Be Excellent To Each Other

I've only played once, with four people. It did take 2 hours or so but the time flew by. I think we then spent the next hour or so dissecting exactly which decisions people made when which caused the eventual outcome.

Netrunner tonight.

I will have the final week of playing my corporation "push their hand size down to slow their play and kill them" set* before it'll all get shuffled away for some time. The runner set, too.



*cybernetics division with self destruct chips and punitive counterstrikes. Not ideal but hum ti tum.

*leela with turntable. I know I know

3 wins in 3 games! I might retire undefeated now.

[citation needed]

We should have a World Championships.

I am surprised we have not already.

Speaking of competitions, the board game café are holding a Pandemic tournament soon.

Crikey, those are some prizes

Netrunner lulz: http://www.semicoop.com/comic/an-emergency/

Netrunner night! Sane decks as before. Same uncool cards. New Tyrell Corp t shirt.

T shirt got some rep.

Ended up 1-3 and missing preferred train home. Now in the spoons with a load of Nasty Leeds fans.

The 1 was a fucking ace win though.

Nail-biting photo finish at the end of the latest episode of 'Pandemic: Legacy' last night. We were just able to beat the game before we ran out of blue cubes.
We then played 'Star Realms'. It's 'Dominion'....IN SPACE! Quite easy to learn and playing in teams was fun.
Ended with 'Suburbia': a charming city-building game I like but I lost badly due to not generating enough income early on.

http://kotaku.com/crowdfunded-dark-soul ... 1771884239

£80?! That's too much

A friend is vaguely and tangentially involved with this game, which seems like it might be a good laugh. It's a bit Cards Against Humanity, but with a little more freedom and variety, I think. And less obvious filth.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/55 ... =discovery

Another fun round of 'Pandemic: Legacy'. Just finished June and won on the first game (you get two shots at each month). Still enjoying the surprises and innovations that the game is bringing in as well as agonising tactical choices. Yeah, we really needed a dispatcher last time round, but the ['new character' - Spoiler umpire] was so dam helpful and oh god why are the yellows suddenly spawning everywhere.

Also played 'Good Cop; Bad Cop' - stud poker like game of hidden and revealed identities. Probably a little too over-reliant on special power cards but might be better with more than four.

Tried a couple of co-op variants of 'Star Realms' ('Dominion IN SPACE') but both felt unbalanced in their mechanics.

Depends what's in the box, I guess. I paid £70 for Imperial Assault, which comes with 30 something lovely 28mm scale miniatures and lots of board tiles. AND SO MANY CARDS. And, y'know, Star wars.

Umm..

£30 for netrunner core set
2× expansions @ £20 each
8 data packs at £10 each.

Oh.

I'm not sure it does. £80 (or £70) is too much of anyone's money. Those 28mm minis cost about 1p each to make

Worst offender for this is Portal, IMO. £60! I see it's already £33 on Amazon (Imperial Assault is down to £60), which isn't surprising because there's nothing much in the box at all.

The turret mini is lovely, though.

Pricing high for the first month and gouging the early adopters seems to be a pretty common board game tactic.

You have to price establish for 28 days so tbis might have something to do with it.

Had some really good netrunner last night. I refined my Corp deck after game one with someone's help and then won the next 2 Corp games with it. Lost when I was the runner due to being a bit too cock. Again.

Oh god, now I've done it, took possession of a number of MTG Duel decks yesterday in preparation for a gaming weekend.

Superb 'Dominion' session with my dad last night, although I lost 2 games to 1.

On the game I won, the cards we had were lending themselves to a high money game so I was buying all the province cards (6 victory points) as soon as I could, often with change and no buys. First time I can recall that a game's ended because the province deck was exhausted.

Lost badly on the final game as it was more attack-leaning but I spent far too much money on witches and flinging curses out than building up my victory points. I think curses are better with more people.

To the Board Game Café yesterday for a fun afternoon. They have Loose Cannon beer on draught, which is always a Good Thing.

Played the following:

'Kodama' - surprisingly enjoyable card laying game, building up a tree and scoring points. Winner appeases the tree spirits, apparently. Like dominos but with more angles to put cards down against.

'Between Two Cities' - city-building game, but you and the people on either side of you are involved in building the cities so you have to negotiate what tiles to place. Your final score is the lowest-scoring of the two cities you're building. I want to like this, but I think I'll have to play it several times to decide if I like the mechanic and if it actually is 'fun'. Over in half an hour though, and it did include a deck of various ways to arrange seating.

'Say Anything' - fun party game. I ask a question ('what would be the most inappropriate thing to say on a first date'/'which celebrity is most likely to be an alien' etc), you write down your hilarious answer. I secretly choose my favourite answer, and you bet on what I have chosen. Can be as clean or filthy as your group allows.

We should go here someday.

Been absent from here since Christmas I think, many life happenings. I've moved to fire and started a new job and been working long hours, yuk!

Fife is lovely though and I have moved to a tiny wee town (or village next to a tiny town) and it still somehow manages to have its own weekly boardgame club! Love it!

Thinking about going to the uk games expo next year, it's the first weekend in June after the bank holiday and it's at Birmingham NEC. I've provisionally booked the ibis and might change it to the Hilton if they do a discount deal.

Missed you

A while back I mentioned playing Grizzled - the only co-operative game set in the French trenches of WW1. Just bought it as I'm still intrigued by it.

Also I'm waiting for the 'Prosperity' expansion for 'Dominon' to arrive.

And welcome back Gilly.

Finished 'Pandemic: Legacy' last night after 19 games. It was very well-paced, throwing up surprises and rule changes at just the right temp to ensure you never felt overwhelmed by taking in new stuff or got bored of playing yet another game of 'Pandemic'.

For what it's worth, we scored 68%. There are different endings depending on what score you get, so don't google it due to spoilers.

Colt Express fans!

Aparently this playmat you can print out is good?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gz0jkv5pssilz ... ress-Playm

First non-Pandemic-Legacy gaming session for a long time.

Started with 'Cosmic Encounters'. I loved the stackable UFO counters when we unpacked. The rules were quite simple to grasp and it swiftly became a riotous 90 minute long session of completely arbitrary back-stabbing and deal breaking and laughing. I came very close to winning but someone allied with the other person so they crossed the line first

We also played 'Flashpoint', using the heroic setup (lot of fires, hazards, and hotspots) because we're manly men like that. We managed to rescue four people, accidentally incinerated another three, then completely lost control and the building collapsed. When I first played this a long time ago, I wasn't too keen but it's grown on me and the tactical decisions are varied enough to keep interest. It also has the best pieces of any board game ever, which helps.

Incorrect.

Netrunner Club tonight! Hurrah! 2 kill decks for the corp side and a Criminal deck for the runner. Let's atomize some hackers! Let's steal some agendas!

Well. First game lost first turn....

Lost the other games as well, but these were a little closer.

There was a netrunner tournament at the weekend in Reading. Looming at the results, the corporation ID i have most recently played appears only 4 times out of 87 players, and the runner ID doesn't appear at all. So that explains a lot

Libertalia: pirate game with rules that sound really complex but are actually quite simple (pick card, play, resolve, get points, stab others, or take penalties).

One Night Ultimate ['Mafia'-ed.] - this works really well and having time-limited rounds with no deaths removes a major complaint about this family of games.

We also discovered that Ticket to Ride:UK doesn't really work with five people.

Bought Agricola and i'm absolutely loving it. Still haven't made the step to advanced mode, and i'm sure that with cards it's even more awesome.

I took it to family lunch last weekend, but i fear it wasn't as popular as pandemic. My killjoy brother in law found it to be boring, but in his defense, the game took 3 hours (which was mostly his fault for being so slow)

Netrunner club tonight! I have refined my Corporation Strategy and have made a deck that is I AM A BANK AND I HATE MY CUSTOMERS where the primary aim is to demolish the home of the runner and surrounding area. Because subprime, right?

The Runner deck is largely unchanged as it didn't get a decent run out last time.

Um. Yeah. That went ok. Mostly happy.

Hey, curio... lizzy sends her regards...

Netrunner night tonight! I am taking my Furious Bank run by Lizzy M which hates You, the customer, and wants to burn your flat down. And those around it. Because foreclosure is a dirty word. It is fuelled by Hedge funds, Restructures and a surprise wolf.


Runnerwise, I am taking Jezzy S in a new deck of hope, dreams and failure. This will hit Where The Plans Are a lot and hopefully work.

I need MOAR CARDS to get Furious Bank to work though, and EVEN MOAR to get a jesminder running nicely.

I now see "twilight struggle" regularly in mainstream store chains translated in Portuguese reasonably cheap (40€). It's worth it? The game always seemed boring to me, but now that i took more time to read about it properly, it actually sounds interesting.

I would love to play it but it looks like a long game. What i have read says it is well worth it.

What Mali said. My boss has it but he says that trying to convince the wife to learn how to play it is tricky. But we need more heavy two player games so probably worth the effort.

The Angry Bank was a Winner! Closed out 7 points with a decent scoring remote. Nobody died.

Jezzy S did not do so well. Having a think about her....

I have made Angry Bank even MORE FURIOUS by adding EVIL SPIRITS and HOUSEKEEPING which makes the runner discard a card everytime they play one.

JezzyS has had some refinements to supply her with more money to use each turn using what I like to call The Gaywood Gambit.

We shall see tonight! Hopefully.

It is probably my all time favourite game. I only play it with my wife (so we learn the game at the same rate), it takes about 3 hours to play, and it's complicated as fuck.

Once you've suffered the first game, you'll realise it's actually rather straight forward to play.

We play it once or twice a year, and I feel it's a game we will play the rest of our lives. It is just a piece of magic.

Well, that was a disaster.

Played my second game of 'Dead of Winter'. Unlike the first game, we weren't in a deserted village hall in rural Oxfordshire, but in somebody's house in early Autumn so we didn't quite get the mood right. We came very close to meeting the objective, but ran out of morale and food before we could. It was only then we noticed that one playuer had been hoarding cards and read his 'betrayal' text with glee. I'm enjoying it, especially the 'crossroads' cards that force players to make tricky moral choices. Need to play it a few more times to nail down the rules, though. I lost my soldier because I forgot about frostbite. Careless.

Rounded the evening off with 'Citadels'. I've always liked this simple game with its interesting drafting mechanic and the interactions between the players. Again, however, I forgot a key part of a character's powers and threw away an easy win.

I could have told you that.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/0 ... hino-hero/

Sounds like a fun game

(If your looking for something to read then anything by Rab on this series is always great)