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Monday 27 July 2015

Six Tribes

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Five Tribes

Alex had brought the new expansion for Five Tribes that, among other things, adds an extra tribe. It also adds a bunch of extra tiles, expanding the size of the playing area, and walls that can be placed between tiles to block movement. And probably some other things.

7 WondersThis week I came armed with 7 Wonders and got straight down to it. We played just the base game as it was new to some of the people. There were five of us playing and it ended up with me and Gemma tying for first place. We played our second game with Philip and Mike joining us for the full compliment of seven players. It was Philip's first ever game but he ended up winning it. Afterwards he admitted that maybe he'd made a couple of mistakes and played some cards that maybe he shouldn't have been able to. But everyone makes mistakes and it's only a board game so who cares, right? Because everyone had fun and winning is just a thing that happens after the anti-climax of adding up the scores. The others were playing Spyfall, One Night Ultimate Werewolf and Warewolf.

Quantum
Afterwards 7 Wonders we played Spyfall ourselves. Has it already lost some of the appeal that it'd had last week? I'm not sure, maybe a little, but it's still very good. There were a few games where the spy got caught out straight away. For example we were on the train and by total luck within the first few turns the spy was asked if they were moving and they said no. It was immediately obvious they were the spy and the game was over. But that's not necessarily a problem, it creates a funny moment and we just start a new game.

Afterwards we played a quick game of Coup followed by a quick game of Yardmaster Express which I'd recently bought the Caboose expansion for, which, although doesn't add much, adds some well needed variation to the caboose cards that add bonus points for creating certain combinations of carriages, etc.

I left with Mike, Alex, Dan and Joe finishing up a game of Quantum.

Monday 20 July 2015

Shaken Not Stirred

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Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar

This week people started off with Betrayal at House on the Hill, Citadels and Nexus Ops followed by Food Fight. I think it was the first time Nexus Ops has been played at IpBoG but certainly not the first time for Citadels or Betrayal, although it's been a while since I've seen Betrayal come out. There was a time when it seemed to get played every week for a few months. I know in this case the haunt was some sort of evil twin scenario where there was no single betrayer. I guess either no one was the betrayer or everyone was.

Betrayal at House on the HillThis week I played Tzolk'in for the first time. Although Alex had the expansion with him we played just the base game. Apparently the expansion is a bit fiddly for a fist timer. It's a medium-heavy game; worker placement, resource conversion, victory points - that kinda thing. But with big plastic wheels that rotate and move your workers into different positions that allow them to take different actions. The game is all about timing when you put your workers on and take them off, and making sure there is some sort of efficient engine going on. Half way through the game there is a big scoring turn. I had a single point but everyone else was in the 20's. Either I was biding my time and playing the long game or I had no idea what I was doing. Obviously I had no idea. But in the last couple of turns I managed to build a temple that scored me a bunch of points for my tech track. I don't remember where I came but it wasn't last. Probably one from last. Dan was the winner. He'd made good use of the god track and had a good lead in the start which just snowballed towards the end.

SpyfallThe big news of the night though was that Danny had obtained a copy of Spyfall. That's pretty impressive going as it's notoriously hard to get a hold of at the moment. Danny played a few games and said that it kinda fell flat with his group. I think maybe he made the mistake of playing with the roles straight away because I played it a bit later with a group of six and it went down incredibly well. After a couple of rounds we got into the swing of things and a few rounds later three of us were talking about buying the game for ourselves. That's a pretty good ratio. It's probably my favorite party/deduction game. For me this is everything The Resistance wants to be, although I'm sure hoards of pitchfork wielding people would disagree with me. We added the roles which changed up the game quite a bit, I'm not sure for the better or worse. Without the roles the game seems to be about trying to keep your questions and answers vague enough, whereas with the roles it almost seemed to be about asking and answering questions until the spy slipped up. The roles made things harder for the spy and drew out the game a little longer. It's nice to have the options of both though, to add a bit of variety but I wouldn't say the roles are the definitive way to play, which the rule book seems to imply. I've not been so impressed by a new game in a long time and it definitely deserves all the praise it's been receiving recently.

Monday 13 July 2015

I'm The Fool

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Guilds of Cadwallon

This week I got straight into Beasty Bar, one of Alex's new purchases. It's a pretty simple little filler where you're lining animals in a row trying to get them into a bar. There are twelve different animals and each animal has a different power like moving ahead in the queue, flipping the queue, removing other animals from the queue etc. Dan assured me I'd get the hang of the powers after a few turns. I did not. But with the rule book as a reference and luck on my side somehow I managed to win.

Beasty Bar
Afterwards we played Venture, a Sid Sackson classic. It's a sort of rummy, set collection game with a company building theme. I did terribly. I'm pretty sure more of my companies got taken over than everyone else's combined. Mike got some huge scores in the last few turns and ended up winning. It was an alright game but for the amount of time it took I found it a little simple and repetitive, with too much down time. We were playing with five players though, perhaps with less players it shines a little brighter.

Danny played Tragedy Looper which seems to happen pretty much every week recently. I think he spends a lot of weeks playing the first scenario because he's playing it with new people. I've still not played it so he'll probably have to play the first scenario again at some point.

VentureAnother group played Coup, Skull and a couple of games of Mascarade. Philip won both games of Mascarade by managing to keep track of the cards while everyone else just got confused. I finished off the night with a 10 person game of Mascarade. I think it fell a little flat, 10 people is probably too many. The problem I find with Mascarade is that it's too easy to get into a run of people that know who they are, so instead of swapping their cards they use their power. The next person then does the same, followed by the next person. This is why I always include the fool when I play even if it's not in the official list for that player number. His power is to swap the cards of two other players. I find that even if you're not the fool you can almost always claim to be him and no one will challenge. Although we had the fool in play, with 10 players this still wasn't enough to avoid the issue.

And Michael managed to fit in a last minute game of Guilds of Cadwallon.

Monday 6 July 2015

Game Of The Year

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Rattus

Another two weeks, another blog. And in the past two weeks the Dice Tower Awards have come and gone. Dead of Winter picked up three awards including best game so in its honor I brought it along. I was the betrayer but never got a change to do any betraying because the game beat us too quickly. So many deaths and so little morale. It was a harsh winter.

Dead Of Winter
Demetri made his not so triumphant return to IpBoG, where he played Citadels and was assassinated for something like five turns in a row while Alex had a run away lead.

Alex brought Rattus, which made its IpBoG debut. I played a quick Sushi Go before finishing off the night with a few games of Lost Legacy. Matt won all of them. Others played Luchador!, Fluxx and Tragedy Looper.

This week the stars finally aligned and Gemma came on a night that I'd brought Abyss so she finally got to play it again. For some reason I quite like winning at Abyss. I think Dan does too and this time he won. I scraped second place. His turn came just before mine and he kept sweeping in and recruiting the lords I'd planned on getting.

Abyss
But this was to be the end of Dan's winning streak and the start of mine. We played Blueprints next and I won by a mile. Followed by Biblios which I won by another mile. And then a couple of games of Sushi Go which I won both of.

Danny was playing his usual affair of Luchador! and Tragedy Looper. I hear rumours of people playing Pandemic although I didn't witness it myself. This week also saw Zombicide, a game that's not made it to IpBoG in around a year.

The night was finished off with a few games of The Resistance including the Hostile Intent expansion. If there's a correlation between how loud a group is being and how much fun they're having (which sounds pretty likely) then Hostile Intent must be the funnest expansion around.
 
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