Two Thousand and Seventeen

Oh wow, it has been a while since the last blog. Like a month. But in my defense Christmas and New Years meant there was a two week IpBoG hiatus.

I came along to the first IpBoG of 2017 with my new Christmas gift of Orléans, the super popular bag builder that was released all the way back in 2014. Although I don't think it was released in most places until 2015. And of course it's only just  2017 so really the game isn't as old as it sounds. In my mind it's still new and fashionable. It really is a great game even if I do say so myself. Everyone that reads this and hasn't played it really should come along and have a go on it, even if you've not been to IpBoB before. You wont be disappointed. And that's an IpBoG guarantee!

As well as Orléans I played a quick game of Bang! The Dice Game. I've always been a bit underwhelmed with Bang! so jumped at the chance to play this. My main gripe with the original is that for a game full of so much randomness it really can drag on way past it's welcome, if you'll excuse my mixed metaphor. The new version didn't disappoint and we got through a game in a timely 15 minutes or less as advertised by the box. Anyone still playing the original Bang! should burn the box (or bullet snakes case, depending on the version) and get the dice game, you wont be disappointed. And that's an IpBoG guarantee!

Other people were there of course, and other games were played. Danny whipped out Tragedy Looper for some two player action. Another table played a bunch of game includeing, but not limited to Not Alone and... okay, that's all I've got. I really need to try and take more photos to jog my memory. Next week, I'll do better. No guarentees.

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.

The Crutch of the Matter

First things first, we got 23 people this week. I'm pretty sure that's record breaking. Let's see if we can keep it up! Second things second, Mike made his triumphant return to IpBoG, albeit on crutches. Some sort of incident involving his son's scooter and a misplaced sense of youth. Probably best not to ask.

We took over a lot of tables this week, snaking our way across Cult.  One table I think spent the whole night playing the worker placement classic Stone Age which made it's IpBoG debut this week. Another table played Mysterium followed by Ca$h 'n Gun$.

Danny was back to playing the mastermind in Tragedy Looper. He lost on the last turn, still unable to claw in his first victory in that game. Afterwards another game was played where he was tutoring Johnny on how to play as the mastermind followed by a game of Betrayal at House on the Hill.

I started off the evening with Kingdom Builder. I'm pleased to say that I came first in both games beating Matt twice. He often beats me at that game and after my terrible losses last week it was nice to have some wins under my belt.

Afterwards we played The Bloody Inn. I think Matt came first in that one. We also played a couple of games of Forbidden Island. We lost the first game in the first couple of rounds but managed to beat it the second time round. We spent the rest of the night playing a few games of No Thanks!

The Felixstowe guys played a couple of games of For Sale before Mike turned up. Mike had brought with him his new acquisition Royals, a game from 2004. I was shocked, this wasn't a classic euro, but Mike assured me it was actually a reimplementation of an older game, Heads of State. After they were done with that they finished off the night with a few more games of For Sale.

The Elasund in the Room

So I have no idea what games people that went played this week. At least Bang, Lost Legacy, Codenames and, I think, The Resistance. Although almost definitely lots more.

So I finally got round to playing Tragedy Looper. I dunno if it's just me being dumb but I found the rules pretty confusing. About half way through I got the hang of it. Basically if the mastermind doesn't manage to kill someone in a loop we win. At least for the scenario we were playing.  The game is pretty much 90 percent deduction and 10 percent luck. Luck must have been on our side because we managed to deduce who the killers were and guarantee a success, moving everyone away from them. It was a strange game of confusion and cross referencing. I'd probably enjoy it more the second time now I actually get what's going on.

Afterwards I played Elasund: The First City. If my board game history is correct, when the guy that made Catan first made Catan it was a much more complicated game but the publishers made his simplify it. Elasund is kinda all the stuff that he took out. And it feels like Catan for sure. Again there's dice rolling and if a 7 comes up bad stuff happens. But instead of placing roads and buildings you're placing walls and, urm, buildings. We let Dan get a big lead and tried in vain to stop him all too late. He hit the victory condition when everyone else was about half way there. More board gaming nonsense next week!

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.

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.

Game Of The Year

Another two weeks, another blog. And in the past two weeks the Dice Tower Awards have come and gone. Dead of Winter picked up three awards including best game so in its honor I brought it along. I was the betrayer but never got a change to do any betraying because the game beat us too quickly. So many deaths and so little morale. It was a harsh winter.

Demetri made his not so triumphant return to IpBoG, where he played Citadels and was assassinated for something like five turns in a row while Alex had a run away lead.

Alex brought Rattus, which made its IpBoG debut. I played a quick Sushi Go before finishing off the night with a few games of Lost Legacy. Matt won all of them. Others played Luchador!, Fluxx and Tragedy Looper.

This week the stars finally aligned and Gemma came on a night that I'd brought Abyss so she finally got to play it again. For some reason I quite like winning at Abyss. I think Dan does too and this time he won. I scraped second place. His turn came just before mine and he kept sweeping in and recruiting the lords I'd planned on getting.

But this was to be the end of Dan's winning streak and the start of mine. We played Blueprints next and I won by a mile. Followed by Biblios which I won by another mile. And then a couple of games of Sushi Go which I won both of.

Danny was playing his usual affair of Luchador! and Tragedy Looper. I hear rumours of people playing Pandemic although I didn't witness it myself. This week also saw Zombicide, a game that's not made it to IpBoG in around a year.

The night was finished off with a few games of The Resistance including the Hostile Intent expansion. If there's a correlation between how loud a group is being and how much fun they're having (which sounds pretty likely) then Hostile Intent must be the funnest expansion around.

All Hail The Kingmaker

Two weeks since the last blog, this means you'll be getting a double dose of IpBoG goodness this week! The weekend before last was the UK Games Expo and a few IpBoG regulars attended. Johnny and Danny had both picked up new games while they were there, both of which I think are by English designers.

Johnny had picked up Frankenstein's Bodies and Danny had got Luchador! Mexican Wrestling Dice. I played Luchador while the others played Frankenstein's Bodies. Luchador comes with the option of laying a flat two dimensional wrestling ring or a full IMAX 3D ring. Naturally we donned our 3D glasses and and played in the maximum number of dimensions the game would allow. Games last about ten minutes and I lost both games I played. The game is a kind of Yatzee style luck-fest. But a fun luck-fest never the less.

Afterwards we played Modern Art. It's an auction game and a pretty pure one. It was Mike's game and he was the only one that had played before but towards the end of the game he'd hardly won any auctions. However, it turns out he knew exactly what he was doing. Everyone else had been vastly over valuing the items and Mike had wiped the floor with us.

The others were knee deep in Lost Legacy. I'm not sure which one, I think Alex may have bought a new version. Or perhaps two new versions. So we played a few games of The Resistance. Some people said some things, some stuff happened. You know? The Resistance.

Now on to the the next week. Danny had brought along Luchador and some more of that was played followed by Tragedy Looper. Danny was the bad guy as always but this time he was foiled in his evil deed. Danny had pimped Tragedy Looper since the last time it had appeared at IpBoG. The cardboard tokens had been replaced by wooden cubes imported from Germany. That's dedication!

Mike once brought Taluva for me to play as he thought I'd like it. It turns out I did and wanted to get myself my own copy but it was pretty hard to get hold of. Well, I finally managed it and so brought my copy along. It almost feels like an abstract game although it's not abstract, it has a sort of island settlement building theme. It's so nice, we played it twice! The first time it was either going to be me or Alex to win and it was basically up to Dan. If he blocked me Alex would win but if he didn't I would win. He blocked me, thanks a lot Dan. In our second game it was getting to the last round of the game and it looked like Alex was going to win but on my final turn I managed to play all of two types of building which ends the game and is an instant win.

We finished up the night with Blueprints which made its first appearance it IpBoG. It's a game where you build towers out of dice and Danny is actually some sort of real life architect. This must have helped in some way because he ended up winning by a mile.

Japanese Time Travel

We got about fifteen people this week, including one new guy who'd met some IpBoGers at the Ipswich Tabletop Day a couple of weeks ago.

Andy had asked me to bring in Ghost Stories to play as he was a fan of co-ops, so bring it in I did. Four of us battled against the underworld to rid the village of ghosts. Half way through the game the board was almost full of ghosts and it looked like all was lost. Somehow we managed to pull through and last out until Wu Feng was revealed. Sacrificing a few qi tokens and using our yin-yang tokens we managed to pull together and defeat the incarnation. I think our luck with the curse die really helped in this game, out of the three rolls all were non-events. One day I'll feel brave enough to attempt it on the normal difficulty.

While we were playing that, Danny was teaching different groups of people to play Tragedy Looper. I think maybe three or four games of it were played.

The others played Citadels but with six players the game dragged as it sometimes does. The full game plays to eight buildings and the short game plays to seven. I think they stopped at six. Citadels can be a great game but it's probably at its greatest with a smaller number of players.

After Ghost Stories I played a game of Sushi Go. Matt won way out in front of anyone else. Others finished off the night  with a few games of Skull and Roses.