All the Spies!

Another two weeks since the last blog but this time I have an excuse, I couldn't make it last week :(. So this update is probably going to be pretty short and sweet.

There were a couple of exciting new games this week. One was Codenames Pictures, the new version of Codenames that uses pictures instead of words. And proving that it can still hold it's own the original Codenames was being played on another table at the same time.

Alex had brought along My Village, another title in the Village line of games. But this one has dice! That's all I really know about it. Mathew also brought along Dragon's Gold which, although not a new game, made it's IpBoG debut.

I played Mai-Star. Justine won with something like 30 points and most people scoring negative points. Afterwards I played Gold West. I came last. I never seem to do well at that game. A bunch of other games were also played including Pandemic, Splendor and a bunch that I didn't see.

All The Tabletop Games

Twenty people through the doors this week, a bit down from last week but I'll hold in the tears, maybe we'll get a few more next week and we'll beat our record.

Here at Ipswich Board Gamers, although our name may imply it, we don't just play board games, we play all the tabletop games. In fact I spent the entirety of this week playing card games. The jokes on me because I bloomin' love a card game. I started with Nyet!, a twist on classic trick taking games. Like Bridge there is a team element. And  the  twist is before every tick you collaboratively decide on the rules of the round (i.e. colours of trumps, who is the starting player, etc.). I did terrible and came last with Dan stealing first place from Alex.

On to my second card game and we played Rattus Cartus, a card game that, although set in the same theme as Rattus, is nothing like it's namesake. At the end of the game, if you have more rats than nuns you're disqualified. The nuns are semi-secret and Alex ended up with too many rats. It was a pretty good card game though, I enjoyed it. But I would say that, I won.

My last card game was Mai-Star. We had to cut it short after two rounds instead of three but again I was doing terribly. Alex made up for his disqualification in the last game by winning this one. So although I like card game, maybe it turns out I'm not very good at them.

After playing Chinatown last week Mike brought along Genoa (which used to be called Traders of Genoa), another negotiation style game but by his own admission probably not as good. Being Mike's game it's of course more of a classic euro. Although I couldn't see a score track and apparently there's no resource conversion so I'm not sure it counts. I think they had to cut the game a bit short because they still had a while to go when I left.

Forbidden Island was played, the group lost. Kingdom Builder was played, Matt won. Codenames was played, everyone had fun. Timeline made it's IpBoG debut. I also saw people playing Star Realms,  Hey That's My Fish! and Bang!

The Thomas Wolsey

Last week I turned up to Cult to find a Gospel band playing. Cult were kind enough to reserve some tables for us but it was too noisy for board gaming so we opted to go somewhere else. We tried Isaacs but it was pretty busy that night so ventured on to The Thomas Wolsey. Again, it was pretty busy but we didn't want to turn the night into an impromptu pub crawl so we made do and settled there for the night.

I didn't stay for too long that night but I did manage to fit in a game of the United Kingdom version of Ticket To Ride. I was just ahead on the score track when the game ended and there were just the tickets to score. We revealed the tickets and  I was feeling reasonably confident. I had not only completed all my tickets but also completed more tickets than anyone else. However my confidence was misplaced as I came in last. The others played Cosmic Encounter and I'm pretty sure some other games were played in my absence.

This week we were back at Cult and things were back to normal. We started off with a couple of games of Red7 and then launched into a game of The Bloody Inn while the others played Codenames. We played the longer version of The Bloody Inn and I got my highest ever score. I think this proves that Priest is an overpowered card. It's probably being removed from my copy of the game from now on.

Afterwards we played Mai-Star, a small card game by Seiji Kanai of Love Letter fame. This was not only the first time Alex had played it at the club but also the first time he had ever played it. The game is played over three rounds. In the first round I did pretty badly. In the second round I took a big risk on scoring one of the high value cards and failed. I was in last place. For the third round I chose to take an even bigger risk, trying to play the highest scoring card in the game. It was going to be all or nothing for me. Somehow I managed to pull it off and a smile even crept across my little face. I think the scores were something like 18, 19, 20 and 45. A pretty crazy card.

We finished off with a game and a half of Pandemic: The Cure which is pretty much Pandemic: The Dice Game. The first game didn't go too well. Not only in the sense that we did badly and lost easily but also in the sense that Alex didn't like the game. I feel how well you do on the game is dictated a lot by the characters you use so we cheated a little, hand picked our characters and tried again. We fared better this time but Cult was closing so we had to abandon mid-game.

Mike brought along the Reiner Knizia classic Samurai which made its IpBoG debut and Danny ran a game of Chinatown and I think I caught a game of Quaridor being played.