Yo Ho Ho And A Bottle Of Rum

I turned up a bit late to Cult this week to find everyone mid-game. People were playing Seasons, Magic: The gathering, Splendor and, of course, Secret Hitler.

After a bit of a wait I managed to join the group that was finishing up Slendor. I played Sea Of Clouds and Paperback, both making their IpBoG debut.

Sea Of Clouds is a flying pirate themed game. It makes use of the Winston Drafting mechanism created by Richard Garfield for Magic: The Gathering combined with a  bit of set collection and a bit of push your luck. It has a kind of a 7 Wonder feel about it. It's pretty light but pretty fun and plays in under and hour.

Paperback is a deck builder where the cards have letters on them. The aim of the game is to spell words with the cards in your hand. generally more letters will give you more money to spend however some of the cards give you points for positioning or allow you to draw extra cards. There are also a couple end game goals and I managed to score both of them, just seeking into the lead. It's a pretty interesting take on deck building but with four people it seemed to drag, taking a couple of hours. Not the quick half an hour games I'm often used to with Dominion.

A bunch of other games were being played that I didn't get a chance to see but I'm pretty sure I spotted Mexica at some point.

While I Was Away

I've been away for three whole weeks so no pictures but here are some reports of what's been played in my absence.

Week 1

Tim:

I'll start. Quite a few of us arrived early so a nine player Secret Hitler game to start. Gloriously unembarrassed about identifying Nazis in a public space. Hitler was identified and stopped at the last possible moment. Then four player Celestia. New game I picked up. For a simple and pretty game its quite tense and tactical. Lot more fun than I expected. We felt like poker players.

Sacha:

Secret Hitler - as mentioned. For Sale, Pandemic, Quarriors, Chosŏn,Sheriff of Nottingham, Star Realms of course. Debuts from Spartacus and Imperial. Imperial we didn't completely finish but will try again another day. In other news, blog stylee, the Porter was off.

Week 2

Sacha:

Tottenham played Chelsea and wished they hadn't, Phillip kindly taught me star realms and now i can kick y'all's asses at that (yeah right!), played Mexica with Dan, Mike and Alex and drank too much Shiraz. Bar closed early due to bank holiday hours. 

Nathan:

Mike, Matt, Alex, Juliet and I played Dungeons and Dragons the board game, and Mafia de Cuba with Rebecca, Will and Danny.

Johnny:

Me, Sabrina, Danny, Rebecca and James played Pandemic (and lost, badly). Then Rebecca busted out an intricate little Korean steampunk deckbuilder called Chosŏn, and the Asian dream team (Danny and Sabrina) won that one. We played Danny's new Hong Kong CSI game Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, where Danny was the Forensic Scientist who steered the rest of the detectives into successfully determining that I was the murderer, and that I done it using tea leaves so I could steal the victim's scarf.

Week 3

Phillip:

Dan, Alex, Joe and I played castles of burgundy, other than that I saw Codenames and secret Hitler.

Nathan:

Mike, Myself, Jonny, Matt, Callum, Elliot and Rebecca played Coup, & when joined by Matt, James, Danny and Alex we played Secret Hitler. I believe Danny played Deception: Murder in Hong Kong.

Thanks to Sacha, Tim, Nathan, Johnny and Phillip for helping out. Back to the regular style updates from next week.

First Things First

So last week I was in London for work and I went straight to Cult as soon as I got back into Ipswich. This meant no camera and, as has been established many times before, no camera means no blog. So this week there will be only a week's worth of pictures but two week's worth of words. But don't expect twice the amount of words. Words are hard.

The first week first! Alex ran a six player game of Mission Red Planet. I don't really know what happened but I imagine it was pretty chaotic. Afterwards he ran a six player game of Shadow Hunters. Again, no idea what happened.

I finally got round to playing Mexica. It was a game of bridge stealing. Dan said that it's had a different feel every time he's played it. Philip won.

Afterwards we played Biblios which I won by beating Philip twice on ties, taking the dice. I felt a bit mean because he ended up with no dice and dice are points. But I didn't feel that mean because, of course, it's just a game and therefore doesn't matter at all.

The second week! I brought along Kingdom Builder. Kingdom Builder has three randomly assigned ways of scoring. After we'd scored the second I was way ahead of everyone but I'd neglected the third. Everyone caught up and Jill took the lead. Afterwards we played For Sale and I managed to win that one.

Tim brought along Rum and Bones. He won it in some kind of Frostgrave tournament which is probably some kind of war game or something. I hear Tim does that kind of thing on the side. And I guess he's okay at it because he got some kind of prize. Anyway, I didn't get to play the game but from what I understand it's mostly a two player game but you can play it as two teams of two which is what happened. And although it works, the guys said it's mostly like a two player game.

Alex had brought along a new game called Patronize. It's a new one by AGE set in the world of Love Letter. And from the picture I took it looks as if it has cubes and cards. That's all I know about it. Alex's table also played For Sale.

After this the few stragglers that were left over finished the night with Codenames. My team did terribly. Phillip claims we didn't win a single round. I think we may have won one. But yeah, we did pretty terribly.

Oh, also someone brought Pop-Up Pirate. That someone was Danny.

Board Games

Board games! You want 'em? We've got 'em. You want to play 'em? Well, come along on Monday night and then you can play them too! Right, enough question and exclamation marks and on with the blog.

Most weeks there's a board game debut and this week was no different, Race For The Galaxy made its IpBoG debut. Tim said he owned the game but had never figured out how to play it. The rule book can be a bit daunting so I offered to teach it to him. It's quite quick once you get the hang of it so we played a couple of games.

After playing Mexica last week Dan rushed out and bought himself a copy and brought that along to play this week. Now there are even less copies of this rare version of the game in the UK, with well over 1% of them belonging to IpBoG members. That seemed a lot more impressive in my head before I wrote it down. 

After that Dan played Mission Red Planet which he won and I played The Bloody Inn which I won. Another table played Eight Minute Empire: Legends, Love Letter and Citadels.

Towards the end of the night I thought I'd give Codenames another try. I can see its potential but we seem to have problems finding links between words. No one wants to give a clue for a single word but that seems to be what happens a lot of the time. Basically it seems a little hit or miss, if you can find a good link it's a fun game, if you can't then it's very lackluster. Maybe we're just no good at it.

MCM Haul

Danny returned from MCM London this week with a bunch of new games. Eight Minute Empire, Time Stories and  Codenames. I don't think Time Stories got a play but Eight Minute Empire certainly did.

Ever since GenCon this year people have been going crazy about Codenames. To me it sounded kinda like an average word association game. But people had been saying that's exactly how they felt until they played it. So I played it. It played exactly how I expected, an average word association game. I ditched out after a single round but others kept on playing. I'll probably give it another go at some point, I can't make a real judgement at this point. I still think Spyfall is the king of party games. Especially spy related party games.

Alex finally got to play Takenoko but Gemma beat us all by miles. I played The Bloody Inn and No Thanks along with a couple of games of For Sale.

Mike came armed with Mexica, a reprint of a classic Kramer and Kiesling game. One of Mike's friend has started a company reprinting classic Euro games and this is their first release. To be honest, they've pretty much nailed it. It looks amazing and the components are second to none. It's a pretty rare pressing though with something like only 144 copies being brought to the UK. Apparently there's a lot of screwing people over in the game. Dan must be ruining some friendships because he won, beating Phillip by a single point.

I also saw games of Keyflower, One Night Revolution and Seven Dragons being played.