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.

I'm The Fool

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.

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.

Another 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.