Nimrods away

Last weekend I got together with a group of old boardgaming friends that I made (mostly) back in the 90s when I lived in Salisbury. We hired a couple of cottages in rural Somerset, bought bags of unhealthy food and drink, shut the doors and windows to keep the fresh air and sunshine out, and spent a long weekend playing boardgames.

Kicking off with Wingspan

First off was Wingspan, which was new to me. This kind of read-the-detail-on-every-card game is inevitably a bit bewildering first time through, and I was duly bewildered. But I like other read-the-card games in particular Oath, so it might grow on me if I ever play it again, who knows?

First railway game of the weekend

Next up was Irish Gauge. This was my copy so it was the first of several teaches I did over the weekend. I'm not sure if my teach was any good, despite hours spent preparing for such eventualities, but the game went down really well. This is such a clever yet compact business game, I'm really impressed. 

Five hours of 18Chesapeake!

Next morning, after a visit to the local ParkRun with Simon and Dave (where I made my best time in years, mainly thanks to Dave shouting encouragement in my ear) and a fried breakfast, three of us consented to play an 18xx game with me. Thankfully they were all familiar (if a few decades ago) with 1830 and so teaching 18Chesapeake was very easy. 18Ches is supposed to be a short game in the genre, but we went to nearly 5 hours. On reflection, I didn't push the loot and train rush as hard as I should have, and in general we're a fairly slow group. But you know, it was a holiday weekend after all, so no need to rush.

Cosmic Encounter – surprise hit of the weekend?

Sunday morning six of us sat down to play Cosmic Encounter. It must be about 25 years since I last played this one. In spite of preparing for this in the week before, my teaching of this classic was embarassingly hamfisted. However, playing it was a lot of fun! Wish I had more opportunities to play this in everyday life.

More Irish Gauge!

After a carvery lunch at the local pub, the weekend finished with another Irish Gauge session, introducing Nick to the game. I love it when a new player twigs to how the bag works. It's so clever and yet simple. Oh yes, and there was a quick game of Jump Drive with Dave after everyone else had left for home.

Thanks to Simon, Fiona, Dave, John, Les, and Nick for a really enjoyable weekend. I've been so starved of FTF gaming these last two years, this was like water in the desert. Results-wise, I didn't win a single game, and came last in most of them. The teacher's curse, that's my excuse.

This is the way (is it?)

My squadron of X-Wings about to (unsuccessfully)
take on the Mandalorian and his dodgy friends

Last week I finally returned to our local Star Wars: X-Wing club after a break of 2 years! That's a long time to be away from the game and I was more than a little rusty. Moreover, the game is currently going through a period of turmoil since Asmodee transferred it from from Fantasy Flight Games to little known Atomic Mass Games, who have seriously rattled many of the fans with some pretty extensive changes coupled with some clumsy PR. One of the biggest changes is to list-building, which now strongly favours named pilots kitted out with lots of upgrades. So my swarm of 5 generic X-Wings that I proudly took along was swimming clean against the tide, and was punished accordingly.

Back in 2017 I wrote a post wishing that FFG would introduce scenarios into X-Wing to relieve the monotony of endless death-matches. Well AMG have listened to my advice (haha!) and made scenarios central to their vision of the game's future, not as an option for casual play, but as the core structure of tournament play. Well my experience of the new scenarios amounts to a grand total of one play, but I have to say I'm not impressed so far. The idea of the scenario was to collect crates of "supplies" which had been carelessly left floating around in space. As someone quipped, it's not so much Star Wars as Star Garbage Collection. I admit I played badly – got so carried away with the idea of shooting up the other side's ships that I forgot to use my X-Wings as zero-G pickup trucks, but... isn't the pew pew shooting the whole point of the game? I'm no longer anywhere near being a hardcore fan of this game, so my opinion does not carry much weight, but the scenarios we have seen so far just seem a bit lame. I hope AMG will quickly develop some  scenarios with a bit more bite.

Time of Crisis

Actually not that much of a crisis.

I've been playing Time of Crisis solo against the bot from the Iron and Rust expansion. The bot is clever in the way that it abstracts the deckbuilding, so you are not fiddling with a deck and hand of cards for each AI player, which would be a pain in the neck. However, in the way that many of these bots work, it has a priority list of actions that you have to work your way down every turn, and the wording of this list is both expansive and sometimes unclear. However, I got the hang of it after a few repetitions, and had a fun game. My AI opponent was Gordian III whom I beat by a wide margin. I hope I was playing it right! I got Emperor fairly early in the game, and Gordian took a long time getting organised to challenge me. I wonder if one of the others would play more aggressively.
 

Shades of a classic

Marc Reichardt's recent article over on There Will Be Games, The Question of Consumption, hit a nerve for me, especially this sentence: "If it brings someone more joy to have Root and all its expansions sitting on a shelf in pristine condition, rather than actually on a table being used by them and their friends, hey, knock yourself out." This is me in fact – I do indeed have Root and all its expansions sitting on my shelf unused, with more to come via Kickstarter. However, this is not a situation that brings me joy, so I have made a start on actually learning and playing the expansions. Over the last few days I have played a couple of 3-way solo games with the aim of learning the Riverfolk company. In both games they came in a distant third against the Cats (who won both times) and the Alliance. The Riverfolk are very different, and playing them solo it is difficult to get a realistic sense of the trading that is central to their distinctive character. This week I plan to try them again against the Cat and Alliance bots, this time using the updates from the Better Bot Project which allow the bots to buy Riverfolk services.

This is what money looks like.

Anyway, when I was playing the Riverfolk Company I got into the habit of placing warrior pieces on their board face down, to indicate that they are functioning as currency. And this reminded me of a similar situation in Civilization where the playing pieces have two faces – one represents potential population, and the other face represents currency which can be used to help buy civilization cards. But you have to be careful – if either face starts to dominate you can run into trouble. If you can't pay your taxes (2 population tokens per city converted into currency) you suffer a Revolt, or if you run out of population pieces then you can't expand on the map. This is reminiscent of the way the Riverfolk's economy works – too many of your own pieces in Funds restricts your presence on the map. But not enough Funds and you won't be able to take the actions you want to. I wonder if Cole Wehrle was thinking about Civilization when he designed the Riverfolk Company?

On the shoulders of giants?

The past is another country

Blogger informs me that nimrods boasts 1,482 posts! Reading back over my past writings is a bit cringe-making, actually. Many of my attempts at jokiness come across as a bit silly. My comments on politics and current affairs seem naive or derivative, and don't really belong in a blog which is supposedly about board games (I feel especially ashamed when I look back at my comments on the so-called war on terror.) Likewise my occasional attempts at proselytising. Then even worse, there are occasional phrases which strike me now as unacceptably sexist. (Thankfully I haven't encountered anything racist or homophobic – yet!) As I come across such stuff I am feeling free to revise or excise as appropriate; I don't feel any obligation to preserve my words as originally written.

On the other hand, the short session reports scattered through the blog's early years are a really enjoyable trip down memory lane for me, recalling many long-forgotten happy times around the game table. May there be many more such times to come!

Blogging about board games since 2001

My very first entry on nimrods was posted on Thursday, April 19, 2001. Two posts actually – the first was a session report on a weekend-long play of Krieg! with my wargaming buddies Dave and Nick. We actually played it twice; I guess I had more stamina back then! The second post expressed worry that my games collection was overflowing the available shelf space, and shared a list of candidates for disposal. Some things never change – I recently posted a very similar entry on Instagram!

Nimrods was actually a very early entry into the board game blogging field. In fact I don't actually know of an earlier one. Mikko Saari started his excellent GameBlog in August 2002. Chris Farrell started blogging around that time, I'm not sure exactly when. So it's possible I was the first! However, unlike Mikko and Chris there has been a lengthy hiatus in my blogging career. My posting frequency slowed down a lot from 2007 onwards, and completely dried up by 2011. When I started blogging it was partly as a distraction from the boredom I was feeling with my career. However, in 2007 I made a new start, with a masters degree in neuroscience at King's College London followed by a PhD at University College London and a post-doc at Oxford. Neuroscience was pretty well all-consuming, and didn't leave much space for blogging. But I retired last year, and so have a little more free time and energy. So perhaps nimrods will come back to life. Let's see.