Hello, Sailor!

Two weeks worth of updates this time. Last week I started off with some more Deception: Murder in Hong Kong before moving on to Welcome to the Dungeon, a little push your luck game that i did terribly at. 

As usual the night started off with Secret Hitler. Others were playing Betrayal at House on the Hill, Ca$h 'n Gun$, Dominion, Pit and Timelines.

I ended the night with Container a game about producing, shipping and selling goods. At its core it's a bidding game. Goods are worth a different amounts to different people and you want to end up with the goods that are the most valuable to you. The twist is that the type of good you have the most of at the end of the game doesn't score anything. I got an early lead and somehow managed to keep it right up until the end.

In the second week so many games made their IpBoG debut. King's Forge, Tsuro and Las Vegas along with my new acquisition, Madame Ching. This was a bargain from the recent bunch of liquidated stock to be picked up by The Works. It's a pretty light little game when it comes down to it and there aren't that many choices to make. I didn't mind it thought and Dan seemed to enjoy it quite a bit. We both drew for first place with Dan beating me on the tie breaker.

There were some IpBoG classics too. I played Chinatown and For Sale and I saw others playing Tragedy Looper and Citadels.

Wacky Races

I'm not sure how many people we got this week. Over twenty, at least. Maybe twenty two or twenty three. I'm out of the country for the next few weeks which means no blog updates but rest assured, no blog updates doesn't mean no IpBog, it will still be going ahead as usual.

As usual IpBoG was a mixture of new and old games. The new being Ys and Steampunk Rally. I played the latter. A simulations drafting, race kind of game where everyone takes the role of a historical scientist and is building wacky races style vehicles, trying to beat their opponents to the finish line. Although the box said it would take under and hour it ended up taking us over two. Dan steamed ahead to take the lead and won this game.

Steven had brought along the classic deck builder Dominion but not just the base game, it looked like he had almost every expansion for it too in some sort of custom wooden box. A bunch of regular games were of course also played like Zany Penguins (okay, maybe not regular, but not it's first appearance), Falling, Arctic Scavengers, Timelines and Citadels.

There's Cardboard in Them Thar Hills

Back up to 22 people again this week. So close to breaking our attendance record! Maybe February is the month it'll happen. Only time will tell.

Everyone loves a bargain, right? And everyone loves a board game. So everyone must love a board game bargain. I managed to pick up a game with a tenner off because of a dented box. I'm living the actual dream! As hinted at by the title of this blog post the game was Gold West, a lovely little euro game. It's as if Stefan Feld made Kingdom Builder. It was touch and go towards the end of the game and I thought Johnny was going to come first but I managed to take pole position.

It seem like, although we had a lot of people, only a few of them brought games this week. One group played pretty much entirely fillers. Rattus Cartus though which I would say it almost out of filler territory. They started with Timeline and went on to play Patronize, Sushi Go and Eight Minute Empire. Afterwards I joined them for Biblios (Dan won, I was the only player to get no points at all) and Flip City (Matt won).

Danny recently acquired Mafia de Cuba which made its IpBoG debut this week. I also saw him playing Chinatown which is no surprise, he plays it almost every week. It must be close to hitting the top spot of most played game at IpBoG. Although the top two are currently Coup and Skull, both of which Phillip played today.

I saw a group playing Dixit followed by the Dixit-like Mysterium and another group playing Spy Fall. I'm sure I must have missed a couple of games but there were so many it was extra hard to keep track this week.

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!