of the most common resource in the first round and you get sod all points.. anyway, you play to 100 points, and martin was a clear winner this time round.

we played atta ants after this, although had to cut it a little short..  Its hit the tables before, but it really plays best with 3.  Four players really drags it out far too much, and you get a lot of ‘Meh!’ turns in the end game.  i won this, although the last few rounds had to be played superquick as i needed to get off.

A lovely relaxed evening of gaming all round, fabtastic stuff. But we really do need some table lamps.....

As ever the Gallery, this week supplied by Monika and one from James.

Elliot beats allcomers at Lords of Waterdeep

Castles of Burgundy with Dean, Guillame, David and... a mystery empty fourth seat ! ( Martin II at a guess )

A worried Fletch. Fletch always looks worried in photos. I think Monika must shout something in polish at him before she takes the photo. Uwaga !

Marvel Legendary

Excitement abounds with Sean getting Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards to table. Looks cool.

China ? Luke plays China again after having a sad the last time that no one appreciated it....

45 (7) people this week for those who are counting.

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 !

Just Seventeen

Just Seventeen, often referred to as J-17, was a weekly magazine aimed at teenage girls, published by Emap from October 1983. The market leader until the launch of Sugar in 1994, after which sales began to fall. In 1997, the magazine was changed to a monthly format in response to the declining circulation, but finally closed in 2004. OK, so that has nothing to do with NoBoG and is just a circuitous way of mentioning that we had record attendance at the Ribs of Beef with SEVENTEEN turning up to play games. Is this the Golden Age of NoBoG? I’m certainly not declaring such a thing. I know full well that if I did we’d be down to just two of us next week -  forced to play Kogge, Vampire: Prince of the City or Medici with a man drinking cream.  So no, I dare not suggest such a thing.

Last night was great, if a little cramped in the Wherry Room. So I took a contingent consisting of Ed and three newcomers, Owen, Grant and Mark, upstairs to play Amun-Re. Nicky, Alina, Matt and Martin played Hansa Teutonica - and then played it again for good measure. Jimmy, Tom and Dean played Castles of Burgundy. And on the end table there was the only marr on the evening as Pete, Rich, Stu, Moritz and Sam inflicted Race for the Galaxy on themselves - twice - followed by Alhambra.

Winners for the evening were: myself (tie-breaker with Ed), Alina, Matt, Jimmy. And on the table of gruelling punishments: Rich swept the board with three victories.