Co-operative – Misery Farming

Hanabi: A guide to successfully marketing pyromania

February 28, 2016February 28, 2016LizzlesLeave a comment

Pair well with: a warm (green?) tea to watch your splendid firework display on a cold night.
Traitor rating: n/a (co-op game)

lots 323_Fotor.jpg

Hanabi is a test.

It’s also a co-operative game, and a pretty neat one. You have a hand of cards but, excitingly, you hold them facing backwards so that only your companions can see what you have. You, for your part, can see theirs but not your own.

The game itself is a test of memory and testing the bounds of limited information. Your goal is to use these skills to create the best fireworks display that humankind has ever seen! Failure can come in the forms of either a really shit victory (what, you wanted more than two small fizzley fireworks?) or a complete loss which comes in the form of all of the fireworks exploding. This presumably results in death, destruction and – even more significantly – shame.

You want to have a victory, obviously, but it’s really about a good victory. A spectacular victory! There’s a scoring system based on just how well you managed to firework, and you want to do well at it.

lots 311_Fotor.jpg The cards are a range of colours numbered 1-5. Effectively, what you want to do is put down sets of the same colour, starting with 1 and ending at 5. Simple. Except, you know, that bit where you don’t know what cards you have. Your turns are a battle between putting down your own cards if you think you’ve figured out what they are (or even sometimes if you haven’t! You maverick!) and giving very limited bits of information to one of your team-mates.

What was that we were saying earlier about how Hanabi was a test?

It’s a test in being able to follow the damned rules and not accidentally give away all of the information. Similar to Codenames, in a way. In Codenames the spymaster needs to constantly fight the urge to stare obviously at the correct clues, look shocked when the spies talk about something really obviously wrong (cough cough JUNGLE JAM) and to say “that’s right!” when someone gets their clue.

lots 315_Fotor.jpg — Typically you introduce someone to the game with the phrase “don’t look at your cards” and they immediately look at their cards. This gives you permission to make fun of them for the rest of the game.

In Hanabi the urge to cheat is somehow even harder to control, because you’re all working on the same team. Perhaps today we’re giving you both a review of a cardgame, and a review of our own skills as not-cheaters. (the conclusion of the latter review is going to be something like “points for effort”*).

One thing you need to try pretty hard to resist is to fish for information you’ve already been given. Because, you know, it’s kind of a memory game, amongst other things. That means you should probably be using your memory!

“Oh damn… did I already know that these two were green?”
“We can’t say!”
“Ok, but if I put in a request via the Freedom of Information Act?”
“Yes, those were green.”
“Scandal!!”

There are sneaky tricks to organising your cards. You can, for example, optimistically try to rearrange your cards without looking at them, perhaps by putting all of the 1s on the left. Which is fine, until you completely forget whether you’ve done that, and where you put the new card you drew, and what bloody number you were even trying to remember in the first place.

lots 312_Fotor.jpg — What? The cards just naturally fell that way

Is it maybe bending the rules a little to completely turn your 5 cards to a 90-degree angle? We’ll let your own consciences be the judge of that. Our friend Rich’s conscience certainly had nothing to say on the matter.

Picture the scene of a tense game of Hanabi (whether or not you’ve played before): Each player with five firework cards in their hand, all facing away. Each trying really, really hard to psychically send messages to their teammates about which card is super-important to play to get the next firework completed. If you’re not passing on information this turn then you can choose to either discard a card or play one into your firework collection. Of course if you play it and it won’t fit, perhaps if you’re trying to play a white 1 but you’ve already got a white 1 and 2 down in front of you, then a mysterious bomb somewhere gets a little bit closer to exploding.

lots 308_Fotor — Maybe finish the fireworks display BEFORE they explode

But if you discard a card, there’s a chance that it might’ve been really important. There are only two of most of the cards in the game, and only one each of the 5s, so if you accidentally discard two green 3s over the course of a game, for example, then you know you’ll never be able to complete the green part of the fireworks display.

This can lead to some very sharp intakes of breath as you see someone’s hand hover over a card to discard that you all really need. Again, bad work with the ‘accidental’ cheating, team.

Still, we’d love to be able to say that was close to the worst example of cheating in some of our games (we could, but it would be lying. Which is just another form of cheating).

“Right, it’s my turn. So, JUST AS A RULES CLARIFICATION, you guys… we can now feel free to discard any of the 1s we have for the colours we’ve already got 1s for, right? We don’t need any of those any more? For the colours WE’VE COMPLETED?”
“Um… yep?”
“Ok. COMPLETELY UNRELATEDLY, I’m going to spend my turn giving information. Lizzy, these cards are all 1s.”

lots 319_Fotor — Your card-holding’strategy’ is getting a bit complicated there, Rich

This kind of thing sends Lizzy, who despite all her anti-establishment tendencies is a stringent rule-follower, into twitching apoplexy.**

The game is a great challenge because of the really limited information that you have at your disposal. If you use your turn to give someone information, then you can only tell them one single thing about their cards: either you can point at all of the cards which have a certain number, or all of the cards which have a certain colour. But you have to tell them ALL of the cards of that type. So if you really want to give someone some information about, say, a useful yellow firework card that they have (perhaps that Yellow 2 that you so desperately need) then you can’t sneakily just tell them that that particular card is yellow, you also have to tell them any other yellow cards they might have which may well be useless as heck to you right now.

This can occasionally lead to a person accidentally trying to inform someone of a super useful card before realising that they have a second one of that type.

“This is a … oh shit, no, nevermind.”

Definitely not cheating.

lots 307_Fotor.jpg To make matters worse, the amount of times you’re allowed to give out information is limited by a bunch of clock-faced tokens. When you run out of those tokens then you have to either gamble and play a card, or discard a card to regain a token. As if the pressure of running out of cards and ending the game isn’t bearing down upon you enough already.

It’s a good game, and it can get surprisingly interesting in terms of strategy. And it’s really… fun. Not just in the way that working out a complex strategy can be really fun (let’s face it, we all know we’re in this hobby because we’re nerdy about that kind of thing) but also in a more general fun way. There’s laughter, there’s miscommunication, there’s failing miserably. All great qualities for a game to have. It’s a game for both dedicated games nights and for casual games down the pub, since it has the highly sought-after quality of using up not very much table space.

And there is just SO MUCH trying not to cheat.

“What? I wasn’t trying to give extra information, I was just making a general comment about how some of these games tend to pan out, that’s all…”
“Really, Rich…”

The real winner this week is board games. But also, a slightly guilty-looking team with some questionable cheating ethics.

* Except for Bob. Bob doesn’t even get points for effort. She’s even dodgy with Carcassonne.

** Her Codenames competitors sometimes refer to her as ‘The Fun Police’

Forbidden Island: I sink we need to get out of here!

December 20, 2015December 21, 2015Lizzles4 Comments

Pairs well with: An ice cream float.
Traitor rating: n/a (co-op game!)

Having not played Forbidden Island in a while, the game was reintroduced to some of the Misery Farmers through a friend. He’d been looking for some board games to get his maybe-not-quite-double-digits-yet children into. More specifically, he’d been looking for some co-op games to get them.

“It’s great! I’ll trick them into family bonding. They’ll like me if I can turn us all into a team facing an enemy of some kind. Unity against a common enemy!” He said, maniacally.

uozaf84 — The previous key to Rich’s popularity

You see, a couple of months ago said friend had been a very popular guy. He’d reluctantly taken in a stray cat at the behest of his friends and children, and soon realised she was a little bit rounder in the belly than he’d remembered. Four kittens later and Rich was the most popular friend / dad in town.

“OH HEY! We’ve just popped by to see you and spend some time with you and play some games with you… where are the kittens?”

Having eventually given the kittens away, (something something cat allergies, something something ice-cold heart) Rich needed a little something extra to win over the friends and daughters. Such beginneth the purchasing of board games.

One of the first purchases (which, of course, we insisted on testing *cough* before the kids tried it) was Forbidden Island. As described by our friend Dr-Photographer, and several others before him, “Oh, hey, you’re playing Pandemic, but easy!”

There’s a sign there somewhere which says “DON’T GO HERE”

But don’t run away yet! If you’re like us, then you know that there’s little worse for a co-op game to be than easy. Co-ops need to balance their lack of competitive dickery with misery, misery and more misery. You need to have to strive for victory! And, dear readers, let us reassure you right now that Forbidden Island is not easy.

These had better be some damned good treasures

What does give Forbidden Island its advantage (or disadvantage, depending on who you are) over Pandemic is not that it’s easier, but that it’s simpler. You play some cunning explorers, and your goal is to acquire four glorious pieces of treasure and then flee the Forbidden Island. But, presumably, the reason that the island was so forbidden in the first place is because it’s rapidly sinking into the sea, or at least it has a tendency to do so when explorers try to take its treasure. Damn.

One of the mechanics that you might be familiar with is the ‘Waters Rise!’ card. These are like the outbreak cards in Pandemic, but you have an outbreak of water instead of an outbreak of, you know, diseases. The cards are hidden among all of the treasure and bonus cards that you’ll be collecting at the end of each turn, which you’ll need a certain amount of to be able to find treasures. (Just like you’ll need a certain amount of cards to research a cure in… what’s that game again? Pandemic.)

Also at the end of each turn you’ll need to draw cards which list places on the island, and the corresponding places that you pick will either start to flood or completely go underwater and get removed from the game. You need to particularly hope not to lose Fool’s Landing (nobody’s arguing against the idea that the explorers are fools) where you ultimately need to escape via helicopter, since losing that means you’ll lose the game. There are also only two tiles on each island where you can find each particular treasure, so if both of those are lost before you’ve actually collected the treasure from it then that’s also a big fat LOSE.

One more way to lose the game is, as you’d expect, drowning. If you’re on an island tile that gets completely lost then you can hurriedly swim to a nearby tile, no problem. If all of the adjacent tiles have already gone? Then I’m afraid that this is the end of your adventure, traveller.

The difference between an area and a flooded area is, as it turns out, just that everything turns blue.

It’s a little unclear in terms of the plot why everyone needs to survive for the team to win. Perhaps the adventurers have a very limited but strong sense of morality. The game is a beautiful tale of human greed, but not between the players. Should we travel to this forbidden island? Yeah, fuck the rules! Steal this treasure? Try and stop me! Let the sea swallow up this beautiful island? Why not. But leave one of your friends behind? NEVER!!

The whole game has a great rushed, panicked feeling about it, as it should. The further into the game you are, the quicker everything seems to move, as getting through more ‘Waters Rise’ cards means that the island starts to flood quicker and quicker. And for every island tile that gets removed from the game, the corresponding card gets removed as well, so you’ll suddenly find yourself having a very small deck and a very small island, practically drawing the entire deck every turn by the end of the game.

To make things seem even more desperate, a player only gets two actions per turn.* Which, by the way, is phrased unhelpfully as “Up to 3”. Up to, but not including. The amount of times that we forgot this as we were planning in our first game is … a number high enough to be embarrassed by.

IMG_0526_Fotor One of the actions you can do is to try to stop the island from going completely under before you’ve high-tailed it off with the treasures. The action is to flip a slightly soggy land-tile so that it becomes dry land again, and the action is called ‘Shore Up’, but it’s a little bit thematically unclear what you’re actually doing. We think there might be a lot of mopping involved. But the amount of mopping you get to do versus the rate at which the island is going under is pretty heavily tipped in favour of the sea. As such, this part of the game tends to feel a little bit like one of those cartoons where a poor cabin boy is using a tiny bucket to chuck the water over the ship and back out to sea, even when water is crashing in around him faster than he could ever bail it out.

The game is fun, and it’s not yet one that we’ve mastered. We’ve only won once on ‘novice’ level so far, and we’re not convinced that we’d have done so well if the difficulty was raised at all higher.

IMG_0538_Fotor — Er, we’re running out of island very fast, you guys!

Some of the roles that you get to pick seem to be a bit pants compared to some of the others. But perhaps that depends on how you play. Also, this might just be an excuse we’re all throwing out for why we’ve lost so often. (I’m sure if we’d been playing with [insert any other role here] then we’d have won that game… *cough*)

We’ve also been on a bit about how similar some of the mechanics are to certain other games, so does it have an advantage? Well, it doesn’t have a legacy version for you to drool over, and the simpler rules do mean that there’s a bit less of a feel for strategy than a lot of games can offer. But it’s not all bad! The theme is good and you can get into character just a little. And the simplicity is in some ways a good thing- not just so that the rules are a bit easier for kids to pick up but also because it means the game moves really quickly, and it can achieve the desperate panicked atmosphere that it’s aiming for.

The real winner is not the island, nor the treasure, and certainly not us. It’s board games.

Edit: *It has come to my attention, thanks to the ever-wise Mac in the comments, that there’s a discussion on BGG about the actions. Consensus on the small thread appears to be that they do mean three actions rather than two, but now we’re not sure what to believe. Have we just been extra-hardcore this entire time? The only thing that everyone can agree on is the confusing nature of the wording.

You may take up to 3 actions each turn (could be 0, 1, or 2).

CAN WE TAKE THREE ACTIONS OR NOT??

*flips island*

Misery Farm on the Road: Essen Spiel 2015 Day 4 Field Report

October 13, 2015October 13, 2015Briony4 Comments

Exhaustion looms, but we’re still truckin’. On the final day of Essen Spiel 2015 we offer some final play-throughs and insights, including our considerations for Children’s Game of the Year.

Bob starts the day late, and hungry. The sheer number of games she and Chris have purchased has completely overwhelmed even her giant suitcase and they’ve had to rope in the aid of Friends With Cars to help lug twenty-something board games back to England. Additionally, Saturday night sushi had been completely de-railed when the previously-awesome all-you-can-eat sushi place failed epically in its mission to, you know, serve sushi to hungry gamers*. Deeply disappointing stuff. It took a generous liver-sausage roll and slice of pleasingly stodgy cake to fortify her for the day’s first mission: get Naïade to sign stuff, take a selfie, and draw us a picture.

Mission success, though with many a concerned look. Naïade is very French, and as such does not understand enthusiasm.

Day 4, game 1: A Study in Emerald

Sanity or victory points.. sanity or victory points..

First actual game of the day was the second edition of A Study in Emerald. The game is based on Neil Gaiman’s cult short story of the same name, which is set in an alternate Lovecraftian nineteenth century in which the royal family have been replaced by Great Old Ones. Sherlock Holmes is there, along with a number of figures from history and fiction. In the game, you play (secretly) as either a Loyalist, faithful to the ‘royal family’, or a Restorationist commie intent on bringing down Britannia as we know and love her. The board is divided into locations which allow certain actions with varying ease, as well as a draw pile of cards. It’s effectively worker placement combined with deck-drawing mechanics, to reasonably solid effect.

Bob liked it, Briony didn’t. It may be that Bob really wanted to like it as she’d bought it on day one and it had sold out, but equally it’s possible that Briony hated it due to being hungry combined with a shockingly poor game demonstrator explaining the rules**. Certainly it’s simpler than the ‘glorified beta test’ original, and much cheaper and cleaner to boot!

Team Misery divided, and wanting everyone to know about it. — Team Misery, divided and wanting everyone to know about it.

day 4, Game 2: M.U.L.E.

Next, Bob and Lizzy tackled M.U.L.E., the boardgame based on the 1983 Commodore 64(?) game. It is absolutely charming. It starts off as a farming/resource management game set on an unexplored planet called Irata, where all you have for company is a robot-mule worker and your fellow explorers. Then suddenly there’s a capitalist market-trading mechanic and a magic money-generating Wampus and a mystical mine of purple crystals which change value in each game round. The board is busy but in a very Stonemaier-Games way in that all the initially-confusing symbols are actually there to clarify any potential misunderstandings and remind you of available actions. The winner is the Bob with the most space gold, while the loser is the Lizzy who has forgotten what their plan was to maximise their resources.

After that economic thrill ride any form of grown-up game seemed an impossible task. Our brains were just too full to absorb any further information such as ‘rules’ or ‘strategy’ or ‘tasks’, so we took refuge in Push-a-Monster, the award-nominated children’s game of monster-crowding. It’s very simple: try to fit your monster on an already-crowded monster platform, without knocking any monsters off the platform. If you knock a monster off, it gets hurt and has to go to monster hospital, so everyone else gets a point. Best of all is the lack of numbered scoring. No one needs that shit. Instead the monster-points are different sizes so the player with the longest string of monster-points wins. The illustrations are adorable to boot; one of the monsters makes exactly the face that Bob’s robot boyfriend makes when he wants to not be part of the Misery Farm.

10505414_10152401408286161_9040811379626614324_n (1) — Stop. Including. Me.

Two refreshing, addictive little games later and we were ready for more. Not before stopping by the HABALINK stand though, where we found a strong best kid’s game contender in Treasure of the Thirteen Islands. In this tactical children’s game, you explore treasure islands by navigating with your finger, then attempting to follow the route blindfold on a grooved board. If your little airship falls into a groove, you get stuck! If you find treasure, you win! It’s adorable and at least one person bought it.

day 4, game 3: Cash and Guns

Somehow we next managed to grab an eight-person table for Cash n Guns, which was promoting its fresh expansion, a special-edition Cthulhu character with a tommy-gun, and foam Uzi machine guns. The expansion was rapidly scorned as unnecessary, as Cash n Guns is perfectly fun without any extraneous bullshit, and plenty of shoosty fun followed.

Meanwhile, Bob secured a game of ‘Acquire Giant Sausage’, which she promptly then lost by dropping half of it on a surprised passer-by. Strong work, Bob.

CQ9NwHVWwAAxSr7 — Pictured: Large sausage.

Day 4, Game 4: Architect

The road to victory. Deed-filled victory.

Briony and co., after being fairly disappointed by the experience of A Study in Emerald went and found a solid worker placement game. Architect fully ticks all of the boxes of worker placement, gasping drought, and being an intricately themed board game. Awesome. In this game you represent a travelling band of folk with different and useful jobs forming a caravan. The caravan travels around small villages and towns in a miscellaneous medieval European region, with a castle located in the centre. The band of travellers must fit the requirements of the specific village/town to be able to build or repair buildings generating prestige points.

Prestige points must be generated to go up each level of the victory track, which will eventually allow a player to win the ultimate prestige from the castle and win a contract. Or something. Honestly we needed a little more coffee to follow the broken English rules, but the game was fun regardless.

There are a nice number of mechanics in this game – the most unique of which is the ‘worker star’. Workers which you buy have different careers which are denominated by the numbers around the corner. After using them to build something you twist the worker around, showing a different number. Throughout a worker’s career their numbers go down, sometimes plummeting to zero if they’re going through stuff, maybe their wife left them or something.

The actions you are able to fulfil are dictated by the worker star also. But in the end, this game is about generating enough build points to get the castle’s favour. Fortunately the whole team was in agreement that this game was fun, quick, and exactly what we needed at that time during the day.

day 4, game 5: Elysium

So this was the final game of Essen. Sad times. A band of team Misery longingly searched the halls looking for an empty table where they were able to play a game on their ‘to play’ list, and much to their delight found a free table for Elysium.

The game is card based, and is heavily focused upon mythology. For anyone who likes 7 Wonders, boy is this your game. Half of the table was excited about its similarity, while the other half was excited because of its twist and difference from 7 Wonders. It ticks both boxes. In fact it won an award at Essen this year (and yet only two gaming tables! Why, Essen, why?!). Instead of representing a nation (as in 7 Wonders), you are a demi-god striving to generate enough myths about yourself to advance to becoming a full God. You have two areas where you may play cards: the mortal realm, and the immortal realm.

Each game plays with 5 gods, and there are 8 in total in the box so there’s variation, replayability and excitement! Your humble misery farmers/demi-gods played with Zeus (a classic), Aphesites (god of metal and hammers, stuff), Athena (owls, wisdom and the Hogwarts postal system), Ares (WAR hurr!) and Dickseidon (aka Poseidon but for serious, this guy is a dick and all his cards are dicks and the illustrations on his cards are dicks and his dick-in-ear scale is measured in kilotonnes).

The game plays out over 5 turns split into 3 phases. First is the ‘Agora’ (or ‘marketplace’. Yeah this game has got its Greek down, yo). This was helped by Lukacs, our excellent and friendly game demonstrator (helpful as we cannot read German rules). After that you move some cards into their immortal realms where their effects disappear but become sets (either by colour or number) and lastly the usual maintenance.

Screw your mortal resources, we need only pillars.

The cards have different coloured symbols relating to 4 actual, physical, coloured columns that each player has on their board. To take a card from the ‘Agora’ a player must have the relevant coloured column. Each card has effects, as you would expect – some of these affect only the player while others affect the player and the others players (not as good, obvi) You can also destroy whole coloured columns with barely an evil laugh. Dickseidon’s cards on the other hand usually do not affect the player but dick over other players (such as losing gold, victory points, discarding cards etc). This game is highly recommended, especially for anyone who likes 7 wonders, mythology and Dickseidon.

Rounding up the day

Finally we retired to a nearby hotel lounge, where our easily-bored but deeply punk friend Pat had secured a few big tables and crates of beer. Codenames, Potion Explosion, and Microfilms*** were all brought out and played to great enjoyment. Codenames remains an instant classic while Potion Explosion is shameless fun, and not just because Lizzy is hilariously bad at it. Microfilms needs… a more thorough explanation than we received. A cousin of [redacted], it relies heavily on keeping your cards secret, so if you don’t understand it you can’t ask what your cards mean. It has potential as a quick three-person game though, and our version comes with highly-professional art!

This weekend (FOUR DAYS IS NOT A WEEKEND -ed.) has been beyond intense, but extremely fun. Really we need to add ‘get enough sleep’ to our survival tips, but somehow between the beer, boardgames, and bratwurst that seems to be impossible. Besides, who needs that stuff when you’ve played upwards of 20 different games in four days? Especially when you’ve been playing with friends as good as ours.

We’d like to extend our thanks to the friends who came with us and made this trip as mad and brilliant as it was: Pat, Chris, Martin, Emma, Sina, Dave, Sam, Charlie, Gord, Mac, and The Reading Boardgames Social guys.** Final thanks to all the wonderful game creators, illustrators, vendors and demonstrators who work so hard and put up with the manic excitement of nerds like us. We’ll see you next year.

*Red Sun sushi, you guys make some delicious food but dear god expecting us to wait an hour for each of five courses is insane. We’re sorry we had to sic Bob and her mediocre German on you, making a complaint was physically painful to our English sensibilities.

** She also strongly dislikes deck building games due to unfortunate circumstances in her earlier years. It’s amazing how difficult it is to like a game again after you’ve cursed it to Hades for a truly terrible experience.

***On a side note, Microfilm has a character that looks hella like Briony. Is she really a Misery Farmer, or is she really the American spy?

Battlestar Galactica: or ‘how to legitimately take out all of those secret grudges you had on your friends with bullying and wild accusations’

August 16, 2015August 16, 2015Lizzles2 Comments

Pairs well with: Space whiskey for the humans, some kind of oil-based fuel for the toasters

In a fit of hostility we’ve decided that it would be a great idea to take on a traitor game two weeks in a row. Who can say why? Perhaps because once you’ve started stirring the resentment-pot then you might as well keep going until you have a delicious broken-friendship-soup. Or perhaps it’s because games with a traitor mechanic are bloody brilliant.

As far as traitor games go, Battlestar Galactica is one of the greats. A familiarity with the television series isn’t necessary, but is a good idea regardless of your position on board games since it’s pretty damn good. (What’s that? Strong female characters? More than one?! Don’t mind if we do!) As such, we’ve always found it a good game to whip out with a group of friends no matter their gaming experience or level of nerdiness. We have all kinds of gateway drugs board games here.

A willingness to play along when it comes to shouting at each other always helps, though. Like with a lot of traitor games, a lot of the real fun comes from player interaction, rather than clever mechanics and strategies. But that’s good, and there’ll always be space for those sorts of games too in our board game collections. Be wary about playing it with a room full of very quiet people though: we’ve all had mishaps where we have been the only person in the room accusing, thinking ‘maybe if I get this going, everyone will join in…’, when ultimately the room silently and awkwardly judges you. We have instead worked out through trial and error that you will require at minimum of two louder people (three if possible), who are poised and ready to create a shouting, energy-fuelled, accusatory positive feedback loop between themselves. As they get louder, and the claims get wilder, the other players in the room are drawn in like the event horizon of a black hole.

It doesn’t even matter if their accusations are true – say literally anything to gain the room’s unyielding attention. ‘I put it to you could have stolen that cargo before you baked the innocent unicorn into the birthday cake!’

Continuing, the theme is a really well-done sample of the well-trodden trope of “human-makes-artificial-intelligence. Artificial-intelligence-thinks “fuck-this-I’m-a-mother-fucking-bad-ass-robot-I’m-having-you-all-for-breakfast-except-I-don’t-even-eat-meat-because-I’m-a-robot-so-I’ll-just-kill-humanity-and-mount-your-squishy-heads-on-my-wall-as-a-trophy””. Humans are the “good guys” (say The Humans) and Cylons (or “robots” or “toasters”) are the baddies. There tends to be one or two toasty traitors per game, depending on numbers, and traitors will discover their role secretly with hidden cards that are given out at the beginning and in the middle of the game.*

Dr Photographer is a good guy. This time! — Dr Photographer is a good guy. Not in real life, maybe, but in this game.

No matter how much you sit your friends down and tell them to please, carefully read the page in the instructions about what to do if you’re a Cylon, and please all make sure that you understand it all and ask any questions before the loyalty cards are handed out and the game begins, there’ll always be one person who picks their loyalty card, looks at it, looks uncomfortable for five minutes and then has to meekly ask to see the rulebook and shiftily hide which bit they’re reading. This is not a subtle Cylon strategy and we recommend avoiding it if possible.

One downside that this game has, (at least, nobody we’ve ever played with has seen it as an upside, that’s for sure) is the way that it deals with certain numbers of players. Camelot, for example, makes the brave move of always having only zero or one traitor per game, no matter the number of players. (It also leaves you with this nifty ability to introduce and lose players mid-game if people suddenly want to join in- genius!) Battlestar has this determination to balance things out, which maybe goes a little bit too far. The Resistance does this to a lesser degree, but still it’s super fucking difficult when everyone is shouting ‘BAD GUY’, and half of the room actually is…

More players (5+) means more Cylons. Fair enough! That can be kind of fun. There are still more good guys than bad guys and there’s an extra level of fun you can have with two Cylons working together to defeat the pesky noble humans.

Playing Battlestar with 5 players is excellent! Two Cylon traitor cards and a lot of fun. Playing Battlestar with 3 players is pretty good too, one Cylon traitor and still enough people for a bit of the ol’ shouting and accusing. With four or six players the game starts worrying that maybe it needs to add more bad guys but also there aren’t enough players for more bad guys, so it says “Shit! We’ll introduce this sympathiser to add instead!”

Nobody wants to be the sympathiser. The sympathiser is a poor player who gets dicked over at the ‘halfway’ point of the game. If the human team are close to death then the sympathiser is a Cylon who sympathises with them, and gets put in the brig but is still on the human team. If the human team aren’t quite teetering on destruction yet then the sympathiser is a dastardly human who sides with the Cylons but can’t do the full range of Cylon moves. So in attempting to balance out the human vs Cylon ratio the game just selects a player and shits on them a little. Boo, sir.

A team that’s getting along fairly well might find themselves trying, on purpose, to lower a resource to a required level so that the sympathiser that’s about to be chosen will side with them. How does that translate into plot? It doesn’t, it definitely doesn’t.

“Why are you chucking all of that food out of the airlock, Sir?”
“Oh, I was hoping that if we get a food shortage then the Cylons will start to take pity on us.”

I don't mean to worry you all, but this card says — I don’t mean to worry you all, but this card says “Ambush”…

Is there also something a little shitty about being a regular Cylon who only gets their traitor card halfway through the game? After you’ve been trying so hard to stay alive this whole time? Maybe, but that does kind of work as a mechanic. You realise your programming, you realise you’ve just been trying to blend in with the fleshbags and earn their trust, and now it’s up to you to make them pay.

The plight of the humans is pretty damn difficult anyway, as it should be in any co-op game. You don’t want victory to come easy, you want all of your games to be a painful and horrible slog, clawing hopelessly at all your resource dials and trying to stay just about afloat in time to reach the end of the game. Our photographer bought this game over one evening when we’d requested a “small-to-medium sized game”, and he insisted against Lizzy’s protests that it would totally be fine. Several hours later he confessed that, actually, it was just so rare that he’d survived long enough during a game that he barely knew the full length of it.

The card appropriately titled “Loss of a Friend”

Perhaps Lily the dog had the correct tactic when she just waltzed in and knocked everything over. Good girl, Lily.

The gameplay itself has two important rules that aren’t mentioned explicitly in the actual official rules set. Firstly, whenever someone does anything it’s important to determine why, assume that makes them suspicious, and to yell at them for probably being the traitor. This is particularly the case when it’s something that you know they had no choice over.

“OH! You just happened to draw THAT random card, huh? Just what the Cylon would do.”
“OH!! You’re going to the bathroom NOW, huh? Seems like you’re all too keen to convince us of your human functions, huh? cough cough CYLON”
“I saw you touch the toaster this morning, to get toast huh? Lies. You don’t like toast. More like communicating via instantaneous up-link the invasion plans back to the general!”

Secondly, it’s important that you make the appropriate noises when you’re trying to blow things up. Every time one of us forgot to make the appropriate “pew pew” noises as we rolled a die to destroy a raider, we failed. COINCIDENCE?**

Appropriately for a team of misery farmers and their friends we ended up losing from too much misery. Losing any one of your four main ‘resources’ will end the game. It’s pretty clear how this works in terms of running out of population (“Guys? Where is everyone?”), food (humans need that to survive, apparently) and fuel (“Ok, ok, we’ll just float around in space… let’s see…”) but it’s not as clear what’s happening when you run out of morale. Mass apathy? Everyone just goes to their room and has a little sulk? Riots, perhaps?

Whatever it was, it got us good. It was an apt representation of our real life selves, as Sophie was just starting to fall asleep in the corner.

It’s a great game for several players and several hours, as long as you have a good team of people keen to accuse each other. Good luck, brave humans. Get your accusatory pointed finger at the ready.

*of course saying that traitor cards are handed out in ‘the middle’ of the game is a generous but loosely-used description. It’s the middle of the game in theory, if the mighty humans are heading for a full game and a victory. It is, unfortunately, also possible for the game to not even reach the point of handing out the second round of cards before humanity gets blasted into oblivion. It maybe wouldn’t be too shocking if this happened when there aren’t even any traitors on board yet.

** Yes.

Credit to Adam “Not the cylon for once” Photographer-friend for the photos. (Usually about 50% game and 50% hamster these days)

Shadows Over Camelot: Knights of the Round Board Game Table*

August 9, 2015August 9, 2015Lizzles5 Comments

Pairs well with: Mead (straight from the Holy Grail)

You know the hamster's in the way, right? Sigh. Of course you do. — You know the hamster’s in the way, right? Sigh. Of course you do.

There’s a lot to be said for a game with a traitor mechanic. And that’s not just because we’re a group of ruthless, soulless, naturally traitorous types who like nothing better than to yell accusations at each other across a table, floor or other flat surface. I mean sure, we are that, and such qualities do lend themselves to particularly enjoying traitor based board games, but still. There are also objective reasons to love a traitor game!

For example, co-operative board games, which the team love (see Letters From Whitechapel), can sometimes suffer from a bit of the ol’ problem where one person knows the game slightly better, or perhaps has a slightly better mind for tactics, and so effectively ends up controlling everything all of the other players do.

“Hmm, what should I do for this move…”
“Probably go throw a sword in that lake.”
“Well, I could, but also-”
“Yeah but seriously, the lake.”
“K.”

And nobody wants that.

There are several solutions to this kind of problem in co-operative games, but one trusty solution is the traitor mechanic. If there’s a chance that the person offering you advice is secretly a duplicitous scum bag trying to con you then you’re maybe not going to be so ready to take that advice after all.

One of the players has three feet, but that's probably not too much of an advantage in this game. — One of the players has three feet, but that’s probably not too much of an advantage in this game.

This review was written during a particular game of Camelot with Dr Photographer, three other friends not yet quite fully immersed into the board gaming world and a hamster. And Lizzy ‘usually the traitor’ Blogger, there for journalism and science. The Misery Farmers: Having Fun So You Don’t Have To since… earlier in 2015.

In Shadows Over Camelot the team all play a group of plucky Knights of Round-Table fame. There are several to choose from: these range from the old favourites like King Arthur and Sir Galahad to various lesser-known characters to the farmers such as Sir Tristan ‘the purple one’ or Sir Bedevere ‘the blue one’. (‘Bluedevere?)

With your character you get a die, a little knight to move around, and a character card with some sorts of special abilities and spiel. Our particular band of plucky adventurers for the evening contained a couple of friends who were still, as mentioned above, fairly new to and slightly wary of all of these board gaming shenanigans, but we had thankfully managed to rile them up get them into the spirit of things with a few rounds of The Resistance first. As such, everyone was ready and willing to start yelling at each other straight from the get-go. Characters were still being dished out when our dear friend Sophie started screaming:

“I’ve seen his card! IT SAYS TRAITOR ON THE BACK!”

Of course, each of the character cards have a ‘traitor’ side on the back with an alternative set of tips and instructions, for if the traitor ends up being revealed. A quick cup of tea and some reassurances later, we persuaded her to stop screaming accusations until the traitor cards had actually been dished out.

“You can be the traitor even if you’re King Arthur?”
“Nobody ever suspects King Arthur.”
*Lizzy looks guilty from a previous game*

Shadows Over Camelot is an excellent example of a traitor-based game. It has all of the best elements: mystery being one. The traitor card is shuffled into a deck with a bunch of ‘regular old good-guy’ cards and there are always more cards than there are people who receive them. That means that you have no idea whether there’s actually a traitor in the game after all! All of these wild accusations you’re throwing round might all be for nothing. Maybe everything’s fine! Right guys?

It also has the important traitor-game element of hidden cards. The actions available to any brave knight at any given time will be difficult to predict because, quite rightly, players are forbidden to say exactly what cards they have available to them, in terms of specific values and such. For example, one common card is a sword card, which can have a number from 1-5 on it, and the different numbered swords can each be used for very slightly different things. Players aren’t allowed to say specifically which kind of sword they have. (Although they will keep trying to forget this rule and someone (Lizzy) has to play the spoilsport and keep reminding them to shut the hell up)

Tremble before my medium-sized-swords, Saxons!

This does, of course, lead to questionable gesturing and hinting at points which definitely seems to border on maybe not quite following the rules properly.

“Right, I’m making an effort to get rid of these bloody Scots again. I’ve got some… little swords, kind of more like a variety of knives, really. Can someone come and help me out next turn with … uh… some medium sized swords? You know, swords that aren’t that big and aren’t that small… nudge… nudge nudge…”

The beauty of having the full range of options for any one knight hidden from the rest of the table means that it’s always a little bit unclear whether any given person is having a run of bad luck, a traitorous scumbag or are just being plain incompetent.

On her first couple of turns, Sir Sophie of new-to-board-gaming fame had trotted off to an area where she could only be of use if she had a 1-Sword card, and promptly in the next turn complained of having no such card and being unable to help. Instead, after only the mildest of chastising, her fellow brave-knaves directed her to the opposite side of the board where some “medium-sized-swords” could be useful instead.

Another round of loyal knightery, holy-grail finding and throwing things into a weird lake later (and other Camelot-themed activities that make the game up) and Sir Sophie’s turn came again. This time, she protested, she was very sad to say that she was unable to help with the current quest at all, the only swords she had on her were 1-Swords!

…

The keenest of detectives among you will notice that there seemed to be something suspicious afoot.

“Nope, definitely can’t help out over here.”

“Oh, golly gosh, did I say that I didn’t have any of those last round? Oh! Oh my, my bad. I’m just not very used to this game yet. I think the card must have been hidden behind my other cards, sorry chaps!”

It’s a real testament to the team’s faith in Sophie that they all still carried on for several turns believing that she might actually just be playing the game incompetently rather than be the traitor.

Sir Dr Photographer-friend even went so far as to formally accuse Sir Lizzy of being the traitor for what seemed to be ‘the-hell-of-it’ rather than to doubt Sir Sophie. EVEN THOUGH Sir Lizzy had been the only knight to have actually won the good guys any points that far in the game. (definitely not bitter!)

All of the elements of mystery in Camelot not only make for great yelling at your friends but also for great gameplay. The game can be won or lost depending on how many black or white swords fill up the round table at the end of the game, and good swords can be converted into bad ones if you falsely accuse someone of traitorhood or if a traitor remains hidden and undetected right until the end.

This week the brave knights suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Sir Sophie of Traitorville. Like any good co-op game there’s plenty of suffering and plenty of horrible ways for the good guys to die. We lost by drowning in enemy siege engines, and we lost shamefully early with no hope in sight.

Luckily, this isn’t necessarily reflective of the game as a whole. We’ve had a fair few victories and a fair few terrifyingly close losses as well.

The real winner is the traitorous scum.

*Sorry to mislead you all so early in the review. We actually played this on the floor.

Credit for the photos, of course, goes to Sir Photographer-friend.

Eldritch Horror: Misery, Doom, Tentacles. A normal Friday night in.

May 31, 2015June 1, 2015Lizzles5 Comments

Brutus rating: 1/10 knives in the back
Pairs well with: some very strong whisky. Strong enough to forget the horrors you’ve seen.

The Misery Farm’s friendly photographer-friend enjoys only three things: board games, cameras and suffering. This makes him a good misery photographer but a bad person. It has also adapted him to suit a game called Arkham Horror: a board game that brings nothing but relentless suffering. If you’ve not played it, then rest assured that it’s just hours and hours of trudging around dreary old Arkham before being eaten by a void-born tentacle-god.

When Eldritch Horror came out, Dr Photographer sold it to us as “It’s Arkham Horror, but fun.” Does being fun take the fun out of it? … No, it turns out!

It’s big and it’s long and it’s tentacley. The board is a great chunky world map which you traverse, and there are lots and lots of extra cards and tokens and doodads which make setting it up annoying but playing it extremely satisfying. Like many ‘big’ games turns take a while and are divided into phases. They are, roughly, Doing Stuff, Stuff Getting Done To You, and Bad Stuff Happens (or ‘action’, ‘encounter’, and ‘mythos’ if you’re being fancy and accurate). The aim of the game is to solve mysteries and stop the hell-spawned Old Ones from rising up and devouring the universe. You will sometimes often fail at this.

Eldritch is one of those games that gives you some excellent characters to work with if you want to get into the spirit of things with a little bit of the ol’ roleplaying. This makes it an immediate favourite for Lizzy already, and the rest of the team are just relieved that it’s a co-op and they can take a break from having to beat the crap out of her in case she gets ahead. Everyone each gets their own character (until they die, go insane, or the game ends) and a good group of friends will heavily encourage acting, an elaborately developed personality and a funny voice for the duration. The characters each have special abilities of some kind, their own set of stats and their own backstory.

Of course, the game also doesn’t shy away from other classic Lovecraftian themes such as racial stereotyping. There’s an Asian lady who’s… really good at martial arts? Ok. And the Nigerian’s backstory is about wise village elders and spirits? Yup. Let’s just… yeah. And let’s not put on voices for those characters k? K.

And then there’s our own personal favourite: Silas Marsh. One for the ladies. His thing is that he’s better on sea-tiles. What’s his intricate and carefully woven backstory? He… quite likes the sea.

What?

Yep, that’s it. He just really likes the sea, you guys. He comes from a small seaport town, you won’t have heard of it. It’s in New England somewhere.

"I'm basically just producing slashfic now." -Dr Photographer — “I’m basically just producing slashfic now.” -Dr Photographer

Good.

So as mentioned above, Eldritch Horror is a co-op game, hence the small “knives-in-the-back” rating. It still gets one knife however, in case someone gets a death pact and has to kill one of their friends.

darkpact — You see this face? This is the face of ‘I just found out what a Dark Pact does.’

… Pardon?

Yup! That brings us right round to the main theme of the review, the game, and indeed life itself: never-ending horror. As with most good co-ops, at the end of every turn someone needs to trigger what’s known as Bad Stuff Happens (‘mythos phase’). For Eldritch Horror this means turning over a card and letting all hell break loose. Not got enough monsters on the board? Have some more. Not got enough terrifying gates to otherworldly and evil dimensions, floating around? Have some of those, too. Not feeling like there’s enough DOOM floating around? Better advance the DOOM track! Frankly if you’re not feeling overwhelmed and panicky once you’ve resolved all the conditions of the mythos card then you’re playing it wrong.

If the DOOM track reaches zero, or you’ve got too many inter-dimensional gates spitting monsters all over the board, or maybe just if great Cthulhu’s great alarm clock was set a little early, then congratulations, the Old Ones have woken up. When that happens you are more or less fucked, unless you can pull out some really fantastic dice rolls and co-operation. So yeah, pretty much fucked. Enjoy being devoured.

But of course, there are several other ways that things can go wrong for a plucky gang of adventurers during the ‘encounter’ phase. There’s that aforementioned “death pact” and other terrifying conditions (you don’t need all of your limbs for adventuring, right?) and there are monsters – those tend to want to attack you if you get too close. Sometimes you’re just on a lovely, optimistic quest for a ‘clue’ and instead you wind up beaten and imprisoned. There are really excellent cards that describe what happens in each situation and which skill-checks you need to pass, and you’ll always find yourself shouting at your character as you read it out.

When the horror gets too much, sometimes you have to turn into a starfish.

“You see a terrifying crypt… good, that’s ok so far… you head towards it to explore… NO I FUCKING DON’T WHY WOULD I DO THAT… and suddenly an arm grabs you… OF COURSE IT BLOODY DOES I’M IN A SHITTING CRYPT WHAT DID I EXPECT? …Make a strength check to escape… OKAY COME ON ARMS OF STEEL… SON OF A BISCUIT HOW DID THAT FAIL?? …if you fail you get dragged underground where shoggoths pull off your arm and beat you with it.”

The game has an exciting balance of making you firefight all of the things going wrong and actually trying to scrabble your way towards victory. You may want to hoover up all of the lovely clue-juice, for example, depending on the current victory goal that you need to achieve, but you also don’t want to leave open five portals which more terrifying goat-spawn can clop through at any point.

One thing that seemed a little less balanced is the discrepancies between different numbers of players. We left Bob unsupervised once or twice and she had a few solo runs of the game, which she tells us was possibly a little too easy. Obviously we can only explain this by the game being easier with only one player, and nothing at all to do with Briony, Lizzy and the Camera-Man holding her back the rest of the time. It’s also absolutely impossible that she was playing it wrong. She’s a known rules junkie, our Bob, who never takes the ‘eh, that’s probably right?’ approach to little things like numbers of dice or how DOOM tracks work.

Big board o' horrors — Big board o’ horrors

We also didn’t have too much of the “one person controls all” problem that seems pervasive through a lot of co-op board games, but that might just be the particular team of plucky adventurers / arseholes that we are.

“Get the clue, we need it for the next victory condition!”
“… Hmm but I really want to explore Tunguska.”
“But the victory condition?”
“TUNGUSKA!”

It’s also got great replayability as you can choose from a variety of world-eating monsters to struggle vainly against, and which affect the gameplay quite strongly. If you fancy your misery Shub-Niggurath-flavoured, for example, you’re going to be spending a lot of time losing your sanity to suicidal cultists. If it’s Yig, you’re going to be poisoned by snakes at least twenty times. If you’re in a Cthulhu mood then I’m afraid you’re going to be spending some time in the sea. There are goat-spawn too, and hellhounds.

The expansion adds to this with a host of new monsters, crippling ailments, and a frozen wasteland. Hurray!

To enjoy Eldritch Horror, you do have to enjoy a bit of misery for your adventures. Luckily, this is right up the street of a group of board game reviewers who’ve called themselves ‘The Misery Farm’. We’d certainly recommend it to people who only hate themselves a little. Most of you, probably.

The real winner is Cthulhu. May the dark lord’s tentacles ever be long and terrifying.

Photos credited to Dr Photographer

The big bag o’ monsters was made during a game by the mighty-impressive Emma Field at JustAddCrochet, who is also featured in a photo as a starfish.

Letters From Whitechapel: The Case of the Illogically Numbered Board

April 19, 2015April 19, 2015Lizzles4 Comments

Brutus scale: Just 1 dagger out of 10
Pairs well with: Gin from your local 1880s London gin distillery.

Picture the scene. It was a dark and stormy night (only metaphorically, it was actually a disappointingly pleasant afternoon) and in the area of Bob’s living room designated as ‘Whitechapel’, four frightened looking bloggers and blogger-friends looked on as Lizzy cackled maniacally behind a cardboard screen and took up her role as Jack The Ripper.

Letters From Whitechapel is a mostly co-operative board game. Between one and five of you will play the noble detectives, trying to hunt down and stop the ruthless, psychotic killer before it’s too late. Another of you will play that very same ruthless, psychotic killer. That was obviously going to be Lizzy. Lizzy ‘always-the-cylon’, ‘never trust her in any board game’, ‘what the hell lizzy leave my goddamn skeletons alone’ The Ripper. Suits her.

She first saw this game on a Shut Up and Sit Down review and had wanted to try it ever since. She incessantly insisted that someone buy it for Gavcon- a mini gaming event hosted by some friends – until eventually the eponymous Gavin relented. She ended up winning the game in a raffle at the end of the night, and went on to play it eight times the following week. You get the idea; Lizzy really likes the bloody game.

The game uses what most people (more on that later) would call some very simple hidden movement mechanics. Jack The Ripper moves on circles, the detectives move on squares. Jack tracks his (or in this case, her) own movements secretly on paper hidden behind a screen-of-doom and tries to get from the murder scene to her house without getting caught. The detectives try to catch her first. They can do this by ‘searching for clues’ on the circles nearby to see if she’s passed through that spot in that round, or by ‘making an arrest’ if they think she might be there.

With us so far? You are? Good, perhaps it’s time to introduce the game from the other perspective. The detectives have all chosen their period-accurate roles. Chief Inspector Donald Swanson (no relation to Mr. Ronald Swanson, and played in this game by our own Dr Photographer) gets the role of Lead Investigator to start with. Everyone has excellent faith in his leading abilities, since as long as they’re half as good as the moustache in his portrait then it’ll be an easy round. The team quickly scrabble through the fairly administrative first half of the game – the instructions describe this as ‘HELL’ – and Lizzy The Ripper needs to decide when to make her first kill. Oh, yeah, that’s right. She gets her first kill before anyone gets a chance to try to stop her. The game isn’t about saving lives, it’s about the egos of the detectives and the serial killer.

She’s mildly indecisive about when to make the kill, possibly for suspense, viz: “… and suddenly! Through the cool summer night’s air you hear a scream… wait, no… sorry guys. CA-CAW! It was actually a seagull. Carry on.” Or possibly it’s just for a chance to make seagull noises. It will forever remain a mystery.

London's most wanted — London’s most wanted

Pool of blood. The scatty focus is supposed to be reflective of the detectives' state of mind. — Pool of blood. The scatty focus is supposed to be reflective of the detectives’ state of mind.

The murder happens at last and an apt transparent red counter is used to mark the pool of blood that’s spilling into the gutters of Victorian London. The team’s faith in C.I. Donald Swanson may have been misplaced, since it’s now revealed that none of the inspectors are very close at all to the crime scene. He’s promptly renamed ‘Chief Inspector Whoops’. There’s already discussion of whether or not they should give up and pretend that they didn’t hear the scream. It’s very far away. Probably nothing to concern ourselves with, nothing to see here folks.

As it became apparent when we played Quantum, Lizzy loves a game with some good and unexpected roleplaying potential. Letters from Whitechapel is one of these games. By the end of her first week of playing each of her housemates had developed a personality and a backstory for each of the detectives.

Our heroes are vaguely aware that a crime may have happened in the distance.

Poor Detective Inspector Edmund Reid’s wife has been arrested several times by mistake, and let’s not even go into the kinds of things that Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline has got up to. Those mutton chops hide a multitude of sins, folks.

You remember earlier we mentioned that The Ripper moves on circles and the detectives move on squares? And that the detectives can try to hunt The Ripper down by looking for clues on adjacent circles? Well, it’s time to have a few words about Bob.

Bob is a competent human being. Bob runs places, plays a damn good game of Glass Road and is doing a bloody PhD. She also has a rare condition called Letters From Whitechapel Blindness (in addition to a serious case of Turn Narcissism, as describe in Caylus). For the love of all that is good in the world, Bob cannot remember which numbered circles she’s supposed to be searching on. Really. It’s embarrassing for all of the players on the game. She’d never see us. Bob’s detectives must just have a really good sense of smell or something. They can apparently check for clues through walls and two streets away.

Coincidentally, Bob isn’t such a fan of this game. You may find her lying on the floor proclaiming that this game is ‘like Minesweeper, but shit’. It’s definitely one that has polarised The Misery Farmers. Briony enjoyed it rather a lot, maybe she’s just pretty good at ignoring the horrific murder of prostitutes disguised by a white wooden game piece, or indeed distracted by the intrigue of what could possibly be in Jack’s house? She reasons what if it’s totally normal, and he has like an elderly mother sharing the house, and has lace doylies, and flushes the toilet like a normal person? What if he has a pet cat? Was that the clue-cat all along Lizzy? Holy shit, Lizzy, was your cat trying to guide us to your capture?

Meanwhile, another prostitute has been murdered and another round has begun. The team have decided that the best way to make the game fair is to introduce a new rule: for every successful space The Ripper moves, she takes a small swig of gin. Only way to even things out.

“I search for a clue on 68!”
“You find a cat. It miaows.”
“Does the cat have any clues?”
“No, you fool, it’s a cat.”

“I search for a clue on 86!”
“Nothing here but a gentle breeze and a sense of bitter disappointment.”

“I search for clues on 75!”
“No you don’t, Bob. For goodness’ sake, that circle is miles away.”
“Oh, so it is.”

“I search for clues on 70!”
“It’s that same cat from before.”
“Oh damn. Does it have a clue this time?”
“Why yes! It’s playing in some entrails. YOU FIND A CLUE!”

The detectives eventually employ some excellent guesswork deduction and have narrowed down The Ripper’s hideout. They’re certain it’s on 78. For sure. They don’t have any clues pointing in that direction but they sure are confident. It just looks a bit shifty. Bob, meanwhile, continues to get confused over circles and squares. We decide that if Bob were a supervillain, we could all just infiltrate her lair by dressing up as a black square. She’d never see us.

The team gather their wily crew of detectives round 78 and are “staking out the joint”. No amount of darting through alleys will save our slightly tipsy antagonist now. She has to get home in a certain amount of moves or presumably she just falls asleep where she is on the streets and gets arrested in the morning, losing the game. Time is nearly up. She makes one final dash for it but the detectives have employed a reckless but effective strategy of making random arrests on every circle in the vicinity. Most of Whitechapel has been loaded into their van so far, included several pigeons, the cat from earlier and the baker’s son. Finally, she weeps and Briony makes the fatal arrest.

Lizzy took five victims: four of whom were in the game and the fifth of which was Bob’s gin supply. It was a victory for the good guys.

Lizzy loves the game. Bob does not. Briony is narrative-distracted.

Overall, it was a game that polarised the team. It’s not incredibly high on strategy, but can still be an awful lot of fun. Originally we worried that it might get a bit boring after a while, but the evidence shows that if you like the game then you’ll get a lot of play out of it. We awarded it only 1/10 on our ‘Brutus Scale’ because it’s not really the kind of game for dicking each others’ turns up at all. At least, not on purpose, and not easily.

The team line up for a round of applause.

Credit to Dr Photographer (C.I. Donald Swanson) for the photographs

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Day 4, game 1: A Study in Emerald

day 4, Game 2: M.U.L.E.

day 4, game 3: Cash and Guns

Day 4, Game 4: Architect

day 4, game 5: Elysium

Rounding up the day

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