Gold, Blood, Art

Saturday night! Seeing as I (Sam) keep missing Tuesdays, and Sally keeps going out, I was grateful to have Andrew and Chris descend upon the house at 7pm. Whilst the boys caused havoc upstairs (my boys, not Andrew and Chris) we set up Fool's Gold on the kitchen table.

What more is there to say about Fool's Gold? It's the worlds-colliding combo of worker placement and push-your-luck, where the luck-pushing gets progressively more optimistic as the game continues. There's something delightfully funny about miners thinking sod it, I'll pan for gold in the snow, and turning up four bags of silt in a storm.

winter is coming

Chris and Andrew were both new to it, but it's not a hard game to learn. In fact the most confusing thing about it was Chris' money disappearing and Andrew accusing him of being thick, before it transpired that Andrew had been taking Chris' money, thinking it was from the bank. And at this point, we were all pretty sober. Oh, how we lolled etc.

Andrew 45
Sam  44
Chris 36

At this point Andrew and I indulged Chris in a game of Blood Bowl: Team Manager. Neither of us was really yearning to try it; it's a very Ameri-trashy, chit-heavy cross of fantasy and American Football. For a couple of Feld-positive Europeans, that's not exactly a siren, more a rock.

But we are nothing if not recalcitrantly begrudging, so we gave it a shot. It's about a series of football matches played out in a fantasy realm, rather violently. In each round players are contesting the matches via card play: cards have a value and the combined value of all your cards in a game decide who wins/loses. But individual cards can do stuff as well; like grab the ball (if you have the ball, you've more chance of winning the game) tackle (resulting in making opponent cards less effective) sprint (change up a card in your hand for a hopefully-better one) and, er, skull: which get your card a skull token. These are revealed when all cards have been played - they may help, but they may get the player sent off.

touchdown

The skulls make the game very swingy - which is fun, but also slightly undermines the idea of strategic play. I can imagine the longer the game is (we played three rounds) the feeling of arbitrariness growing from a sense of chaotic fun to mild annoyance. But overall the game was fine - Andrew said it was "not anywhere near as terrible as I thought it'd be" which, from his mouth, is praise indeed.

Andrew 22
Sam 22
Chris 18

What next? I brought out several options and Chris' phone chose Pueblo. This was the first play for me that wasn't a two-player, and I decided early on to get all my buildings of my own colour down as soon as possible. This meant I took a lot of early hits whilst Chris - and Andrew in particular - shimmied about, avoiding the eye of the chieftain and taking minimal point penalties. But when our building was completed and he took his final inspection, I was all but hidden, and I moved into a respectable first place. I didn't note the scores, but Andrew was second, and Chris third.

stroppy chieftain looms

We finished off with a couple of short games; Dice Heist is the game of the moment in the Morrison household - Stanley loves it and it goes down well at GNN too. Andrew and Chris fought it out over paintings, whilst I hovered around the edges, trying to pick up cheap heists in St Petersburg. But there was too much hovering, not enough heisting:

Andrew 28
Chris 27
Sam 17

Finally we bashed out Push It, which has not been seen for a few weeks now! At this stage, I was rather merry, and merriness and dexterity don't always go hand in hand. I flicked pathetically as the others jostled for position. Andrew surged off into the lead with Chris hanging on to his coat-tails. But as the pressure mounted around the ten-point mark, anxiety took hold and as the others bashed into each other, I came back into it. With the scores poised at 10-9-9 in Andrew's favour, anyone could win it!

Andrew 11
Chris 9
Sam  9

Lots of fun, thanks gentlemen. Enjoy Tuesday!

Bowled Over

The pull and draw of modern table top games is such that even those that once viewed them with mild distrust begin to accept them, enjoy them, look forward to games nights to eventually buying titles for themselves.

James has come a long way from an evening 4 years ago when he banned me from bringing a few examples in the pub to show him. These days he is providing lists of possible purchases to his wife for Christmas! Nice one James! The plan for last night’s two player was his Christmas present, Blood Bowl : Team Manager.

With the thrilling finale to the recent super bowl fresh in our minds (Well my mind as I stupidly stayed up to watch it on a school night) we made a bid to recreate the event albeit with bits of cardboard, playing cards and the hordes of chaos taking on the puny humans…

With the Team Manager version of Blood Bowl the board has been done away with and a virtual playing field has been planted there in it’s place. Somewhat obscurely though teams are vying for dominance over season highlights (denoted by newspaper clippings) which give the winner certain benefits such as star players, team bonuses and general scoring bonuses. The main currency of victory is fans which are symbolised by little flags on the cards. In each of the 4 seasons there is a main trophy to be fought over which mostly offers a large supply of fans to the winner and a token gesture for the runner up.

Battles over highlight cards involves selecting players from your hand of 6. Each player has certain abilities, like tackle, pass, sprint and cheat. It is cheat option which really makes the game interesting. Although there is a great deal of luck in the game, tackles are resolved by dice for example, the cheat mechanic makes adds the element of the unknown which players will either love or hate.

 

Picture ripped from BGG.

In the scoring round the cheat tokens are revealed and can do one of 3 things, add to the players score total, add fans or get him sent off thereby removing his total score from the battle. I found this to be fun and not at all irritating. There was a certain amount of tension as we came to the reveal section and realised we had either been undone or luckily boosted.

We played the first season in a semi open fashion whilst we worked out the process. It was all very simple and intuitive and we found ourselves reaching for the rule book only to clarify random events. Most of the information was on the cards.

Our fortunes wavered between seasons with James marginally winning the first and showing me the benefit of obtaining a star player. I fell further back in the second but had a really successful 3^rd and 4^th seasons as my new star signings began to repay their huge transfer fees. James was as sick as a parrot. Obviously.

Chris – 42

James – 24

Even though this game (As Joe noted when he played it) is a little random for its length I still came away with a very positive feeling. I don’t mind a fantasy theme and it reminded me a little of smash up where if you expect your best laid plans to be whipped from beneath you then it’s not so harsh when they are. It also has that Nexus Ops feel to it whereby your best laid plans can be inexplicably prevented by a series of unfortunate dice rolls. No different to the much loved Lords of Vegas in that respect….

Introducing the smallest meeple in town

This week's games night saw a return to Anja and Steve's sooner than perhaps anyone could have guessed. Despite their son being just two weeks old, they decided to risk it and host a games night, and so we all got to say hello to the soon-to-be board game champion of the world (perhaps). Also in attendance was Jon and the non-playing Morag along with their also-non-playing child. A very family feel to games night for once.

But once all that talk of milk teeth and best nappies was over (something like that, I expect. I wasn't listening) we sat down to play. Seven of us: Jon, Anja, Steve, Joe, Sam, Adam, and myself played Incan Gold. This was Anja's only chance of the evening to get points on the leaderboard, and she played it well. It was also the first game of Incan Gold that we can remember when all five artefacts came out.

Anja 33
Sam 32
Jon 29
Joe 20
Steve 20
Andrew 20
Adam 11

At this point, Hannah arrived and Anja retired for the evening, and we split into two groups. Jon was keen to play Blood Bowl and he recruited Joe and Adam to his cause. Meanwhile, Sam and I wanted to see how Samurai played with more than two players, and Hannah and Steve agreed to try it.

Sam explained the simple rules, and we put out the big four-player, four-island version of the board. The main difference between the two and four player versions is the amount of AP. With so many options, trying to whittle your choice down to one can take a while. While the other table hummed to the excited commentary from Jon, our table was mostly lost in thought, with the occasional "whose go is it?" breaking the silence.

At the end of the first game, newcomer Hannah came away with a commanding win.

1. Hannah
2. Andrew
3. Sam
4. Steve

Since the Blood Bowl was still in full swing, we set up and played again. This time, I clustered most of my tiles on the main island of Honshu, and it seemed to work.

1. Andrew
2. Hannah
3. Sam
4. Steve

With Joe, Jon and Adam still in battle, and Steve enlisted to Baby Patrol, Hannah, Sam and I tried a new but simple game called Can't Stop. In this, four dice are rolled. Pairs of dice are made to give two values, and each time those values are rolled, the player moves their counter along that particular value on the board.

In a later roll they can later nominate a third value, but once they've done that, they're stuck with those three. Rolling the four dice and not being able to make up any of those values means they are bust and return to wherever they were at the start of the turn. Otherwise, they can stop once they feel they've pushed their luck enough.

I loved it. It's a perfect example of Good Dice. We didn't have long enough to finish the game, so it remains non-leaderboard, but for the record Sam was doing best, followed by Hannah, then me.

On the other table, the blood had dried up and gone all flakey. The final scores were

Joe 35
Jon 33
Adam 23

On the form table, Sam holds on to first place, while Adam can be grateful for those tied scores in Incan Gold, otherwise his last place in a seven player game would have sent him second to bottom.

						Points
Sam	3	3	2	2	1	11
Andrew	2	2	4	1	3	12
Hannah	2	1	4	2	5	14
Adam	5	3	3	2	1	14
Anja	1	1	3	5	5	15
Steve	4	4	4	2	1	15
Joe	1	4	4	4	3	16
Jon	2	3	5	5	5	20

On the Division, however, we find that Adam's overall performance this season has been the best in terms of points scored. Anja comes out top in points ratio.

In Bracknell, Paul was away helping to form a new government in Italy. Instead, everyone's imaginary friend Dirk took his place in two games of 7 Wonders. James won both by giving Chris a Vulcan mind-meld and a dead arm.

James - 53
Chris - 48
Dirk – 24

James - 49
Chris - 48
Dirk - 40