On the boardgames front: January is OxCon month and all of my boardgaming too place there.

I gave Civ a try only to remember that I’d played it once before when I was half way through the game. (It is quite fun, but I’m still not sure that it is a good game as it feels too much like a game of “Who will blink first”).

I got in a rare game of Seafarers which I proceeded to win by a large margin after discovering a 6 gold and a 5 gold next to each other on the same turn.

I also managed to play half a dozen games of Dead Rising which I’m growing increasingly fond of. The expansions have arrived now so I’m going to have to try it with some other races and custom warbands.

I entered the Settlers tournament and managed to come third (after new rules were invented to tie break the tied tie break for second place). I’ve now managed to come consistently near the top for a few years, so I’m feeling quite pleased with myself.

Finally an honourable mention to Cities, an interesting tile laying game. Sadly it completely lacks interaction. A collection of tiles are selected in a random order, but each turn each player gets an identical tile and places it in their own play area.

Next up, RPGs: A GMing heavy month for me, I’ve been running Fantasy Craft with a Mythic Roman setting on Tuesdays. I’ve been very happy with my players as they’ve taken the plot in directions I hadn’t imagined and kept me on my toes. I think I’m getting better at improvisation. I’ll try to get a proper write up done after the final session next week.

The monthly Traveler game continues. We broke into a disturbingly insecure military base to sabotage the Giant Ancient Anti-Hyperspace Weapon Of Doom.

Finally I ran the adventure from the new D&D Red Box. It went down reasonably well, although one player was unimpressed with the dungeon crawl slog making things somewhat boring for his character (the party tank).

On to wargaming: No plays this month, but great success with my New Year Resolution, which I have so far failed to break.

If I have a quiet evening in, then I will do some painting.

Some nights I manage 10 minutes, some I manage 2 hours (and quite I lot I’m out and thus not subject to the resolution). It has meant that I’ve got through a couple of dozen skeletons, mostly finished a dozen elves, and have another dozen skeletons almost ready for the QuickShade stage. Decent photos coming soon!

I’ve also half assembled the Magnus the Traitor starter set for Warmachine after two people asked me to start playing the game enough times.

One of my acquisitions was a copy of Dwarf King’s Hold. This is a fun little game with fairly simple mechanics, but a fair amount of tactics. I’ve played through the first scenario twice now, once as each side. The undead won both times, but it was a close thing on the second game. I’m looking forward to giving scenario 2 a shot.

The figures are great, but suffer from Mantic’s usual problem of not having enough bases (none in this box). The box set comes with a £5 gift token which I’m going to splurge on getting some more (since I have various Mantic freebies that came without bases).

The other worry I have about the figures is that you really need to glue them, which might limit the set as a mainstream board game (which is a pity, because I think it would suit a certain segment of that market).

I’ve painted up the skeletons by applying some Army Painter Skeleton Bone primer, slapping on some Warlock Purple for the cloth, painting a few bits in black and then dry-brushing a dark metallic paint on the weapons and shields. Then it is off to Strong Tone Quickshade before painting the bases dark grey with a coating of Ash Grey flock then adding a little static grass before applying a matt varnish.

I’m quite happy with the way they have come out, and it has encouraged me to dig out the box of undead that I still need to paint from last year. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a few more days to work on them before the end of Easter.

I haven’t been about to give it much of an outing yet — I had a weekend full of friends visiting, movie watching, Dragonmeet attendance, and GMing of Fantasy Craft — but I did manage to squeeze in a couple of games last night.

I started out attempting the tutorials, but they seemed geared up more to teach Blood Bowl then the control system the game uses, which I felt left to figure out for myself (possibly I just wasn’t looking in the right places).

Once you get the hang of it, the controls are pretty easy. Point to where you want the action to happen, click, and the system figures it out. So click on a square to run to it, a teammate to pass, an opponent to block or blitz and so on. Just don’t get scared off by the range finder when you have the ball, clicking an empty square will still move to it.

So, with the controls figured out, what next?

The AI seems pretty easy, but that could be a combination of using the default settings, having played the boardgame version before and possibly finding “my team”.

I’ve never given Chaos an outing before, but they have a nice balance of stomp and speed. We’ll have to see how they handle themselves if they come up against a Dwarf team (who are as stomping as you can get but about as fast as an injured snail).

The fluff is good too. It has nice graphics and amusing commentary.

Overall? I’m looking forward to getting into it a bit more, and then venturing out onto XBox Live to see how I handle myself against intelligence that isn’t artificial.

The event is geared around four types of gaming.

• Video games (not what I expected and disappointing enough to not mention further… except that I’ve just found a photo that suggests there was more to it then I managed to find)
• Wargames (a fair amount going on, but a distinct lack of Epic — my current obsession
• RPGs — lots to see here. I managed to get a game of Paranoia in, and picked up copies of Savage Worlds and Starblazer Adventures. Savage worlds was cheap with a couple of fluff books that appealed to my desire to run Pulp games, while Starblazer takes my current favourite game system (FATE) and applies a space opera setting to it. Now I have many more games I wish to run.
• Boardgames…

Boardgames were the biggy here. I entered the Settlers of Catan competition and surprised myself by coming second. Meanwhile Declan won (no surprise there) but also pulled off first place at On the Underground and took the overall prize. Jim won Puerto Rico, and come top five in the Settlers and overall (he was the top player not to play in all three tournaments). My excuse for not doing well overall is that I only entered Settlers (quite a good excuse in my opinion), but next year I think I’ll take a punt at three.

This result means that the group of people that I play boardgames with most often were victorious at the majority of the tournaments, and took away over half the price money (or vouchers), which is impressive, but suggests we spend too much of our time doing this sort of thing.

Still, it gave me a change to pick up Days of Steam, a big collection of expansions for Zooloretto and Twilight Imperium.

With a weekend of boardgaming coming up in two weeks time (did I mention we spend too much time doing this?) I might be able to break some of them out and see how they play.

At this point we discovered that the rest of our party (ah, the joy of sharing a car) was just starting a game of Lord of the Rings. There was only one thing to do!

OK. I lie. There were two things to do. First, we ordered some food (It is quite handy that OxCon takes place in a pub that sells decent food).

Second, we played another game. I’m a big fan of Ticket to Ride, so I was quite happy to give the Nordic edition a try.

There are some good things to say about the changes to the basic game they made for this edition. The smaller board means that you can have a three player game and still use the double routes (which in other editions requires a four or five player game). The cards are very pretty (having art featuring snow covered trains) and spotting places where people I know come from is always nice (I have a fair few friends that hail from that part of the world).

Unfortunately, what they did to the rules was insane. The game has become massively overcomplicated. I’ll ignore a few minor points that serve to complicate things further, but my main bugbears were that:

Locomotives cannot be used as wild cards, except on routes involving ferries (where you can also substitute any three cards instead of a locomotive). On these routes you must play a minimum number of locomotives equal to the number of ferry spaces (with the three card substitution in effect for them).

Complicated? Yes.

There is also one route of nine spaces that is worth a whopping 27 points. This is a grey route, so you need nine cards of any one colour. It doesn’t use any ferries, so you can’t use locomotives as wild cards. However, it has a special rule, unique to that piece of track. Like ferry routes, you can discard cards which combined will count as a wild card. Unlike ferry routes, the number is four cards, not three.

The game also has tunnels (as in the Europe version of the game) which may require you to spend extra cards to complete a route (or be force to take the cards you have played back and waste a turn).

I thought the game was needlessly complicated, which is a shame as I really enjoyed the original, Europe and Märklin editions. I won’t be getting a copy of this one (I do want to get my hands on a copy of the Swiss edition to give it a try though).

I ended up winning it, but it didn’t feel like a satisfying victory. Having completed the three routes on my ticket cards, I noticed I had five red cards in hand and set about drawing enough to go after the nine route. Over the course of a few turns, I pulled out a sixth red card and enough detritus to build the route.

Two turns later, I had exhausted my pool of trains, which ended the game.

Since I had completed my tickets and scored the 27 point route, I had a lot of points – and since I had very rapidly pulled the game to a close, the other two players were left with a stack of incomplete tickets (which counted against their scores).

So I ended up having a run away victory thanks to one slightly sneaky tactic — it didn’t feel like a well earned win.

With great timing, the Lord of the Rings players managed to finish off their game and join us in time to watch the last two moves of the final round (along with the score counting).

This let us all head off with a minimum of waiting around. There isn’t much to say about that, except perhaps to comment on having an unlikely discussion about the gas mixes and pressure when diving, and how that relates to Dr Who, on the drive home.

It was a fun OxCon, and I’m sure I’ll be going along next year. Keep an eye on the website and see if you can make it. If you enter the competition, you can play a couple of great boardgames against people who are really rather good at them. Between rounds, or if you don’t enter, you can try out other games that people bring along with people who love boardgames. It’s a great way to discover a new game (or decide that buying the Nordic edition of Ticket to Ride would be a mistake!).

First though, I managed to squeeze in a quick game of Galaxy Trucker before we were due to start. It’s a game I’ve played before, but not for a while – I’m going to have to make Jim dig his copy out next time we have a gathering of some description.

Settlers came and I didn’t do very well in the first game. It didn’t help that I got cut off from a build site I had built to (every painstakingly gathering up the resources) the turn before I had the chance to play the cards to build my second (not counting starting placement) settlement.

The most memorable game of the day saw me use a no more than one brick or wood as building material (I used lots of other resources though). When I did have brick and wood, it usually got traded away. I ended that game with three cities and sixteen development cards (one of which was Road Building, which is how I got the settlement without spending wood and brick on roads). That was one of the wins I’d managed to get.

I had a lot of close, tense games during the day, some of which didn’t end in time. I gather the day saw more time outs then any other OxCon. I don’t know why though.

Still, a game that times out gives you more tournament points then a loss, so it worked out relatively well for me.

I was also lucky enough not to be playing Markus (who has managed to win every year I’ve been and a number before that) or Declan (who had a pretty poor day).

So, I think it might have been more down to luck then skill that I managed to pull into third position (also known as second place discounting Markus).

I’ve got a lot to live up to next year though.

I’m not really sure what to make of this one. It is an interesting game, but I don’t think any of the players in the session I joined had figured out how to play strategically when we had finished.

Each round starts by each player choosing which of six cities to tax (with some made unavailable by random selection, so there is one city per player).

Each city produces different goods, and random allocation of tax discs (which have different selection arrows) mean that cities don’t produce the same combinations each time).

Two players can’t tax the same city, but a player who goes later can start a bidding war with someone at the city they wish to tax. The person with the highest bid gives that many guards to the other player, who has to move (at a cost of one guard per space).

In theory, if you run out of guard cards, you can sacrifice points in order to acquire more to pay off your debt, but none of us did that as we had no shortage of guards.

I don’t know if that was due to us not having good enough strategies, of it is just an effect of playing on the basic boards (the six cities are double sided with one side being recommended for more advanced players).

Each player then turns the tax disc in their city to point at the goods the city produces which they want. Some goods are actual goods, which can be exchanged for points. Others add more guards or influence your turn order in the selling phase.

In the selling phase, each player picks a shelf (which has a number of slots on it, marked with a colour and a bonus score). They then fill as many slots on it as possible. The other players then take it in turns to score points for the remaining slots. If the shelf is filled, the person who selected
it gets the bonus.

This makes it a tricky business to try to score as many points as possible, while forcing other players to put their cubes in low value slots, and to make it impossible for other shelves to be entirely filled (to deny the possibility of the bonus to other players).

I’m not sure what to think of this game. I enjoyed the one shot I had of it, but I don’t know how it will hold up under continued play. I might have to see if I can find a strategy guide to see if I’m missing anything about it.

Saturday was Puerto Rico, and the less said about my performance there the better, it isn’t my best game, but I managed to make several boneheaded moves during the day that left me cringing afterwards. I didn’t bother to try to figure out my ranking.

Around the Saturday competition, we managed to fit in a few pick-up games. Dominion proved to be very good, at least initially. Describing it by comparison to other games is difficult, so I won’t try.

In Dominion, there are three types of cards (yes, it is a card game).

• Money
• Victory points
• Actions

These are all oragnised into piles in the middle of the table (one pile per card name. So all the Action: Market cards would be in one pile, and all the Victory points: 3 cards would be in another.

Each player starts with a seven of the cheapest money and three of the smallest victory point cards in their deck. These are shuffled and a starting hand of five cards is drawn.

Each turn a player can play and action card and then can buy one thing.

An action card will have one or more special effects. It might allow cards to be drawn, or allow a section action card to be played – but with double effect. Some will hurt other players (such as by making them discard cards from their hand) and some will be useless under current conditions.

When buying, a player looks at the number of coins in their hand, and then takes a card from one of the face up piles and adds it to the discard pile.

Then they discard their entire hand, and draw more cards. Play then proceeds to the left.

The game is one of balance and timing. You need to add money cards to your deck in order to afford more powerful cards, you also need action cards because their effects are so powerful. Of course, if you haven’t bought any victory point cards when the game ends (when three piles of cards, or the pile of Victory point: 6 cards, are exhausted) then you’re certainly going to loose.

The problem is that if you have too many cards that are not money, you won’t be about to afford to buy the cards you want (since your hand of five cards won’t have enough coins in it to afford the good stuff). The same problem applies to action cards.

This all means that it can become a fairly strategic game.

To make things more interesting, the game comes with something in the order of 25 different types of action card – but only 10 are used in any given game.

This means that the combinations of cards that are available changes, so games can be quite variable.

Unfortunately, when selecting the cards at random, we found that they would often turn up sets with one very powerful combination effect in them. When that happened, everybody would tend to blitz those two or three card types and the game would end very quickly and without a great deal of satisfaction.

We found it worked better using the preconstructed sets in the rulebook.

I don’t think I’ll buy this one, but I will play it again. Having had half a dozen games (more of them quite short), I’d suggest that every circle of gamers should have a copy. My opinion might change after I have another dozen games though.

Photo credit: Trevor Coultart

Copies are selling on eBay for quite insane prices, so I’m probably not going to be able to relive that particular part of my childhood through that channel.

Happily, Games Workshop have produced some rules that are supposed to recreate the feel of the original game. So, despite my intentions to aid the Green Tide in conquering the galaxy, I might just have to invest in a couple of squads of Terminators and some of those nasty Genestealers in order to build myself a pseudo-Space Hulk set.

Hopefully, it will prove to be a good system for quick games that don’t require much in the way of set up, and keep the measuring down to a minimum. I have quite a few friends who like board games, and this might turn out to be something that will appeal to them.

So when people suggest a game of Arkham Horror, Order of the Stick or Shadows over Camelot, I’m last to say “yes”, and in the case of SoC I’m usually crying “Oh no, please not Shadows over Camelot”. This weekend, however, I bowed to the will of the group and gave it another try.

It turns out that this game is much better when you aren’t playing as the traitor (the possible random player who works against the group while trying not to look like they are an enemy) during your first go at the game when you are still learning how to play.

It also turns out that if you play after you’ve had a few drinks it rapidly descents into an exchange of pseudo-Arthurian speeches designed to identify which cards have been drawn by the other players.

It would be simple to say “I drew a grail card” or “I’m putting a one point card on the Black Knight attack spaces”, but that is against the rules. Instead we get “Verily, My Lord, I hath news of the Grail!” and “My Leige! The Black Knight hath caught his foot in his stirrup.” Bewards to imbibing too greatly though, else phrases such as “My-th Leige! Thine Blacketh Knight hath caughteth his foot inth hith stirrupth” might start arriving at the table. (Maybe we shouldn’t go to Camelot – it is a very silly place.)

Anyway, we roundly defeated the forces of evil that surrounded Camelot and I was left with a much better opinion of the game.

I’m still not fond of collaborative board games in general, but this is better than most – just so long as you aren’t struck trying to learn it without helping the other players win, as the traitor must.