back of a spreadsheet; back of the net

I recently took delivery of Bristol 1350 by Facade Games, after backing their Kickstarter last year.

Had the first couple of games of it whilst my sister was visiting it. It has a lot in common with the other Dark Cities games (Salem 1692, Tortuga 1667, Deadwood 1879).

They are all semi-cooperative, hidden role, social deduction games. I like them all.

Bristol - you are trying to escape the Plague in Bristol on three carts. To win, either get out of the city on a cart where no one has the plague, or if you have the plague, make sure everyone else gets it.

Salem - find the witches, or if you are a witch, turn everyone else in to a witch, or kill them.

Tortuga - control pirate ships and the island of Tortuga to make sure that your nation wins the most gold - or if you are Dutch that everything is even.

Deadwood, make sure your gang of outlaws has stolen the most money in round one but that you brought the best gun for the final shoot-out when your gang turns on each other.

The Captain especially like Tortuga and I think that's my favourite.

The Dark Cities games have some nice mechanics which work well with the fundamentals of the game as a semi-co-op, hidden role, deduction game. I particularly like the use of dual teaming.

In Bristol and Tortuga you are part of two teams. The team controlling the cart or the pirate ship and the faction you belong to (plague victim vs healthy or in Tortuga, British, French or Dutch). You have to work together to maximise the potency of your vehicle but make sure that your vehicle is being used to further the overall aims of your faction.

Bristol 1350 has a nice mechanic where the players control the speed of each cart at the risk of spreading the plague and you can pick up useful information about people from how they operate that mechanic.

I think they are all very elegant games.

Like all social deduction games they play better with a high number of players (not ideal for a time of plague). Bristol 1350 has a mechanic for introducing dummy players so you can play with smaller numbers. Tortuga plays fine with 5 (2 British, 2 French, 1 Dutch) but it's a different game than if you are playing with 9 (4 British, 4 French, 1 Dutch). With fewer numbers it's easier to figure out who is who and the game is then more about working the mechanics as a team to win. With higher numbers more time is spent working out who is who.

Salem I think only works well with more than 7 people. Deadwood I'm less familiar with but I think it also plays better with more people. I'm drawing a distinction here between plays differently with smaller or larger numbers compared to works well as a boardgame. I'd play Tortuga or Bristol with 5, I'm not sure I'd try Salem with 5.

As a collection the four games are amongst my favourite games. Will need to have a think about my top ten games but I think Tortuga is dead cert for inclusion.

Desert Island Games

You are to be marooned on a desert island with a group of friends or relations or your local boardgaming group. To while away the years until rescue arrives what boardgames would you take and why?

You get:

A life time supply of standard playing cards and a book of card games.

The John Lewis Classic Boardgame Compendium

https://www.johnlewis.com/john-lewis-6-in-1-games-compendium/p1993150

Your choice of eight board games including any expansions

I think my current pick would be

1) Carcasonne - a firm family favourite with really good replayability and works well with small numbers or larger numbers in case there has been some sort of feud and half of the party aren't speaking to the other half. A tile placement game with some great expansions. Lots of options about how long a game you have as you can add extra tiles. I think with all the expansion packs we currently have we have double the number of standard tiles.

2) Machi Koro - it's a gentle game with not much direct conflict and probably the favourite of at least one member of my family and it plays up to six. A deck building and dice rolling game which is a smart alternative to Monopoly.

3) Pandemic - firstly it has lots of expansions, it's a co-operative game for those times when you need to all be on the same side and it also plays a decent number. You are a team of scientists trying to stop an outbreak of disease killing everyone.

4) Ticket to Ride - a family favourite, although we don't play it often enough to have memorised all the mission cards so we spend the first game staring at our had trying to work out what we're doing. Build a deck to buy routes on a map, use the routes to score points and to complete missions for even more points.

5) Isle of Skye - a tile placement and auction game set in the Highlands of Scotland with lots of variable victory point conditions. You could play the game many, many times before you got the same group of victory conditions. It has Highland Cows on the tiles, this is important to some people.

6) Stramash - use decks of cards to move some marbles around a track and back to home, with the option for some mean-spirited sending your opponents back to their base. Easy to play but sufficiently deep not to get boring on replaying.

7) Hanabi - if ever a game will bring a group of weary castaways together it is this. A beautifully presented co-operative game with some elements that are similar to Bridge. You can't see your own hand, and only have limited knowledge of it from information that your fellow players give you. You all have to work together to put on a fabulous firework display.

8) Power Grid - I don't have enough time for large, long, complex big box energy themed games. Perhaps whilst on a desert island we will find the time to master this beast.

If I had to pick only one it would be Carcasonne.

As a bonus question, what board games do you think you could fashion out of materials likely to be found on a reasonably sized desert island? Could you remember the rules well enough?

If you can cobble together a game from locally found materials and the pieces from games you are taking then you can have those games for free.

Here follows a short and fluffy update on my holiday.

Family Visits

My sister and brother in law were in town for Easter. My youngest brother popped in for the weekend on his way to working offshore. He dropped off his dog for dad and the Captain to look after. Bluebird visisted for her last Easter holiday before the access arrangements expire. Dad had returned from Australia.

So I cooked lunch. Dad cooked lunch. Then I cooked lunch again. Lunch was eaten. One of the lunch was a pre-birthday tea for BB, who turns 18 soon.

Then BB went on a three day Introduction to Cookery course at the New Town Cookery School. It seemed to do the job of introducing her to foundational techniques so she can cook with confidence when at uni. Money well spent if it helps her manage her budget and eat properly, healthily and enjoyably. Judging by the quality of the food that came back she's learnt a lot.

Friends

Caught up with some old uni friends and their four children on Sunday. A pleasant lunch and a short walk followed by an ice cream. Four children are ruinously expensive.

Andy nearly joined us for one of the lunches after setting fire to his kitchen.

Drinking

Enjoyed some wine from Naked Wine and had a Grasshoper now that I've tracked down some white Creme de Cacao. Delicous stuff. Had a delicious bottle of Moet et Chandon 1998 to celebrate BB's birthday. Very delicious.

Modelling

Took delivery of my new painting station from Hobby Zone of Poland. The painting station itself is superb. Took about an hour to assemble with a little help from MLW. Holds all my paint. It should allow me to do painting in shorter bursts and the tidy up quickly so that I can do more in the evening without MLW feeling like she's living a Warhammer shop.

However, it doesn't fit in the box that I thought it would by about 5mm. I'd clearly measured the internal dimensions of the box incorrectly. This is a bit of a blow but good will triumph over evil. I've found an online bespoke cardboard box shop so I can have a box that fits perfectly in to the space I want to put it, which will contain the painting station and some other things and be out of the way and tiday.

Gardening

My Lovely Wife and I spent a few days in the garden. Mostly this was tidying up after the winter. The flat is on a corner over looking a park so lots of leaves get blown into it. Excellent mulch but there is a need to clear them away. A bit of pruning. Well quite a lot of pruning. MLW had stern words with the Naughty Clematis and I tackled the Excellent Good Rose. I'm redirecting its energies along the wall. I did manage to get myself entangled in it with a nasty combination of thorns under my arm and in my wrist.

Other pruning and staking and re-shaping happened. Generally the garden looks like someone cares for it now.

We got the trellis for the Corner Clematis up on the wall. This has been a job in the offing for several years. I hope the Corner Clematis now thrives in a it's blowsy purple way. Along side the Corner Clematis went a bird house. Bets are invited on how long this survives being stolen.

We also planted some plants. We have a new flowering cherry with interesting gnarly branches to replace the dead Yellow Broome. A nice white early flowering upright shrub and a striking evergreen perential with bright green and white leaves. Some new wallflowers and some bedding plants for the planters.

Board Games

With my sister and brother in law up there were board games.

I played the following

Power Grid for the first time. Long game but interesting. Put aside three hours or more to play it. We broke our session with dinner.

Blueprint - second time. A game based on architecture. Short game (30 minutes or so). Nice mechanic. Not deep. I feel it's going to be a pleasant warm up game, or one The Captain can join in with.

Camel Up - a short funny betting game based on a camel race. The Captain did really well with the betting and the counting. Particularly when the game is for 8 year olds and older.

Ticket to Ride Europe with the 1912 expansion pack. We tried one of the new sets of card. It worked well and Bluebird through a combination of luck and judgement managed the family highest ever score with a series of about a dozen new route draws towards the end of the game. For a few minutes I thought she was going to top 200 points.

Tsuro came out for some Captain gaming.

Machi Koro with the Harbour and the (new to me) Millionaire's Row Expansion Packs. The game works very well with the Harbour expansion. I consider that the base game. Millionaire's Row changes the ethos of the game. The base game doesn't have many opportunities to agrressively interfere with other players. Millionaire's Row gives you the opportunity to disrupt them in several ways. It makes the game more interactive but sneakier. I liked it, the rest of the family less so.

I return to work having had a good week off.

I spent the weekend with my sister , my brother-in-law and Bluebird in Bristol. Well most of the weekend.

I have the quarterly Unlock Democracy Council meeting on Saturday in London, so I got up early, went to London for the day.

A useful and interesting conversation about our strategy immediately after the election and for the coming year. I may have used the words capability and resource about a dozen times. Even when not being an accountant I’m such an accountant.

In between Unlock duties I managed to eat some food, chat with my family, drink some beer and play some board games

On Friday we played Forbidden Island which is a co-operative game based on treasure hunting on a sinking island. You have to work as a team to pick up four MacGuffins and escape the island before it sinks beneath the sea. Quite a simple game but good fun.

On Saturday night we played the Village. This is a competitive game where you try and steer a mediaeval family through three generations of toil. It’s very complicated. Complicated to the point where I was struggling to keep a track of what was going on. Very enjoyable.

We also managed a few rounds of Kingdom Builder, which was fine, enjoyable, but not as exciting as the others.

Finally on Sunday we played Pandemic. Another co-operative game, you have to work together to contain and cure four diseases that threaten to run out of control. This was definitely the pick of the bunch.

It’s made me think about developing a board game of my own and on the trip back from Bristol I made really good progress turning some vague ideas I’ve had into the mechanics for a game. More anon.

Listened to Rumours, whilst trying to explain why Lindsey Bellingham is a bell-end then ear-wormed myself with the Corrs entire back catalogue.

On the journey back I finished Battle Cry of Freedom. Thoughts anon.