GamesReport: 18/25-Nov-12 AGOT, Mansions and Light Nights

Braaaiinnnsss!

At this time of year the weeks seem to pass quickly and I haven't found enough spare time to blog about our KoffeeKlub evenings. In part this is down to the heavier blog pieces on ASL Starter Kit after-action reports, but they're fun to play and write about and are likely to stay.

Our Sundays of late have been taken over by bigger games such as Mansion of Madness, Eclipse, Battlestar Galactica, A Game of Thrones (AGOT) etc. and on Sunday the 18th of November numbers were big enough for us to run both Mansions and AGOT on the same night. GaryB hosted AGOT on one table and we played a Mansions scenario, The Green-Eyed Boy on the other.

Stark's strategy to conquer Westeros isn't too clear...

Chris. Ready to beat-on fellow players with his guitar.

On the 25th of November we'd decided to take a short break from the bigger games and to roll-out a few lighter games in our first Light Nights session.

Light Nights

During the evening we played:

Zombie Dice
A very light push-your-luck dice game. The players are zombies trying to find brains and avoid getting shot-up too much. Fun for a couple of rounds, but then we shuffled on...

Game 1 - Zombie Dice

GaryG 16-2 (1st)

AndyA 16-0 (2nd)

GaryB 5

DaveB 0

Game 2 - Zombie Dice
AndyA 14 (1st)

GaryB 5 (2nd)

DaveB 3

GaryG 0

For Sale
A short auction game where the players bid for property cards in phase one and sell them off for big profits in phase two. A lot more fun than it sounds and too long since I last got a chance to play. 

Game 3 - For Sale

GaryG - 48 (2nd)

AndyA - 42

GaryB - 37

DaveB - 58 (1st)

ChrisG - 34

ChrisB -35

Game 4 - For Sale

AndyA -60 (1st)

GaryG - 55 (2nd)

Bluff
A firm favourite of ours that never seems to grow old. Highly recommended.

Games 5 to 8 - Bluff
GaryG (2x1st)

AndyA (1x1st and 1x2nd)

GaryB (1x1st and 1x2nd)

DaveB (1x1st)

ChrisG (2x2nd)

ChrisB

Karl (1x2nd)

 
Ca$h & Gun$
Not much to this one, but you do get to point foam guns at each other!

Game 9 to 10 - Ca$h & Gun$
GaryG (2x2nd)
KarlW

ChrisG (1x1st)

GaryB

ChrisB

DaveB (1x1st)

6 Nimmt!
An entertaining trick-taking game. It takes a little while to get use to and bye that stage you've probably lost already! :)

Game 11 - 6Nimmt! (low is good)
GaryG 50 (2nd)

AndyA 87

KarlW 50 (2nd)

ChrisG 77

GaryB 56

DaveW 36 (1st)

Overall Scores

GaryG 3x1st and 5x2nd

AndyA 3x1st and 2x2nd

GaryB 1x1st and 1x2nd

DaveB 2x1st

ChrisG 2x2nd

KarlW 2x2nd
ChrisB

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the first Light Nights session!

KoffeeKlub Evening 25th of November

This week at KoffeeKlub we're chilling out and playing some lighter games.

Light Nights will hopefully introduce you to a couple of fun short games that you haven't seen before...

...so if you get the chance please join us at The Black Knight this Sunday between 7pm and 11pm.

"Why don't we just wait here for a while... see what happens." Childs - The Thing

Light Nights @ The KoffeeKlub

GamesReport: 23-Jun-12 QCon19-Day 2

Welcome to the second of KoffeeKlub's daily QCon GameReports. If you haven't already caught the Friday GameReport you can check it out here.

Saturday @ QCon19

Clements once again was our friend and provided our early morning caffeine shot as we settled down in the board gaming area - so what to play?

Undecided, we opened with a quick game of Zombie Dice before moving on to Bohnanza, a light(ish) German bean trading card game from AMIGO Spiel.  (1997)

Beans, not cowboys!

Bohnanza is a game about trading, planting and harvesting different beans in order to make more money than your fellow players. Oddly, unlike most card games, you cannot alter the order of your hand except through trading cards away and immediately planting the cards that you receive from the trade. 

Beans of the same type must be planted together and beans yield different returns based on their value (depends on how frequent they are in the deck). 

Beans with no name?

Players are challenged early in the game as their two bean fields are quickly planted, so good hand management and effective trading are both key to your success.

Overall, Bohnanza should not to be taken too seriously. I have the German version of the game and much fun can be had during trading as players create their own English names for the different bean types...

...the Boxing bean, the Fire bean, the Shit bean and the Puke bean... we've heard most of the "translations" already :) 


Our morning closed with a second failed attempt to beat Pandemic. There was much discussion about what we could do differently next time... ...my inner voice was screaming - "drop these clowns and play it solo!"

Lunch was pizza and more Zombie Dice at the Parlour across from the student's union building.

Original, still the best?

After that we went our separate ways for the afternoon session, AndyA demoed Guards! Guards! for the Blackspindle guys and I headed down to the role-playing area for the Al Darragh Memorial Cup: Call of Cthulhu - A Shadow over Belfast. I thoroughly enjoyed the session, but find myself preferring the Trail of Cthulhu system ahead of Chaosium's original Call of Cthulhu. Multiple percentile rolls for plot-driving clues can be frustrating and Trail handles that sort of thing so much better.

We dined at The Other Place for our evening meal. It sounds vaguely supernatural, but actual offers fairly plain fare. Ideal for hungry gamers! 

Thunderstone Hooo!

Promises of a Pub Quiz and much alcohol drifted into more gaming as Swami kindly hosted Thunderstone, another AEG game. 

Thunderstone, similar in many ways to Dominion, is a fantasy deck-building game. "Fight the evils of the dungeon to prove your worth. Gain powerful weaponry and level into new and mighty hero classes. Claim the best cards and survive to take the Thunderstone."

I struggled a little to come up with the right card combos, but I did like the theme of the game more than I do with Dominion. Dominion may still be the stronger game and I'm not sure that you could justify having both in your collection, certainly worth a second look though.

Finally we made it to the bar and spent the rest of the evening drinking and playing pool. Home for 2am...

What state will we be in on Sunday for our Game of Thrones showpiece?

Find out in Sunday's GamesReport coming soon to a blog near you.

GamesReport: 22-Jun-12 QCon19-Day 1

It's taken me a few days to recover and catch up on my sleep, but as QCon closes for another year, the KoffeeKlub look back on an epic weekend of top notch gaming!

Friday @ QCon19

Zombie Dice

Coffees in hand we found ourselves a quiet little space in the corner for a few rounds of Zombie Dice, a recent purchase for Mr Bingers, having played it last weekend during the TTN event at Nerdtopia.

Zombie Dice is a light press-your-luck style game similar to the older Pass The Pigs or Can't Stop in that you are trying to advance your score (eat brains in this case) before your luck runs out and you lose what progress you've already made (getting shot three times). It ranks quite poorly on the geek but still served us well at QCon as an opener and a few times over the weekend as we waited for our food to arrive during lunch/dinner breaks.

Next up, having seen quite a few plays at our regular KoffeeKlub meetings, was Bluff (aka Liars Dice or the dice game played in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest).

Bluff goes all the way up to eleven!

We had pulled together two full sets and wanted to open with a Mega game to get our QCon off to a good start. People were slow to join us in the beginning, but cries of "World Record Muff!" seemed to do the trick and eventually we went all the way up to eleven!

Trying to predict how many 4s there were with 50+ dice being rolled proved tricky, so we followed our record-breaking match with a couple of six-player tournament games.

Great craic all round!

Tensions rise during the Bluff Final!

Trev - our dealer

Our first meaty game for the evening was AEG's Nightfall hosted for us by Trev from his own private collection. In Nightfall you take control of various vampires, werewolves, and ghouls and try to deal damage to your opponents in the form of wound cards which then clog-up their deck.

Vampires and Werewolves and Ghouls

I always enjoy this one, especially when we play with one of the expansions, it can be tough to learn for newbies though and we had a couple with us for this game.





Ideally players need a game or two before they really begin to understand what to look for in the card-combos.

Bah!

Our final offering for the evening was Pandemic, a co-operative game where the players are highly skilled CDC specialists working as a team to stop several virulent diseases as they sweep across the world. We'd played this one recently and failed in our efforts to save mankind... Would QCon be the turning point? ...hell no...... In fact we would fail in multiple attempts throughout the weekend to beat the game.

My only purchase at QCon was the expansion to Pandemic, On The Brink. We've provisionally agreed not to play this until we've beaten the base game first. Hmm...



All-in-all a great opening to QCon19 for the KoffeeKlub. By close on Friday we were tired, but still looking forward to a great weekend of gaming.

Watch out for Saturday's GameReport coming soon to the KoffeeKlub blog.

GamesReport: TTN Zombie Nerdtopia

Today the two Gary's met up with Sarah, Jackie, Posty and Chris from tabletopnorth at Nerdtopia in Belfast. First thanks to Nerdtopia for hosting and TTN for organising the gamesday. We had an epic game of Zombies with a couple of the add-ons shuffled in to add a little spice to the occasion. I know I'm biased, as founder member of TTN but they are really friendly bunch of guys and very welcoming. If you get a chance to attend one of their events you should make the effort. You won't be disappointed.

The Zombies game started very well though with six players it tended to be a little slow between turns. Posty and I skipped our first turns due to automatic cards in our opening hands, though we didnt mind as it allowed the others to put some city tiles down and allowing us to decide which way we wanted to head. The time between our turns was admirably spent in banter and less so in playing event cards on each other. The pain of losing a turn in a six player game can be extreme and when Chris played an minor card on GaryG the favour was repaid in spades when Gary made Chris lose the next turn.

I continued the viciousness a few turns later by placing a hospital and then playing a card which sent Jackie there and right into the middle of nine zombies. To her credit she was over the space of the next few turns able to fight through the lot coming out amongst the strongest players. Sarah focused her city building efforts on graveyard tiles only to have her character die from a zombie swarm after getting surrounded. The graveyard tiles are interesting and can be played as a separate game in their own right. They are a challenge though as we found out when I drew a card which filled every legal graveyard space with a zombie. We had about forty zombies pop into the game in one turn.

 My game revolved around finding items only to have them stolen by GaryG. Grr! I had a skateboard which allowed faster movement around the city a pick axe which I intended to clear out the graveyard with. I had to send GaryG all the way cross the city in retribution and an attempt to keep him away from the graveyard where he could have used my gear to great effect.

In a fit of madness Chris placed the helipad at the far end of the graveyard meaning that to win we had to fight our way heroically through the graveyard tiles. Most of us tried and failed to this, though GaryG stayed at the other side of the city and made a fair attempt to get to twenty five zombie kills and win the game. It was Posty who grabbed that honour with a legendary charge to the helipad. Epic.

Afterwards GaryG and I played a few games of Zombie Dice, and I really enjoyed it. I definately would buy this little pick up game. It takes minutes to play and is full of character. Thumbs up. KoffeeKlub and Tabletopnorth will be ganging up again at QCON next week. Say hello if you are around the tabletopnorth booth on the gaming floor.