Trans Siberian Express

It's been a while since the last blog. I was away for a couple of weeks so I don't know exactly what happened but I hear people still managed to turn up and partake in board gaming without me so all is good in the world of IpBoG. Last week I went straight to Cult from work so didn't have my camera with me and, as has been mentioned many times before, no one wants a blog without pictures so I've saved up two weeks of excitement into one double packed blog post.

Most weeks there's a big new and exciting game to try and last week was no different. Mike had come armed with Russian Railroads, a big Euro style game allegedly about trains but seemed mostly about year 8 maths homework. It's pretty worker placementy which I know is usually a turn off for Mike so I was interested in playing one that he actually liked. Although he'd only played it online previously, taking half an hour per turn (Mike obviously took his maths homework seriously), he manged to transition the game play to the physical realm with ease and reduce his turn time accordingly. In my usual style for worker placement I panicked, stared at the vast array of choices, froze up and eventually decided on the worst possible move. I repeated this process throughout my turns but got more of a feel for the game as we progressed and, through some sort of train related miracle, ended up steaming ahead of the other players (yes, it's a train pun). Like Mike I'm not usually a huge fan of worker placement, but this one I didn't mind as much. Maybe winning helped but the next day I found myself thinking about different strategies I could apply, which can only be a good thing, right? It is a pretty long game though and we only just managed to squeeze it in before closing and as such I'm not entirely sure what other games were played. But onto the next week...

The big new game this week was Flash Point: Fire Rescue, a cooperative game about, you guessed it, fighting fires. We found out pretty early on that having a specialist in the fire engine really helped keep the fires under control. This left the other players free to mostly ignore the fires and rescue the people. The paramedic helped revive the people and get them to safety quicker. My job, it seemed, was to get the people the last few meters to safety, stealing all the glory. Functioning like a well oiled machine we were keeping well on top of everything. The thing about well oiled machines is they're kind of boring, no one enjoys being a cog. Towards the end, in an act of heroic defiance, Andy left his post on the fire engine to break down a well and save a couple of people. This was all good, the people were brought to safety, but we'd let a rampant fire get out of control near another character; the family dog! But ever a member of New York's Bravest, Andy chopped down another wall with his axe (walls are often made of wood in America for reasons I've never understood, so I assume this is vaguely possible), braved the inferno of a room, and took the dog to safety, winning the game by rescuing our seventh character.

I also played Abyss where everyone told me I'd got the rule wrong about the monster track but I insisted I hadn't. In hindsight I almost defiantly had. Felixstowe Dan played a stellar first game and won by a long shot.

Some guys played Discworld: Ankh-Morpork. There were also the common staples of IpBoG: The Resistance, Coup, Skull and No Thanks! I doubt there's a week that goes by where at least one of those games isn't played. I'm sure I've missed a bunch of other games but some weeks it's hard to keep track.

I've written quite a lot and not proof read anything so let's hope some of this makes sense! I hear it's bank holiday next week so some people might be turning up an hour or two early. Keep and eye on the Facebook group for more details.

Diceni

If you're bank holiday weekend is a little lacking in board game goodness you can always pop over the border into Norfolk for Diceni.

Japanese Time Travel

We got about fifteen people this week, including one new guy who'd met some IpBoGers at the Ipswich Tabletop Day a couple of weeks ago.

Andy had asked me to bring in Ghost Stories to play as he was a fan of co-ops, so bring it in I did. Four of us battled against the underworld to rid the village of ghosts. Half way through the game the board was almost full of ghosts and it looked like all was lost. Somehow we managed to pull through and last out until Wu Feng was revealed. Sacrificing a few qi tokens and using our yin-yang tokens we managed to pull together and defeat the incarnation. I think our luck with the curse die really helped in this game, out of the three rolls all were non-events. One day I'll feel brave enough to attempt it on the normal difficulty.

While we were playing that, Danny was teaching different groups of people to play Tragedy Looper. I think maybe three or four games of it were played.

The others played Citadels but with six players the game dragged as it sometimes does. The full game plays to eight buildings and the short game plays to seven. I think they stopped at six. Citadels can be a great game but it's probably at its greatest with a smaller number of players.

After Ghost Stories I played a game of Sushi Go. Matt won way out in front of anyone else. Others finished off the night  with a few games of Skull and Roses.

Some Sort of Title

Hi, and welcome to some sort of blog post. This week some people came and we played a bunch of games. Pretty much the same as every week.

This time we I started off playing Diskworld: Ankh-Morpork. In this game every player has a hidden role and different roles have different win conditions. You are trying to complete your condition without giving away which role you are, whilst trying to work out other players' roles and stop them from winning. With a lot of the roles, you have to satisfy the condition at the start of your turn. This proves hard when there are a bunch of other players' turns before it comes round to you again. We were about to run out of cards and come to the end of the game. In a last all or nothing attempt to satisfy my conditions I accidentally satisfied Felixstowe Dan's conditions. His turn came directly after mine and having no one between to fix my mistake I won him the game.

While this was going on others were playing The Resistance and Bang! Another group were playing Pandemic and, from what I understand, beat it on the medium toughness.

After Diskworld we played a four player game of Star Realms. Teacher Dan got himself an unbeatable combo, playing all the cards in his deck on every turn. He'd gone for the blue faction and was not only dealing about twenty damage on every turn, but also healing himself by twenty every turn too. As is usually the way with unbeatable combos, he ended up beating everyone else and won the game.

Towards the end of the night Danny was going through the rules of Tragedy Looper. The first play through will no doubt come next week.

Cthulhu's Cultists

Bank holidays are always a strange one for attendees; some of the usual suspects can't make it but conversely some people that aren't usually free on Mondays have some spare free time. All in all we managed to pull together eleven board gamers.

Tim is one such guy that is usually busy on a Monday but he came this week armed with Cthulhu Wars. It was a mammoth box, many times the size of a regular game. My understanding is that it also cost many times the price of a regular game. I don't know much about it it except that it's a mini-heavy Kickstarter affair, with some minis so big they can hardly be called miniatures.

I started off with Machi Koro, a game I own but am not overly keen on. This time I didn't mind it too much though. And Gemma won it, obtaining her first ever win at IpBoG.

Afterwards we played Biblios where Gemma and I drew for first place. This was followed by a few games of Skull. Continuing her winning streak, Gemma also won one of those games. We finished off the night with a game of Quarriors. Determined not to let her winning streak continue, I used by best dice rolling skills to win that game.

The others played Dead of Winter. Teacher Dan and Alex both won. Despite his victory, Alex pretty much hated the game.

Don't forget that this Saturday is Tabletop Day. No doubt some IpBoGers will be attending.