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.

Big Trouble In Little China

I'm back in the country and back to IpBoG so it's back to regular blogs with pictures. I arrive to find people playing Secret Hitler. It looked like a print and play version. I think it's a Kickstarter that's not been delivered yet but in the mean time print and play versions are taking the board gaming world by storm. As far as I can tell it's a sort of social deduction game à la The Resistance.

Rebecca had asked if I could bring in Takenoko so bring it in I did, but before we played that we played a quick game of Zaney Penguins. I finished off the night with Danny's new deduction game Deception: Murder in Hong Kong. He actually picked this up in Hong Kong where it's called CS Files. Thankfully the components still have English text on them otherwise figuring out the text would have been a deduction game in itself. I've not played Mysterium so I can't really comment but people have been saying it's a bit like Mysterium so maybe it is. It's a fifteen minute game and so never overstays it's welcome but we enjoyed it enough to play four or five games in a row.

Alex brought along Dominion, a game by Catan creator Klaus Teuber, as well as Patronize . Mike brought along Container which made it's IpBoG debut. As this there were a bunch of IpBoG classics: Dominion, Eight Minute Empire and Lords of Waterdeep.

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.

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.

Chaotic and Cooperative

The blog didn't get done last week due to lazyness but I do have a list of games that were played. Here goes! Arctic Scavengers, Coup, Falling, Lemonade Stand, Onward To Venus, Pit, Splendor and Timelines.

Now on to this week. After the usual bank holiday slump we were back in full flow. We actually got a record breaking 24 people, up from 23 a few weeks ago. We had a bunch of games making their first appearance at IpBoG this week including The Walking Dead: The Board Game, Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game, Spaceteam and Zany Penguins.

Zany Penguins is a game I picked up a few days before and hadn't got a change to play before. It's a 15 minute filler card game and I ended up playing six games of it. It played a bit like a multi player Lost Cities. I've heard it's kind of like a reverse Arboretum but I've never played that game so I can't really compare it. It has a terrible name, pretty average artwork, the slipperiest cards I've held (or at least tried to hold), but pretty good gameplay. Everyone seemed to like it and newcomer Matt even said he was thinking about buying it himself.

I also played Coup and Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game. I've not played this version of Legendary before but I have played Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game which is similar but a bit more complex and much harder. The Marvel version is semi-co-op whereas the Alien version is fully co-op but the Marvel one is much to win. So much so I wouldn't really call it a co-op game, it's almost as if you're using the win condition as a timer to end the game.

Steven had picked up Spaceteam which attempts to bring the digital game to the tabletop and labels itself as a chaotic and cooperative card game. Does it succeed? I don't know, I didn't play it, but kinda is what people seemed to say. It definitely had people shouting orders at each other and frantically running around the table.

A bunch of regulars were played too including Falling, Lords of Waterdeep, Chinatown, Arctic Scavengers and King of Tokyo.