Board gaming in July

I love spending time with people, and I love being decimated by them in games of strategy, humour and imagination. Hence why I’m a proud member of…

boardgamesgroupfacebookBoston Board Games Group

Meeting on sporadic nights in and around Boston, we get to try out various exciting new games. All games are fully explained by experienced board gamers, and beginners are welcome.

Go on… join the group on Facebook!

We’ve play games like NInja’s gaming setup, Settlers of CatanLords of War, 6nimmt!, Carcassone, Coup, 7 Wonders, Dead of Winter, Android: Netrunner, Between Two Cities, and Discworld: Ankh Morpork. In other words: no Monopoly, just fun new table based explosions of co-operation and competition.

Last night…

With 50% of our regular members leaving Boston – forever – over the next 2 weeks, we decided it was important to meet and be mean to each other whilst the opportunity remained…

gameoftrainscoverGame of Trains

Game of Trains is a pretty simple card game from Brain Games. I picked it up at the UK Board Games Expo last month, where it actually won “Best General Card Game”.

It benefits from quick to learn mechanics, a streamlined gameplay style with fast rounds, and mild player interraction. Definitely not my favourite game ever, but its simplicity, and beautiful artwork gets it to the table more than I’d expect.

There’s something very satisfying in getting the carriages in ascending number order, and its light enough to be great for playing whilst chatting. And seriously, look how pretty!

gameoftrains

Jon and I played a few rounds whilst we waited for everyone else to arrive, and it fulfilled its purpose, wetting our whistles for an evening of good natured cardboard aggression…

camelupCamel Up!

Camel Up is a recent classic in the small, slightly inbred world of tabletop fun. It won the coveted 2014 Speil Des Jahres Award in Germany. In board gaming circles, that’s like winning the World Cup, Wimbledon and, I dunno, the Conservative Party Leadership Race.

In simple terms, there’s a camel race afoot. The field is represented by funky wooden stackable camels, you spend your time betting against each other, trying to a) guess who is going to win the current leg, or b) the entire race.

The reason its great fun? Because Jon will decide to make your exact guess about the red camel’s inexorable victory… 4 seconds before you do, meaning that your prize of 8 Egypt Pounds drops to a disappointing 5 Egypt Pounds. And then, in the last second, the yellow camel gaily leaps over your pathetic rouge dromedary, transforming your hoped-for earnings into a penalty charge of one pound, and gaining Robbie an unstoppable lead.

I’d never played it before, but I can tell its going to be a family favourite. It’s short, its simple, very interactive, and wonderfully silly. Just a shame that Craig broke my cardboard dice pyramid!

projecteliteProject: ELITE

We were only at the UK Board Games Expo for a day, so there wasn’t much time for playing games as much as childishly running around in excitement. One stall did catch my attention though, and we managed a quick-but-intense play through of their offering – Project:ELITE.

As it turned out, it was awesome; so awesome in fact, that Robbie bought it there and then, with both expansions. That’s a big chunk of money to throw down on a game we’d never heard of, and had only played for 15 minutes. What was it that drew us in?

The sheer pace of each round – and the degree to which fighting for useful dice rolls can delay you – lends itself to moments like this, moments of “Oh right, my plan was to go in there and then retreat…

The premise: You are space heroes, or soldiers, or whatever. Basically, you = generic good guys. You work as a team to complete a mission, generally along the lines of capture all objectives, or maybe collect things and take them to your base, or simply “survive”.

Up against you is a never ending swarm of different monsters/aliens/demons/generic bad guys. Thanks to Robbie picking up the expansions, there’s also Boss monsters, and around 20 other different types of scary things to attack you in a variety of intriguing ways.

So far, so blah. It’s fun, but futuristic combat themes are ten-a-penny. Where this little gem shines is in its the core mechanic: each scenario consists of 8 two minute long rounds, which progress in real time…

  1. You start with a quick team strategy talk, then someone presses “Start” on the two minute timer.
  2. Each of you has 4 dice. They are custom dice with symbols that let you walk, shoot, open things, use equipment, etc.
  3. You will be frantically rolling and re-rolling to get the outcomes you need.
  4. If you roll a red alien symbol, you have to immediately stop and move an alien.
DSC_1223
Craig making bedroom eyes at me

How does this work out? For two very focused minutes, each of you is obsessively picking up dice, groaning, moving aliens, rolling again, groaning *again*, moving more aliens, then finally getting the symbols you actually need, giving a yelp of joy, before grabbing the dice again at a corybantic pace, wincing as someone shouts out “Ten seconds left!”

The round finishes as abruptly as it began, at which point you step back and look at what actually happened to the rest of the players during your entirely introspective 120 seconds. Its a fun moment – you’d think it would be frustrating to miss the action on the rest of the board – but in fact it invites story telling: everyone gets to boast/commiserate about their own activities during the frenetic dice storm.

DSC_1231Our match left me with plenty of memorable moments. After the first round, where I had quite easily kept the right flank at bay, we debriefed, and it turned out that Craig’s sole achievement had been to open a box, and we were close to being completely overrun by aliens on our left flank. Despite a well thought out plan, the dice had defeated us, and it took concerted effort to stop us losing the next turn.

The buzzer blew on a later round, and everyone realised I had managed to leave myself wounded and stranded in the middle of the alien base. The sheer pace of each round – and the degree to which fighting for useful dice rolls can delay you – lends itself to moments like this, moments of “Oh right, my plan was to go in there and then retreat…

Our final turn involved me limping across to Craig, where he tossed me one of two jetpacks he’d somehow stolen from somewhere. I eventually equipped it with one of my two remaining dice, allowing me to boost across the board to Jon, who, thanks to my injuries, had to give me his medkit and help me use it. Meanwhile, Craig had turned back to the final objective, effortlessly completing it and, using his own jetjack, nimbly launched himself back to the safe zone. Robbie was probably doing something cool too, but he was the other side of the board from me, which might as well have been the other side of the world given my ultra-focused (read “selfish“) approach to the game.

I definitely recommend Project: ELITE. It scales well, has a solo mode, and there’s plenty of variability, even with just the base set. Setup is a little fiddly, but the rules are surprisingly simple and quick for new players to pick up.

chrononautsChrononauts

Next to the table was the time travelling card game Chrononauts. From the creator of Fluxx, its a set collection game with a very thematic twist.

Setup involves laying out a grid of cards in chronological order, representing the last 150 years of world history. You are then given a hand of cards, which give you the power to mess with your opponents, or flip over key “linchpins” in the timeline.

There are three ways to win. Be the first to:

  1. Get the timeline to match up with your ID card: this will have some real historical events, such as “Assassination of JFK”, and some alternate timelines, such as “World War 3”, or “Titanic Avoids Iceberg”.
  2. Collect the three artifacts on your Mission card: ranging from “The Mona Lisa (an obvious fake)” to “Live Triceratops”.
  3. Play 7 patch cards: these sit on top of flipped “Paradox” timeline cards, repairing worrying holes in time and space.

chrononautsThe rules take a few minutes to sink in, but once you have them it makes sense. Flipping over cards in the past affects events in the future – if Hitler is assassinated, how can he open the 1936 Olympics? – so small changes to one card can ripple down the timeline, affecting multiple events in the future.

I enjoyed myself, but you can tell that it came from the same mind as Fluxx: player progression is not respected. At one point, I accidentally played a card that took Robbie’s hand, swelled by the 5 patch cards he’d played, and gave it to Craig, putting him into the lead. Whilst its a satisfying way to mess with people, there’s something that puts me off about any rules that let you play tactically for 25 minutes only to have your entire role swapped so easily. In the end, I actually won, but only because the timeline almost randomly ended up matching my ID card. Too luck based for my blood.

coupcoverCoup

We started the evening with a lightweight game; rounding things off with Coup seemed equally appropriate.

DSC_1239An early Kickstarter success, Coup is practically a micro game, with rounds lasting perhaps 2 minutes, and being entirely based on straight-faced lying to your friends, being challenged on that bluffing, and throwing your cards to the table in frustration as they beat you. I covered it in my December round-up, so check it out there…

And there we were, five different games under our belts, and only 10:30pm, meaning I could avoid my usual played-game-until-midnight sleep deprivation hangover the next day. Good stuff!

Feel free to drop a comment below, or check out the posts from November, December and FebruaryDon’t forget to visit the facebook group!

12 thoughts on “Board gaming in July

  1. Glad you liked Project: Elite. As a kickstarter backer it’s great hearing positive reviews, but at the same time it’s unfortunate we still haven’t had anything shipped to us.

    1. Absolutely with you on that. Hadn’t heard of it before the con, but seeing that we were able to buy it then and there, its frankly outrageous that you guys haven’t recieved it!

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