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.

Martha the Camel

Ah, the joys of Norwich traffic on a football day - NoBoG evening found me many miles from Norwich dahn sahf, battling to return against lane cutting coaches and roads that cannot handle the numbers. So I arrived this week without any preparation or organisation and without any clear game to play. I decided to watch the river go by from the Ribs balcony instead and enjoy not looking at the arse end of yet another football coach.

My peaceful reverie did not last long however, as a bunch of fresh faced first year UEA students turned up fashionably late looking for games to play. Given only one of them had any real kind of gaming experience, Agricola seemed positively cruel, Legendary Encounters probably... a bit too alien, so I started them off on the gentle crowd pleaser, King of Tokyo.

Which was a bit like Yahtzee I explained.

What's Yahtzee ?

An old family game from then 70's, 60's, 50's whatever.

But I'm only 19, I don't know Yahtzee.

Moments like this make you realise just how old you are. Or possibly how few people play Yahtzee anymore. I blame Angry Birds.

A couple of enjoyable games followed, Kaylee was determined to be a pacifist penguin and came second twice, or in her own words "a consistent failure". Camel Up was played next, with Kaylee again favouring odd tactics and encouraging the hopelessly behind yellow camel ( which she named Martha ) to ride forth and win. She did not however put her money where her mouth was, and refused to bet on the long term prospects of Martha.

We finished with a couple of games of Avalon Resistance, four new players in a six player game, followed by five new players in a seven player game. Uh huh. No monumental cockups, apart from a team of all good guys managing to fail a quest. Uhhh. And then Darren convinced I was a bad guy sending all the actual bad guys on a quest together. Oh dear.

Despite Darren being very keen to play Resistance with our group, he spent most of the play time stating how he hated playing Resistance with me. I took it as a compliment. Which sounds weird perhaps unless you've played Resistance. He dithered about me being Merlin. I told him I wasn't Merlin. Incredibly unlikely I was. He stabbed me on the offchance I was Merlin. I wasn't Merlin. I suspect this has not improved his liking of playing Resistance with me.

It was great to get to play Resistance again - it's been a while for me, and it was great to wind Darren up. Very enjoyable.

Elsewhere Stu rustled up some Burgundum for a group of five, followed possibly by some Love Letter. Downstairs the longest ever game of Betrayal at house on the Hill saw Lewis and his zombies eat everyones brains - including the two newcomers ( rather rude to eat newcomers brains before they learn the ropes ) and Elliot brought his Catan on steroids with the Catan Histories : Settlers of America : Trails to Rails.

Which left Sam on the last table showing off his new kickstarter package. I think at this point Sam needs to be called Kickstarter Sam as he seems intent on single handedly supporting board game kickstarter development by investing in one of every other release.

This week Sam had Xia, a game in which you get to fly your spaceship around, make money from salvage and cargo, shoot things, explore things and compete for titles and fame. Which in theory sounds like a more open ended Merchant of Venus - or if you like Elite - The Boardgame. Richard IV gave this game a big thumbs up and recommended I give it a try if I could. A pity I was so unprepared otherwise I would have had a nice picture of it.

28 this week.

Two Eds are Better than One

Two Eds are Better than One, so sayeth the idiom, however just what three Eds gets you is beyond conventional wisdom - this week we had three Eds, Med Ed, Writer Ed - finally back from the wilds of Milton Keynes - and lastly for want of a better title, Lord Ed - who loves to play Lords of Waterdeep... and win.

Pax Porfiriana - the card game of Mexican coups, revolutions and dodgy businessmen - made it back down to the Ribs, last time I saw this was in Mr Bond's excited grip, and I can remember it being quite a good play.

Pax Porfiriana with Two Eds, Hal, Rich and Pete

This lasted all evening for the entire table, Pete muttered something about hidden information - I think he was subtly complaining about it - but I believe ended up winning. Or won one game. Or something.

Lord Ed decreed that Lords of Waterdeep was played on the middle table, and proceeded to play a very close game, with Ed pipping James by two points in a close finish, whilst on the table over, another evergreen favourite at the Ribs - Betrayal at House on the Hill was setup with Luke eager to once more prowl the haunted corridors.

Upstairs Dead of Winter got another cold blast of play - this time around we had to barricade the bejesus out of the colony with 10 barricades, and have a barricade at every other location too. Mid way through the game things were looking good, decent food supply, zombie numbers in decline and no apparent betrayers. Then a single dodgy betrayal like card turned up in a fuel crisis, accusations went flying, and things started to go downhill. With a single round left to play, Sam called all the zombies to the colony, set fire to the lovingly contributed crises, trashed a whole bunch of cards to make everyone miserable, and oversaw a massive thirteen people get eaten by the rush of zombies.

Game over, betrayer Sam had won. Betrayer Bondy had kept his head down all game, and by the smallest of margins missed a joint win. Everyone else was eaten.

Although Sam technically won, the final outro of the game revealed him to be eyeing his naked self up in the mirror, stroking his well fed belly, and getting excited about all the suffering people and his mountain of saved food. Freak. I'm not sure anyone wins when you are getting off on watching yourself stroke your belly in a mirror.

There were other really nice narrative moments in the game, Mr Bond screaming the police station down, Martin poisoning people with his cooking and causing an outbreak of pus filled buboes, the wonder mom single handedly trawling a crate of food back to colony then breaking it down to make a barricade before romping through hordes of zombies.

It's a really nice game, but I think the betrayers tend to have the upper hand, timing is everything and it can be easy to tank the colony when things get a bit tough.

James brought Five Tribes to the table again, Dave won this by a tiny margin, and Small World Underground got a play for the second week running, followed by some Love Lettering.

Atta Ants induces much thinking

Whole bunch of people played Cash and Guns 2nd Ed at the end of the evening, making this the third or fourth consecutive week its seen table time.

Last week was Small World Underground, a long game of Blood Bowl Team Manager - Ewan and his Orcs tanked badly - Notre Dame, Five Tribes, Lords of Waterdeep, Ticket to Ride, Atta Ants, Cash and Guns and Frank's Zoo. We also kicked off the evening with an absolutely frantic couple of games of Space Cadets Dice Duel, which was immense fun, but after the second game everyone literally stopped for a rest for ten minutes. Crazy frenetic stuff.

29 people this week. 26 last.

Chris is ecstatic about getting his Tickets in TtR

Guns, Beer, Loot. What could possibly go wrong ?

Five Tribes - a game confusingly for only Four players

Notre Dame

Small World Underground