Spiel: Boardgaming in the UK

Late back from London tonight but, as some consolation, two parcels had arrived while I was away. The first was my BGG competition prize of Trains & Stations, an interesting railway dice game – a copy of which I already have. The second though was my Essen pre-order of Mush! Mush! which is subtitled Snow Tails 2 and I hope is a decent refinement of the original Snow Tails. Looking forward to playing it soon.

The new issue of Counter arrived today. Contained in its 84 pages are reviews of more than twenty games including Concordia, Machi Koro, Mush! Mush! Prosperity, Russian Railroads and Spyrium. There are also articles on GenCon and Essen, Rick thornquist on Learning Games, The Counter Guide to Worker Placement games and the usual letters page. You can learn more about Counter at the magazine’s website.

This Friday’s session (13th December 2013), which was due to take place at Nige’s house, won’t because his boiler has packed up and it’s rather cool up the Stiperstones at this time of year without any heating.

Instead, Mark K is picking up the slack so those travelling out to Oswestry will, I’m sure be offered a feast of biscuits, cake, cheese and crackers etc.

The following week will, as planned, be at Garry’s house – but without the biscuits, cake……….

Wayback When? is a review of the games I was playing five, ten, fifteen and twenty years ago with me highlighting the most memorable titles of each particular month in the vain hope that I might dig out some of them to play again. This month we’re looking at December 1993, 1998, 2003 and 2008.

December doesn’t seem to be a very good month for trying new games. In 2008, I only played one new game (out of just 11 in the whole month) but it is a fine football dexterity game for two or teams of two. Weykick is frantic fun but mind your knuckles on the crossbar below the table.

Five years earlier, I managed to play just two games in the month, although both of them were new to me. The Bridges of Shangrila was a typically dry but interesting game by Leo Colivini while Terra was a semi-cooperative game by Bruno Faidutti, where you try to get the most points possible but, if collectively you pollute the planet too much, everyone loses – inevitably people end up being too greedy hence dooming the planet.

 

In 1998, I got to play Das Motorsportspiel for the first time, motor racing with real time pressure to complete your move before the sand-timer runs out. We also played the hilarious Bamboleo, a dexterity game where a knowledge of the laws of physics is usually an advantage – that is, unless you’re a physics teacher.

The stand-out game of December 1993 was Rette Sich Wer Kann (more recently released as Lifeboats) and is an evil game of tossing your companions out of the rescue boats to be eaten by sharks – don’t play with anyone who bears a grudge.

You may remember I recently reviewed a neat little battling card game called Stak Bots, designed by Tom Norfolk and published by DogEared Games. Well, not one to rest on his laurels, Tom has an expansion up on Kickstarter running until 18th December. This is a sixty card deck of sixteen additional varieties of Bot to add to the original sixteen. Or you can pledge for both the original and expansion decks together. All the details are on the Kickstarter page here.

Got home today to find my copy of Euphoria: Build A Better Dystopia, which I backed on Kickstarter, had arrived. The production looks very, very good and I’m hopeful the game will be a decent one too.

November saw me play just 12 games of 10 different titles, 4 of which were new to me. The small number of games played was due to half the month being spent in the Caribbean where, remarkably, I played no games at all (other than a few games of the excellent Street Soccer ipad app. The new games were Relic Runners, Arche Noah, Russian Railroads and 1911: Amundsen vs Scott.

I added twelve new titles to the collection which were Auf Teufel komm raus, Arche Noah, Nauticus, Russian Railroads, Piraten Kapern, Flash 10, Steam Noir: Revolution, Homesteaders, Trains and Stations, Prosperity, Concordia and Legendary: Fantastic Four. My unplayed games list has unsurprisingly grown to 42 this month and game of the month was a fairly easy call with Russian Railroads being the pick. We wondered whether there might be one dominant strategy but reading around Boardgamegeek, this doesn’t appear to be the case.

Just found out today that I won a contest on Boardgamegeek. I don’t enter all of them but I do take part if the prize is a game I’m interested in. And this is the first one in which I’ve been successful. So Wizkids will shortly be sending me a copy of Trains and Stations. Woohoo! Perhaps I won’t mention the fact that a copy is already on its way to me from Germany.

Wayback When? is a review of the games I was playing five, ten, fifteen and twenty years ago with me highlighting the most memorable titles of each particular month in the vain hope that I might dig out some of them to play again. This month we’re looking at November 1993, 1998, 2003 and 2008.

  

Five years ago, we were first introduced to Le Havre, another good meaty game from Uwe Rosenberg which has remained a fairly regular game in our group. We also immersed ourselves in the classic semi-cooperative and very thematic Battlestar Galactica (I am not a cylon!) and a great racing game from the Lamont Brothers, Snow Tails. The follow-up, Mush Mush, should be sent to me pretty soon and I can’t wait to try it.

  

In November 2003, we played Anno 1503, another of Klaus Teuber’s post-Settlers games and this one was really good. Attika also saw its first outing this month and, interestingly, it got played at the club only a week ago and seemed to still hold up pretty well. Also, I couldn’t pass up mentioning the first time we played Igloo Pop, one of the fun games that Nige actually admitted to enjoying.

  

In November 1998, I played the delightful race games Honeybears and Igel Argern for the first time. In Honeybears, you use cards to advance the bears towards the finish line but want to keep cards of the leading bears to score you more points. Igel Argern is a great Doris & Frank design where hedgehogs are scrambling over other hedgehogs and trying to avoid the pits in a team race to the finish. Five years earlier, the only notable new game I played was another Doris & Frank game about a corrupt political system where you are bluffing your way towards getting voters to vote for your candidate.

In October I played just 12 games of 9 different titles, 8 of which were new to me. The new games were Carcassonne: The Dice Game, Casa Grande, Spyrium, Stak Bots, Revolution, Ticket to Ride: Legendary Asia, Sonne und Mond and SOS Titanic.

October is traditionally the month when the additions to my collection explode but this year I didn’t visit the Essen game fair. Nevertheless, I still added 15 titles to the collection which were Gunrunners, Relic Runners, Spyrium, Carcassonne: The Dice Game, Fleet, Revolution, Dixit, SOS Titanic, Terra Mystica, UGO, Palmyra, CV, Glastonbury and Coal Baron. In addition, two further orders from Germany are on their way to me with a further ten games but they’ll appear as November acquisitions. My unplayed games list has unsurprisingly increased from 29 to 35 this month and game of the month was a fairly easy call with the new William Attia game, Spyrium, taking the trophy although SOS Titanic gave it a bit of a run for its money but I’ve only played it solo so far.