Card Drafting Heaven

"If you find yourself alone, riding in the green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium, and you're already dead!" - Maximus Decimus Meridius from his cavalry warm up speech.

This week Dean brought along the new and swanky card drafting, pool building game Elysium to NoBoG with its lovely art and Greek mythology theme. There is some fluff and nonsense about you competing with other demi gods to compose the greatest feat of narcissism by collecting artefacts, heroes and composing legends about yourself all in a bid to impress Zeus and have him pick you, X Factor style BC ( oh the horror ), but what it boils down to is collecting sets of things to score more victory points than your neighbour. And yeah. They all have Greek mythological things going on. Imagine Canasta, or some variant of Gin Rummy, but instead of the Ace of Hearts you have Persephone, 3 of Hades.

Elysium - pic courtesy of BGG

Elysium is pretty much what we've seen before from such games - every round a pool of cards is placed in a central area for everyone to draft from. There is no real purchasing going on of the cards at this point - everyone has an opportunity to draft four things in turn, the only constraint being whether you have the right colour selection left to take an available card ( which by and large you always will have ). A small twist on the typical drafting shenanigans at this point sees your card pool split in two - those that are active and possibly earning you capabilities and gold, and those that are inactive and that score you end game points ( for sets of things and special VP multipliers ). Timing when you push an active card into a scoring card is a little of what the game is about - you get limited opportunities to do so, and every card you push down costs an amount of gold, so getting your ducks in a row of how many cards you want to push down, covering the costs, and getting enough actions to do it is the order of the day - not that it is particularly taxing to do so, this is not a game that's going to beat you over the head.

The game offers a mild point salad in how to approach things, there are bonuses for being first or the best in particular category, and you can also engine up into raw points early game, or go for the long game and invest in sticking stuff into your scoring area.

There are limited opportunities to dick with other players ( Poseidons cards are all about the dicking) but by and large the gameplay is not terribly cut throat, something like say Core Worlds is a much more explicit fight and race for crucial point scoring opportunities. Elysium is way more laid back, build your own area up, graze from the deck pool. It's also not a heavy synergy lead game like say Imperial Settlers where that drafter is all about the ramping up of interaction - you will be turning cards into inactive point scorers throughout the game which keeps the interaction and complexity rate low ( imagine if at the end of every round of Imperial Settlers you widowed cards into an end game score pile where they no longer took part in the game - and you only scored end game points from that pile, not your open tableau ).

Elysium, pic courtesy of BGG

All in all the game is a nice example of its genre, lovely theme, nice artwork, good production and is a cool addition to a collection if you have a need to scratch a card drafting itch and don't already have something like Abyss or Core Worlds ( unless you are Dean who seems to collect *ALL* the card drafting games ), but ultimately doesn't really bring anything new or innovative to table and is something of a Me Too game.

For my money, Elysium would probably edge out all the other card drafters - it's a bit more relaxed, simpler, quicker, streamlined and open to newbies doing well, as opposed to experienced players slicing and dicing in Core Worlds, and on the whole I probably prefer the Greek theme to anything else - even sci fi. Gasp. Blasphemy. Then again, I have two mutts and their names are Ares and Athena. And I dig the Iliad and the Odyssey. And I can fan girl when I know the stories of the characters I am picking up. So. You know. Bias. YMMV and should arguably pick Core Worlds instead ( Imperial Settlers is different enough here that imo, they are just enough of a different game to stand apart ).

Martin won this by possibly a single point - Richard IV got the end turn order over me and stopped my glorious victory. The points were very close all told, everyone was within a point or two of everyone else. Dean, expert and shoe in for the win came last. Surprise !

On Her Majesty's Service

We also busted out a game of On Her Majestys Service earlier which was all round pretty funny, and incredibly back stabby. I went from a single turn away from victory all the way down to last place, Martin, stole the single turn away from victory spot away from me, before I managed to stab him a few times, leaving Dean in the oh so close to winning position before Rich IV came from nowhere and pipped the win. Ridiculous. Funny. High points include Dean exclaiming that I had dicked him twice in one turn, and Martin's face when it went from the smug, I have won next turn it's all downhill to the backstabbed, shit, now I can't win. Priceless. The game has enough going on to make you think in a turn, and enough backstabbery to make that journey sometimes painful and usually funny.

Med Ed was in the house and decided to play one of my new things Isle of Skye - which amounts to Carcassonne on steroids. But this is Carcassonne with someone taking a deeper look at the scoring, sorting out the tile placement and putting in a better way of interacting with players. In short. It's a whole lot better. In fact. If this game doesn't at least get nominated for an award I would be surprised - it's simple yet offers a surprising degree of variation complexity on what you should do in your turn, and has a very high replayability factor.

The game is played over the course of 5 or so rounds ( depending on player count ), with each game having different scoring things at different rounds, meaning no two games are ever the same ( there are some 20 different scoring items, and only 4 per game are ever selected ).

Isle of Skye

The game itself revolves around your placing tiles to create your own little Isle of Skye fiefdom, with fields, water, mountains, roads and the usual malarkey giving you a modular landscape to piece together, on the face of it like Carcassonne if you had your own private board.

But here's a nice twist. At the start of a round everyone gets to pull three tiles in secret from the tile pool. You then have to decide which of the three you will discard, and for the other two, how much money you will place on them. Once everyone is finished, all tiles are revealed and then in player order you can buy a tile from anyone for the amount of gold they have placed on the tile. Purchased tiles are then added to your pool for you to place, whilst the seller gets your gold, and the gold they placed on their tile back. Unpurchased tiles have the gold removed and go into your placement pool.

Isle of Skye, closer shot of the tiles

This means that on tile pick up there are plenty of things to consider here - where can I place these tiles that gives me good scoring, either now, soon, or later. What state are other players boards in, and can others use these tiles and potentially purchase them away from me. How much money do I have to potentially make some tiles very expensive for others to buy and lessen their attraction. Do I save my money for future in case something really good comes along that I want to keep or purchase.

And on reveal that set of choices multiplies. Who has a great tile for me. Who would really like tile X. Can I afford it. Is it worth it. Yada.

Although simple in principle, the puzzle of where to place, what to buy and what to guard is surprisingly deep, and I suspect this game would be a trough fest of Analysis Paralysis in the wrong hands.

On the whole a fantastic light tile laying game, scratching the itch of building your own little kingdom, enormous replayability in scoring and timing options, and a whole bunch of player interaction with the open tile buying. Great game, well worth having a go of.

Trains : Rising Sun

Elsewhere Tim brought along Trains Rising Sun, which is the second game in the Trains series, which for those that don't know is Dominion with a board and themed solely around ... trains. I very much like Trains, and whisper it, I think it's superior to Dominion, albeit Dominion scores heavily on the breadth of available options making it supremely replayable. Trains Rising Sun is a welcome addition to the line to start giving the whole thing more breadth in what you can do. Either play it as a standalone, or mix it up with the original Trains to expand the number of options available ( just like you get with each Dominion set... ). Davey reported that although Tim was excited about having the rare opportunity to bring something a little heavier this week, he was less excited at getting beaten into last place. Oh dear. Stupid game anyway ! Maybe this is the real reason Tim never brings it.

We also had Lewis introducing new people to Smash Up and beating them all with his... Steampunk Cats, followed by Monty Python Fluxx that saw only Lewis brave enough to adopt silly accents and other ostentatious diplays of ridiculousness. Although to be fair, in Lewis' case that's normal behaviour, where silly Bane accents come as part and parcel of Batman Love Letter, so he has an unfair advantage.

Multiple simultaneous games of Dead of Winter were on the front tables with a whole bunch of new people. Not sure if this is a new trend of the front tables to have multiple copies of the same game going on.

Pete had a Petetastic evening with two games he really likes - Steam followed by Hansa Teutonica. He mentioned getting an early 5 actions in Hansa, so I would presume the game went very downhill for everyone else from that point on.

James and Torres

Old school Torres was busted out, I think James won this by a single point, and then they went on to play James' prototype Robot Robot... which if we aren't playing at least one prototype every week, then we have failed. Perhaps everyone should clump together into a co-op publishing house and raise a new game company from the ground.

The university season has restarted, so, as such, we had a spread of Uni people back with us, including Luke who seems to have had an argument with the barber over the summer and lost his shoulder length hair. He brought Betrayal at House on the Hill back to table, along with some other social crowd pleasing goodness.

Firefly also made a visit - I think its first visit to NoBoG, but slacker that I am, I have no idea how that went down, or indeed much of anything else that went on in the Tuna.

And there were some ridiculous Speed Avalon Resistance games which unsurprisingly was a crushing win twice for the bad guys.

I also failed to get decent pretty pictures of what was going on this week. The camera died. What can you do. Thanks to Tim for a couple of his snaps.

In other sad news the new red gaming cloth has also died. After suffering from the great Eastern Sea Coke spill a few weeks ago, its tangle with the washing machine caused it to shrink to a fifth of its size and declare it was done with being a gaming table cloth and instead had focused on embarking on a new career as a rather fluffy bath towel instead.

56 this week for the count, just one off the record 57.

Quantum Flux

Quantum theory states that you can never know a thing for certain until you observe it - and once observed you've changed it forever. In practical terms this sounds like utter bollocks. But without the boring details the science is sound ( kind of ).

That leads you onto the hilarity of Schrödinger and his cat. Schrödinger also thought the whole quantum state thing was bollocks too, and came up with a thought experiment where a cat in a box with some radioactive triggered poison could be both alive and dead simultaneously until you open the box and observe it to show how absurd it all was. It turns out however that the joke was on him as Schrödinger's cat is now probably the most famous quantum example in popular circulation.

At this point you're probably scratching your head wondering why you're reading a physics journal when you came here to read about the goings on of this weeks NoBoG.

Ah ha !

Counting heads at NoBoG is odd. I can do a rough count up of heads before we kick off and come up with numbers like 36, or 42 and think ah, a quieter week. After the games are sorted, everyone is seated and beginning to battle with their cubes, dice or accusations, I count up again and get... 57.

How does that work ? I blame quantum theory. NoBoG is in a state of quantum flux and it's only when everyone is seated does the superstate collapse.

You see. That quantum waffle was relevant.

*cough*

This week for the fourth week running we had a record turnout, with an epic 57 people which included a whole slew of new people. Truly at this rate half the population of Norwich will have turned up to NoBoG at least once. The council will have to start putting us on the tourist map. There's the castle. There's the cathedral. And there's NoBoG.

Alchemists. Alina seems to be having a brain meltdown.

We welcomed back Matt and Alina who haven't been down to NoBoG in quite some time - and they got stuck in with the excellent Alchemists with its potion deduction malarkey and its smart phone interactivity. Like everyone they had a minor grumble about the dingy lighting as the evening wore on. The lower level of the Tuna has lighting that is "ambient". Good for snuggling, drinking yourself into a daze, making out, but not so great for reading tiny text on dubiously coloured boards. Adequate lighting is to be found on any of the mezzanine floors of the Tuna.

Alongside Alchemists, Descent 2 was brought to table - and one thing I love about the two long

Descent 2. Beer expansion not part of the game.

tables at the Tuna is that you get to observe close up two games at once - it's really quite a cool thing if you have some downtime you can look at what they're doing next to you. After much gaming was done, some of the groups collapsed and merged to play a very raucous game of Avalon Resistance with a triumphant Sam ( IV ? ) bellowing out he was the king and you would all follow his lead or greatness or something. I think that probably meant he had duped everyone as an evil doer.

Lewis cracked out the crowd pleasing King of Tokyo and hoovered up some newcomers plus some old hands - Sam admitted he had never played it, despite being one of our solid veterans. Sam and Lewis played nicely with the newcomers, Davey on

King of Tokyo ! Give us a wave Davey.

the other hand was having none of it, and destroyed the newbies because it just happened that way. I believe Lewis might have ended up winning this. They played Other Stuff afterwards, including Love Letter batman which descended into nothing but Bane impressions. I successfully guessed Lewis was Bane when he looked at his card and started doing another Bane impression. Helpful.

Darren brought along the much subscribed Marco Polo - this seems to have generated a fair level of interest and has a line of people wanting to play. It does look like a fun Euro, so I can see why - I want a play of this at some point too. Not sure who won that.

Marco... Polo ! Looking spiffy.

Pete had a very full game of Steam which was lovely in the summer sun, but as the light faded the board become a dingy soup of similar colours. One can only imagine that by the time Autumn rolls around we will probably need to do Something about getting some better lighting in. It's not terrible, and indeed is on par with the upstairs dinge of The Ribs, but, it would be a heap better with some good light. Portable, unobtrusive, rechargeable lights that last 5 hours are what is required.

Scoville, Ewan takes some newcomers through the game

Round the corner, Scoville and Caverna hit the wood, with rather oddly the beginner variant of Caverna getting a play - probably quite serendipitous as all at the table had either a single play, or no plays at all of that beast of dwarven farming. Ewan also got to take some new gamers through Scoville - whilst Scoville isn't anything like heavy euro territory, the game is challenging enough, particularly for new gamers, that it took them a good playthrough to get the gist of what the hell was going on.

Round t'other corner we had Classic Corner with Alhambra busting out alongside Settlers of Catan for some real old school but modern gaming. Elliott was pleased to note a win at Alhambra, apparently his first win in over a year at NoBoG. Competition

Alhambra, a lovely classic.

man. It's harsh at NoBoG. Don't let the laid back, easy going, non competitive friendly players fool you, the standard of play can be brutal. Also. RNG - random number generator. The more players there are, the less RNG shines upon you alone.

I had a couple of rounds of Dark Moon which was splendiferous, not as harsh as the other week, but still ended in some wins for the infected - I have yet to see the uninfected win this. The lovely Mr Bond was back with us this week and decided to get in on the Dark Moon action.

At some point during the first game I was rather rudely thrown into quarantine as infected despite not having done - much - wrong. At least not observably. No one liked me stealing a dice from good guy Bondy however. I explained it was a good move. They weren't having it. Jacob and Bondy voted me into quarantine. Martin abstained, but only because he didn't have the right dice to also send me into quarantine. ( I was indeed infected, but, bah. My logic was sound. )

Dark Moon. Best table in the house. Martin and Jacob
sitting on some damn comfy armchairs.

We then got to play Bring out Yer Dead and Get Bit, although I bailed out of Get Bit at the last minute.

I'll also let you into a secret here - we used the new table for Dark Moon, and without a doubt, on the upper floor, with good lighting, acres of space, swish seating, and a wonderful breeze coming through the nearby door... it was the best table in the house. But I didn't tell you that. It's a secret.

Lastly we have James who took some newcomers in hand to play some Robinson Crusoe and wrote up some speaky words for it with a submission ( keep those submissions coming people ! ). Settle back with some snacks and let James paint you a picture...

Whilst i had myself down on the marco polo list this week (with our trial, sign up to things) i realised i was essentially the 5th person subscribing to a 4 player game, so expected to be a reserve of sorts. Glee then when Pete said he was playing something else and i went down as a player.  Glee then turned to, well, more glee as it became apparent that three other people actually wanted to play Robinson Crusoe! And as this rarely happens i ditched MP (which i still really want to play btw..) and set up Crusoe with three new members (i think all three were new anyway).  Now, as people will attest to i am utterly rubbish with peoples’ names and forget them about 2mins after i have been told.  so i shall go with ‘carpenter’, ‘chef’ and ‘explorer’ after the roles they were dealt in Crusoe.  i, being the only experienced crusoe player, took the role of soldier.

Robinson Crusoe

For those of you that don't know Crusoe, it is a co-op game with six different scenarios (and a number of fan created ones online). The general gist of the game is survival on an island that seems intent on killing you, starving you, battering you with terrible weather..  I assured the group that NEARLY everything that the game would throw at us would be negative, but there are a few nice things that might happen along the way. 

Anyway, at the start of each round some event happens; as far as i know, every single one hates you. for our scenario (#1, the easiest) there are 12 cards. as its the easiest scenario, where the only aim (other than staying alive) is escaping the island by building a big pile of wood and setting it on fire, half the cards are toned down a little bit. in other scenarios the cards hate you even more, and in addition to stuff like reducing moral, food or making the weather worse, things like heavy fog makes it harder to do anything.

after the rounds first attempt to kill you, we all decide on who’s doing what for the day. everyone has two actions (morning and afternoon) that they can spread around the various actions.  you can go hunting, try to build something (good luck having the right materials though), you can gather food or wood, or you can explore.  you can use two actions to do one thing to (generally, not always) auto succeed (except hunting), or one action to have a bash at doing it, at which point dice are rolled. needless to say, the different characters are better at certain things.

each type of action (except hunting) has its own set of three dice that TRY TO KILL YOU!.  ok, well, one of the dice is a pass/fail dice with are 5:1 success for gathering/exploring, and 4:2 for building. one of the dice tells you if you wound yourself in the process, and one tells you if you have to take a card from an appropriate deck, and guess what; they mostly try to kill you.

Anyway, things got off to a crappy start and stayed pretty crappy throughout; but that's how this game rolls.  our chef decided to go out and salt all the earth around us in the first few rounds; by the end of the game there was hardly anything left.  our explorer kept hurting herself while exploring, and our carpenter kept building stuff that didn't look safe.  but a few lucky draws in the early game meant we got some bonuses every time we explored, and those kept us alive.  combined with a lucky find of some biscuits we scraped through to a point where we had build our wood pile and just needed to survive. 

the close call of the game went to our intrepid explorer.  During the very last explore action possible she managed to get stuck away from camp for the night. Being stuck out of camp is a bad bad thing in RC, and can easily lose the game if you are not lucky.  So the weather first hit the explorer hard, forcing her to ‘discard’ three wood and three food. being out of camp of course meant she had no access to the wood and food that we were discarding to avoid the same weather effects, and she took a wound for every one she couldn't discard. Then of course everyone needs to eat during the night or take two wounds.. again, no food outside camp. 

by pure luck this left our explorer one step away from death.  unfortunately this meant the next two rounds were spent with our explorer in bed, reading a bible to recover, while the rest of us collected wood, starved at night so she could eat, and built the wood pile.

by the time a ship came by and spotted our massive bonfire, all players were exhausted; but we had survived..   that takes my win ratio for the first scenario to 7:3 (winning).  and it is by far the easiest scenario.. im pretty sure everyone enjoyed it; and it reminded me why i need to bring it along more often as it’s a pretty good game.

i will need to print out some of my own scenarios next time.. they seem to be doing quite well on BGG now..

You can go check out some of James' custom Crusoe scenarios over at bgg
https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/98763/encounter-rlyeh-playtesting
https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/98806/hms-raika-bayou-playtesting

Cthulu. With Crusoe. On an island ? What a fantastic idea. That smells like an entire campaign !

Final thought of the day. We have too many people with the same name. I know in the past we have had things like Richard IV which is rather Kingly. But tbh, I am losing track of whether someone is Sam III, Sam IV, or who knows. I think we should start assigning nicknames to people. Perhaps they can be randomly assigned as you walk through the door. Your muppet name. Jedi name. Porn star  name. Wawa Skittletits.

As ever I leave you with the gallery.

Classic Settlers, Egyptian style.

Classic Steam.

Caverna. Everyone looks worriedly at me as I tell them they are playing the beginner variant.

Viva la revolucion

Che Guevara - the Argentinian who became arguably the poster boy for the Cuban Revolution
And ironically spawned a massive capitalist enterprise of T Shirt selling.

On Tuesday revolution was in the air at the Ribs - and before everyone starts arguing about whether they're friends anymore, and what colour you're sporting - we're not talking about the business as usual election that took place in the UK this week, but rather the presence of GMT's Cuba Libre game, which pits players against and possibly at times with each other in the Cuban Revolution of the 1950's.

Cuba Libre is part of a series of games from GMT - the so called COIN series - that through a spread of different times and places, play out a balanced but asymmetrical struggle for power. Simple in execution but tricky in practice, the games are all about shuffling your cubes, eliminating your enemies cubes, grabbing cash/resources, and timing your operations all powered by a random event card system.

Cuba Libre - Viva La Casinos !

In the case of Cuba Libre the action takes place on a relatively small map depicting Cuba and engages the forces of the government, 26July ( Castro & Che ), the criminal Syndicate, and the anti communist rebels of Directorio.

Not only are the forces asymmetrical, but what you can do in a turn is also asymmetrical - although, largely if you squint at it similar - split between the Government and Everyone Else ( insurgents ) by and large ( the syndicates do get to build casinos which no one else can ).

A few simple actions that you can choose from in a turn - which the basic set amounts to moving, training new dudes or attacking enemy dudes in some form or another - is complicated by the fact that you are never quite sure who's turn it is next, or if and when you will next get something to do. There are also some special actions you can take - if you're the government you have the luxury of an air strike - maybe, assuming the US is still lending you support - or if you're the insurgents you might care to infiltrate somewhere and switch out government forces for your own dudes.

Another main staple of the game is that of the event card - which tells you who might get to have a stab at taking an action this turn as well as describing an event that can be played. If you've ever played Twilight Struggle, then you'll be right at home with the cards that have a spot of flavour text of a real world event, an optional event that a player can take, or failing that just engaging in some default actions for your own faction.

The different here between TS and COIN is that there is no concept of a hand of cards to beat your opponent to death with ( or grimace as your own hand beats you to death ), but rather a central, unpredictable game event generator.

Hal took a group of four through their paces with the game, and to his credit actually managed to finish it by closing time. COIN games have something of a repuation of playing long, albeit Cuba Libra is the simplest and quickest of the lot ( Andean Abyss, the game before Cuba Libre is slotted at a mere 6 hours play time, which can also run long... very long.. 9 hours or more long, depending on who you have at your table ). They played with the minor tweak of Easy Mode being on, speeding up the game and requiring less thunking ( which is simply the option *not* to reveal the next card that will pop up before it pops up ).

James called foul about having the living crap kicked out of him at game end, but, this is very much in the spirit of a COIN game and I think Hal and Rich IV ended up in something of a tie - although by my reckoning someone should have won, just a lesser win, as there are very specific tie breaker conditions. I can't recall if this means the historically accurate win for July26 occurred as I have forgotten who was playing what. ( Post Edit : If you look at the photo, Rich IV and Hal were the syndicate and the government respectively, so history was overturned and Cuba got to stay as a lovely corrupt Mob Resort for Rich Americans ). As the saying goes, "It matters not who won or lost, but how you caused the pain.". Something like that anyway.

This is what happens when no one sends in a report.
We have to mime what went on.

There were no reports sent in this week, so, it's all me. I was tempted to have a text less version of the blog with just pictures of board games, and various sad faces of street mimes appearing. An interpretative street art performance of the NoBlog if you will.

In celebration of FFG announcing a reprint of Mission Red Planet, I got the original version to table for a group of five and commenced a very enjoyable somewhat backstabby, somewhat evil session that saw Jason swipe the lead from my very respectable score with his ice bonus.

Tit for tat astronaut killing and femme fataling began to set a pattern, and the game saw again one supposedly innocent area of Mars become a bloodbath of treachery and far too many visitors.

Awesome game, we then followed this up with some Spyfall - the game in which a single spy tries to figure out which location everyone else is at, whilst everyone else tries to figure out who's pretending to know where they are.

Mission Red Planet - a squabble erupts over Mare Serpentis &
its lucrative hidden bonus card - which turned out to be a bluff

Ben II managed to win this at game end over the course of four rounds, the weirdest question of the evening being "So, if you had a wish what would it be ?". I'm not sure what that tells you about anything, apart from, "I'm not good at asking deductive questions".

Whilst we played Mission Red Planet, Tim took a group to play Citadels, which bares a very close resemblance to MRP in its main mechanics.

This was a group who had never experienced Citadels before - which to me is like saying, No, I've never played Settlers of Catan before, what's this wood for sheep pr0n I keep hearing about - with all ending up agreeing that it was a cool game.

Citadels with the newbie Citadel players

No idea who won.

Pete played a busy game of Steam - after I had poached a player from his table to prevent the madness of six player Steam - which left downstairs playing Lords of Vegas - with another full table, and in my opinion equally crazy at six players and Elliot and his table playing a bunch of things including the frantic  Escape - The Curse of the Temple.

There were some squeals and shouting going on as I passed Escape, plus some mad dice throwing. Which all looked to be thoroughly engaging.

Some of the other usual fillers were in attendance. Guillotine. Things. Stuff. I don't know. Here, have an artistic street performance of the fillers that were played at the Ribs this week.

Jacques mimes his interpretation of "Saboteur"

Thought for the Day : Did Che Guevara ever wear a Che Guevara T Shirt ? And could you have a Che T Shirt of Che wearing a T Shirt of Che wearing a T Shirt and thus end up with some infinite mirror malarkey T Shirtness going on ?

UFO

This is what fighting aliens looks like. Sexy. Right ?

Start the youtube vid below. It's this weeks theme tune. Once it's playing you can read on !
 

Back in the early 70's, when space hoppers were the greatest orange coloured transport device ever invented, hair was big, collars bigger and flared trousers biggest of all, if you had thoughts about defending the Earth from nefarious alien ne'er-do-wells then you might have found yourself a member of S.H.A.D.O and your go to uniform choice might look something like this

Standard S.H.A.D.O uniform.
Clearly they never suffered chilly days in S.H.A.D.O central command.

UFO fighting fashion styles have moved on fortunately - or unfortunately depending on your level of depravity - and so this week when an alien defence headquarters was setup in the Ribs of Beef, none of the defenders were wearing string vests sparing us all a horrifying sight. That there are sacrifices to be made defending the Earth goes without saying - putting up with four gamer dudes hanging out in string vests however is arguably a sacrifice too far. You'd probably be better off welcoming your new alien overlords instead.

Owein brought along the new and sexy XCOM to NoBoG challenging three fellow compatriots to keep the earth safe, the humans from panicking over the prospect of string vest wearing whilst simultaneously swatting away alien invaders. If you haven't been living under a rock for the past 20 years computer gaming wise, you will know that XCOM is a highly successful video game franchise that splits into tactical man to alien combat and a strategic level logistics management mode where you get to train people, research new tech, and react to alien ship incursions. The whole singing dancing Xenophobia train has now been ported into board game form, and whilst the man to alien tactical combat element has been lost in translation, the nail biting logistics balancing space ship intercepting bit remains.

XCOM. Don't drop your pieces on the floor. The timer waits for no one.

Truly one of the new breed of board games, XCOM integrates technology into your usual pile of cardboard and bits with a free app for use on your digital toy of choice - like for instance an iPad. The app gets to co-ordinate the alien player, effectively forming a broad programmed AI against your wiles as well as injecting a real time element into the game where you have to make decisions in a short span of time ( unless you're playing in the lame Easy mode ).

The nature of the app also allows the game to play with the timing of various phases, meaning that you can never be quite sure that A follows B follows C thus forcing your into committing resources before they were ready or correctly in place.

Because of its triple A computer game heritage the production values of the app are absolutely first class, oozing theme and atmosphere - heavily borrowing a lot of resources from its sibling games.

Did you know ?

Ananda Gupta who designed the board game Twilight Struggle also designed the reboot of the XCOM video game and brought a lot of board game sensibilities into the design mix. In ever more crazy cross pollination that video game has now crossed the divide back into the board game world.

As a co-operative game it slightly side-steps the group think tendency that some of those games can have - where a particularly strong or pushy player just orders everyone else around resulting in a solo game with a number of observers - by giving players unique roles to play that have very clear responsibilities and available actions.

Explaining the actual machinations of the game is kind of tricky - its involved and has a lot of bleed through from the computer game ( which you'll feel right at home with if you have played it ) - but basically making decisions about missions, sending squaddies out on missions, balancing resources and doing everything in a timely fashion is the order of the day. You'll need to cater to random things popping up, keeping a lid on panic - which can lose you the game -, keep your base from being destroyed - another lose event - and finally surviving long enough to actually take a shot at the aliens and win the game outright - as opposed to just surviving.

If tense random thematic games are not your thing, then XCOM is going to not be something you want to look at ( unless you like facing the derision of the gaming community by playing it in Easy mode and not having to worry about the timer at all ). If you are into your stress time based games, and or you have an XCOM background, this is a game you will definitely want to give a try out of.

The game went down very well on Tuesday, with Davey vowing to rush home and buy it as soon as he could so taken he was with its gameplay.

The intriguing looking Castles of Mad King Ludwig

Another recently release game was on offer this week - the Castles of Mad King Ludwig. This is a tile placing game that has you vying for victory points by collecting sets or synergistic placements and according to Sam who got to play it, is something of a riff on Suburbia.

Castles however is not a town builder but is a . . . castle builder. Where you get to build room by room a crazy patchwork castle ( hence the Mad King ) to try and maximise your VPs via whatever cunning strategy you cook up.

Lighter than Suburbia with less capability to synergise the game however ups complexity in a different direction with tiles that are different shapes and sizes - meaning that placement of those rooms is not quite as straight forward as Suburbias uniform hexes.

A fun looking game, Sam enjoyed it - managed to win, and noted Chloe had spent all game building a very evil looking castle with suspicious pits, mossy rooms and long spindly corridors that led nowhere.

Steam with 6. Banned by the UN as cruel and unusual punishment

Elsewhere Steam had a monster game with six players. Hal was playing mean. Apparently. And on the table over Pandemic was succumbed to with an abject failure for players, who could only end up planning their apocalypse party with 3 turns to go as it became apparent the infections were out of hand. They then finished with the less disease ridden Small World.

I believe Lauren and Andrews table played King of Tokyo - and some other lighter stuff. Not sure.

Pandemic. It's looking bad folks. Time to invest in a bunker.

Downstairs Lewis lead the ever redoubtable Lords of Waterdeep to table, complete with machine gun noises which he assured was not for once his fault. Ticket to Ride was on the table over, which left the last table with a riotous game of Archipelago.

On a crazy whim Pete decided the Archipelago should be seeded via the optional desert start, which proved to be in the end an absolute nightmare for exploration. Getting those tiles out with a land interior is much tougher going than starting with a sea tile. It certainly changed the pace of the game however, and with the expansion cards in play - and the Jail out from turn one, some of the typical dynamics of the game were subtly altered.

Dawn rises over the ill fated Archipelago.

Pete got off to a flying start whilst most of everyone else struggled to escape the hot sandy interior. Feelings of ill will circulated towards the obviously well performing Pete, and as an end game trigger threatened to activate, everyone suddenly got very jealous of their precious commodities. So much so that the colony leapt up in misery, jumping a full 21 unrest points in a single turn, whilst the singularly quiet Punk Rich who turned out to be the separatist secretly gloated that the colony would now go tits up.

An extremely funny game, much comedy with Rich IV offering Pete a pocket bird flip at one point in reply to his request for renumeration, and with Punk Rich playing a very quiet separatist, lulling everyone into being ever more selfish, the game sank in perfect Archipelago fashion. Amazing game.

The gateway game classic - Ticket to Ride

Roll for the Galaxy was squeezed into the end. We got two thirds in before calling it a day. Pete pipped me by three points. Everyone else was flailing on half scores.

Mr Bond was very excited this week. The prospect of having 40 NoBoG attendees sent him a twittering, only to have his hopes dashed when two of the would be players managed to claw their way to safety  left prematurely. It should be said this was with several of our regulars out. Breaching 40 seems like something we will be doing in 2015. Still. 38 is a record. Apparently. I've lost track. It certainly sounds a lot. The pub was pretty full with NoBoGians, and that was with a table of six and three tables of five. Heaven help us when everyone decides they just want to play four player games only. It will be woollen hats and thermal gloves all round to cope with playing games on the ice festooned river terrace.

Lastly, congratulations to Sam who is now the official Norwich Netrunner champion. This is apparently why we only see him every other week at NoBoG - he's netrunning down at Athena games in the other weeks. Personally I think he's a Norwich based mask wearing crime fighter who takes it to the streets every other Tuesday. I noticed he turned up in a spiderman themed jacket this week - clearly he got his crime fighting persona days mixed up. But yeah. If you want to believe his cover story, then he's the Norwich Netrunner champion.

Which is a card game. If you didn't know. Go look it up. Don't expect me to do everything for you ! Tsk.

Rail Rage

Another week of lovely gaming at the Ribs where 29 assorted players gathered to push abstract cubes around abstract maps and score abstract points to obtain the abstract crown of best abstract winner title. Or to put it another way. We wasted time engaging in rituals of pushing bizarre things around nonsensical maps for no gain whatsoever. Huzzah.

But then in the Nihilistic Bear view of the universe, everything is a waste of time, so, a beer and a boardgame would seem to be one of the nicer wastes of time that you can get up to. At least before that asteroid hits and wipes everyone out ( you need to follow the link to get that ).

In less abstract nihilistic terms a good deal of the meeple manipulation focused around trains, making chuffing sounds, tooting horns, delivering goods and meeting the needs of passengers, all in a very model railway enthusiast kind of way. Trains seem to be a huge draw to the makers of board games with an enormous number of titles devoted to the iron beasts in a hundred often subtle variations. Compare and contrast the number of trains games, with say, the number of games about cars on motorways. 1,000,000* titles to... 0 ? There must be something about a train that a truck just can't replace.

This must irk James greatly who hates games about trains. No idea on his opinion of trucks. He avoided the stupid train games entirely and played Lords of Vegas instead. When I grow up I want to be a Train Driver Gambling Pit Boss.

Upstairs we had a bonkers six player game of the train chuffing Steam with half a table of newbies, on a five player map. The game was a bit long for my taste with six, but was enjoyable nevertheless and gave me good opportunities to leave the table for periods to chat with everyone else in the pub. Despite not bothering to build track in 2 out of 3 end turns, I scored very competitively and only ended up being pipped at the post by a stolen good to came in third, with Pete a single point in front, and Martin a single point in front of Pete. Very close. Sam came joint last with Guillame(? I think). Stu was somewhere in the middle. Pete played almost entirely non cut throat - a nice change of pace from his usual evil Steam antics - for the benefit of the new players. Or maybe he just couldn't find good ways to stick the knife in.

Downstairs they played the classic gateway train game Ticket to Ride, with Elliot presiding over the tickets and looking to dominate his table for a third week running.

The grin of a man destined to lap the loser on the score track

Alas it was not to be, as Lewis rudely waved to the lacklustre Elliot as he lapped him on the score chart - oh the shame -, and everyone managed to beat him - some in truly extravagant style. This caused a certain amount of Rail Rage in Elliot who got blocked, stomped, kicked and failed to make good on any of his tickets. The word Rage was apparent in everyones aftermath report. Clearly trains are not Elliots thing. He should stick to managing Wizards in Waterdeep. Less stressy.

Sam brought his kickstarter space ship flying sexiness Xia again, I am not sure who won this, but I think Richard the IV died in the very first turn by crashing his ship or somesuch. Brilliant piloting skills.

Xia - Legends of a Drift System

And a future warning about getting into the interstellar exploration business with Richard. Apparently he scored a point for his demise however. It must have been a particularly entertaining death. Perhaps he was piloting the stunt ship for the plutonium rock band Disaster Area. **

Elsewhere we had Betrayal at house on the hill, where Frankenstein met his doom. I think Frankenstein has met his doom before in Betrayal. Setting the poor fella on fire doesn't seem to be a terribly difficult thing to achieve. He's just misunderstood you know. No need to set him alight because he doesn't conform to a size zero super model size. But alas. The fashion police won out again, and sent his misshapen, no dress sizes for you body into the furnace, unwelcome and unloved. But heating the house nicely. Always a silver lining.

Lords of Vegas upstairs with James played out particularly cut throat and somewhat weird, as all three strip cards had disappeared by early game - making the strip lots far less valuable - the silver casino had almost exhausted itself without being built, and tussles over control of very large single colour casinos raged everywhere. Brutal.

Glass Road - a masterclass of Euro design

Nate brought along the ever excellent Glass Road, and played with a couple of people new to it - Hal and Nicky, both of whom gave it a thumbs up. For my money Glass Road is a masterclass in Euro design and is just about one of the best Euros out there. That's not to say everyone is going to rate it top of their list 10/10 - for personal preference reasons - , but its design is sublime, elegant and I can find no fault with it at all. Personally I really like the theme and how it works too, and would put this game on a Everyone Must Play This At Least Once list, and on a gateway to 'proper' Euro board games list.

Hal won this, although when I looked he had bugger all scoring opportunities apart from a pot of points for clay. The victory point buildings were not great, but eh, I would take a guess that the winning score was around 18 - not usually high enough for a win in my experience. Scoring can be a tricky and subtle thing in Glass Road. You don't have time to faff around, and sometimes what you spend in points to get points comes out as an almost net no gain.

Die Fugger

Follow ups we had some Fluxx Monty Python, King of Siam, Die Fugger and 6 Qui Prend ( aka Sex Nymph aka Sechs Nimmt aka Category 5 ) where I went from an outstanding first round of no cows picked up in first place, to a terrible second round of 34 cows picked up to come dead last. I blame Bondy and James who were distracting me in the second round and in Mr Bonds case offering terrible advice. Thanks to Guillame who corrected my poor pronunciation of 6 Qui Prend. There's nothing like having a native speaker at the table to correct your mangled pronunciation.

King of Siam

Pete being his ever sensitive self ( he has for three weeks in a row ( ish ) during pre game banter managed to sit at the same table as Elliot and bait his game choice describing them as not a game, no choices to be made, no brains required, don't you think they just play themselves etc ), described 6 Qui Prend as a stupid (French) name, causing mild exclamation from Guillame, Sex Nymph was much better, before back tracking to Guillame and making some excuse about it not being stupid because its French but because it doesn't have some dodgy double meaning.

Pete should be on the UN council. Or possibly a foot in mouth novelty contortionist stage act.

* Figures may be slightly inaccurate.

** Disaster Area employ stunt ships to dive into the local star as part of their gig repertoire. Obviously it's generally not good to be aboard them when this happens. Unless your name is Richard the IV. Or Marvin. Arguably it's not good regardless of your name. Understandable perhaps.

Steam

For those of you who are

1. Computer game players
2. A member of Steam

( which for all I know is two people ) a NoBoG Steam group has been created which you can find right here.

Feel free to join whoever you are, and gawk at the others in the group, and who knows, maybe even play a game.

The Return of the Saboteur

Eleven this week, Moritz bringing along newcomer Tina to join myself and Pete playing Steam.

And free glasses to all ! The ever excellent Ribs of Beef were undergoing a Glass change as the NoBoGers assembled, and very generously the old set of fine offerings were made available to all comers - quite a few people went home with a nice set of beer glasses tucked into their game bags.

Onto the games. Whilst Pete showed off the capabilities of his Googly Androidy NSA phone and how amazingly it tracked his entire life ( he has his own personal data share at the friendly and obliging NSA HQ ), Sam brought forth Kemet to entertain Bondy and Rich, neither of which had sampled its tumultuous delights.

This seemed to go down well with Bondy giving it a big thumbs up as he surged from a lacklustre position mid game to take the win with an unmitigated bloodthirsty approach, optimising all forms of warfare. I think this game has the favour of all that have played it - and I still personally think it's a better, less "up its own arse" version of Game of Thrones. I love GoT - the fiction, but the board game rendition to me is far too long for what it does.

Kemet fixes the overlong bit twiddling of GoT, but otherwise keeps a lot of other things in the same ballpark. Of course GoT has the advantage of players that turn up with loving rose tinted spectacles of all the fiction going on in their heads. I suspect if the roles were reversed, and Kemet had a GoT theme ( tricky thematically given the churning death rate of armies ), and GoT had a Kemet theme, GoT would be lumped down as an average Diplomacy rehash.

The Village turned up at the other end of the room - not the M Night Shama-lama-dingdong version of dudes running scared in forests ( no spoilers ! ) - with Dean teaching Nicky, Tom and Stu how to shuffle their cubes and train up their villagers to be noteworthy citizens. A Euro with an interesting time mechanic, your family members can be sent off to undertake certain tasks, and as time ticks ever onwards mortality takes its toll and removes them from the board.

The successful dead laid to rest in the village book. Hmm.

But this isn't a bad thing, what you lose in resource gathering you gain in final VP - as your now deceased family member is either remembered in the village chronicle - earning you VP - or ends up in an unmarked grave ( no VP for you ! ).

The first to leap wholeheartedly into their graves are remembered and earn VPs, those that come after however only face anonymity, in a first come first rewarded death race. Hmm. Not sure what this game is saying.

With a bevy of approving nods and awards this game ticks the spot for Europhiles, although isn't too far removed from The Usual cube shuffling ( apart from the cool race to the death mechanic ).

Having put away his NSA approved device, its camera no longer able to secretly record the goings on in the underlair of the Ribs of Beef, Pete had a quick run through of Steam for Tina, and we all got down to shuffling our cubes on our train routes. Despite Pete getting off to a rocky start, his wily skills of deploying a game changing grey route whilst I was watching the antics of the Village paid off handsomely, and with some perfectly optimised late game timing he romped to a convincing win. Newcomer Tina put in a great performance and came in second, leaving me to third and poor Moritz who struggled with Pete at the start - but unlike Pete failed to break out at the end, brought up the rear in last.

As all games finished just about at the same time, the stage was set for perhaps the most epic game that the Ribs had ever witnessed - an eleven handed bout of Saboteur 2. Alas, Nicky, Tom and Stu departed, leaving us with a mere 8 to dig through the rock in search of gold. Some evil last minute final round role swapping on my behalf netted me joint lead with Rich at game end. Sam then played King Maker and stole a gold from Rich, leaving me out front as bestest miner/saboteur/gnome in the pub.

I staggered home with imaginary gold stuffed in my pockets, and not so imaginary beer glasses grasped in hands. Huzzah.

Preference for repeated plays?

We’ve not been very adventurous of late. Unusually for the club there has been a lot of repeat plays with a few games getting played on consecutive weeks. I always remember Tom mentioning that he’d been coming to the club for six months and had yet to play a game twice. This was back in 2007 and there certainly seemed to be a new game on the table every week. Of course there have always been old favourites; Power Grid has regularly been hauled out of someone’s bag at 7.30 on a Tuesday. It benefits from being owned by quite a few attendees so there is a good chance someone will have it. It’s one of those rare six-player games (along with Cosmic Encounter) so is the obvious choice when we have six players - usually preferable to splitting into two groups of three, as good three player games seem to be a rarity. Re-playability is boosted by the plethora of expansion maps. And finally it’s a great game – OK, so that’s rather subjective, but I can safely say that the majority of the club regard it very highly and the remaining few are willing to endure it. So, if Power Grid is the old stalwart, who are the new pretenders?

Chaos in the Old World

This game had a spate of plays at the beginning of 2010 when it was introduced by Richard Harding. It got played five times in the space of two months as Punk Rich also bought it. It’s seen a resurgence this summer as the Horned Rat expansion was released and Phil added it to his collection increasing the likelihood that it’ll be available to play (also Phil’s other games are uniformly awful or ridiculous – so it’s the only game he has that we’ll play). It perhaps shouldn’t see as much table time as it should as it absolutely needs to be played five (or four without the expansion). However, it has a nice mix of styles - the core mechanisms are clearly from the Euro mould, which are then jazzed up with kickass dice rolling, funky miniatures, and the chance to shout ”BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!”. This appeals to my taste in games as I gradually shun the ‘mechanisms for mechanisms sake’ of a lot of games out there. Punk Rich, Phil and Pete clearly feel the same and one of us will suggest it almost every week.

Steam

This has displaced Age of Steam since it came out a few years ago and although has regularly hit the table it’s seen more play over the summer months than most. The old Age of Steam split opinion and there were certain gamers that wouldn’t touch it with the proverbial bargepole. Like Power Grid it benefits from having a number of expansion maps, which keeps it fresh. Good with four or five, there is now a core group of players down the club that know how to play Steam and the game only improves with more plays. As another one of my favourites and also one of Jimmy’s there is a good chance it will make the journey to the Ribs on a regular basis.

Hansa Teutonica

This has been played on four separate evenings at the Ribs; twice in a night on a couple of occasions. This is definitely a pure Euro with a theme so wafer thin you could feed it to Mr Creosote all night long. This cube shuffler is eminently playable, with a raft of choices and a feeling that you’re not just playing the game, but actually playing your opponents, which is often lacking in this type of optimisation game. Crocker waxed lyrical about it a few weeks back. He’s the only one of us that owns it and with Luke coming to the club less frequently this could easily see more play if others decide to buy it, especially as it looks like it will scale well between three and five players.

Popularity and player numbers are obviously the biggest deciding factors with regards to which games get played on a given night and this has always been the case. Perhaps the change isn’t the games, but NoBoG itself. With the most stable group of regulars we’ve had for a long time we are now able to explore games we all know rather than teach or learn new games. One thing the three games I’ve mentioned have in common is that they all get better as players become more experienced. With strategies to explore, and blocking and countering being a big part in all three, everyone is improving at the game and everyone’s experience is getting better each time – leading to the game being requested again the following week.

Or maybe there just aren’t as many good new games coming out?