Snap on Steroids

It was a pretty busy at IpBoG this week with around 22 attendees. We had about five games going on at once. I started off with Ca$h 'n Gun$ but was eliminated in the first few rounds. A couple of others were eliminated just before the end of the game and Danny claimed the victory.

After I was taken out I joined Alex and Joe who were playing Dobble. It's a speed game, a bit like snap on steroids. Each card has eight symbols and each two cards have a single symbol in common. One of my favorite classic card games is a speed game Spit, so unsurprisingly I liked Dobble quite a lot. I was sure I was doing well at it too until it came to count up the cards and I'd come last.

Next I played Splendor. I felt I was doing pretty well but Matt just beat me to fifteen points, winning him the game.

A few weeks ago Alex brought Rattus, this week he turned up with the card game version, Rattus Cartus. After bringing Black Friday last week, Mike brought another stock market game, Hab & Gut.

After Splendor I played Evo, a game about evolving dinosaurs which comes with actual dinosaurs. Well, not actual dinosaurs but small wooden ones. We ended with a double tie, two players had 39 points and two players had 26 points.

I finished off my night with Eminent Domain: Microcosm, a two player little microgame. I got my revenge against Matt for Splendor, beating him at this game.

Plenty of other games were played. An abstract called Quaridor, Citadels, Black Fleet, Ventura, a couple of games of King of Tokyo and more Dobble.

Black Monday

There were a bunch of new games at IpBoG this week including Spectre Ops although I don't think it got played. Personally I hope to get to play it myself soon. Instead Shadows Over Camelot was played, making it's IpBoG debut.

I'd brought along Ca$h 'n Gun$, my own new purchase but didn't get a change to play it either. It was played by another table however and I think they had a pretty good time with it. The rules are so simple they could read them there and then and get playing in no time.

So it turns out we've been playing Abyss wrong. When exploring the depths you have to offer the card up before being able to take it yourself. We'd been playing it so that you could take it before offering it up. This time we played  with the real correct rule. It was pretty similar but had a bit of a different feel to it. Alex won by a single point. I lost hard. Everyone else scored in the 70's and I was somewhere in the 50's.

After Abyss I played Black Friday, a reasonably serious stock market style game with strangely cartoony animal art. When Mike was explaining it I don't think anyone understood what was going on but after a couple of turns we'd gotten the hang of it for the most part. Toward the end of the game me and Alex both invested big in the yellow stock. It didn't pay off, we did terribly. Mike won by a mile.

Danny ran a game of Tragedy Looper and was the bad guy as usual. He also lost as usual. I think maybe he's just the nice kind of bad guy and lets people win so that they have a good time playing his game. I guess we'll never know. There was also a bit of Eight Minute Empire action going on along with some Lost Legacy.

The Gabbleman

I started off this week with Alex's new purchase, Article 27. It was a game I've seen before and, in fact, had bought for my sister as a present, buy never played myself. It's got some auction-ish mechanics and some negotiation but to me it felt like year 7 maths homework. Not entirely unpleasant, but like more of an equation to solve than a game. I would describe it as fine. A fine game. Dan won, so gets a gold star and a smiley face. Although it does actually come with an actual wooden gabble. So that's fun.

My second game of the night was 7 Wonders with the Babel expansion. An expansion that not only adds a communal board that affects all players, but also a whole host of symbols that no one fully understands. In some ways it makes the game more chaotic because you can't plan for what's going to happen in the future. That was Mike's complaint anyway. But in some ways it makes it less chaotic because you know how you can effect the game and so you can plan for that. I personally like to think of it as not better or worse, just different. Isn't that how all expansions should be? I came pretty much last. Afterwards we played it again, this time without the expansion. I came first. Maybe Mike is onto something after all.

On the table across from me there was more newness. The Kickstarter titan (it got over 8 million dollars of funding) Exploding Kittens. I didn't play it or even see it myself but I did hear it described in various ways ranging from "alright" to "pretty poor". I also heard Justine won.

And although not a new game by any means, but new to IpBoG, Mike brought Armorica along. As always a bunch of other games were played; Beasty Bar, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Shadow Hunters, Biblios and Spyfall.

Six 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.

This 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.

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.

Shaken Not Stirred

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.

This 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.

The 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.