There is now a <a href="/calendar" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Calendar page</a> on the site, which will list confirmed dates of future Saturday games days, as well as other events at the club (Vital Night, Christmas Games etc.).Saturday games days for 2025 are now up there. Christmas Games week this year will be on Thursday 19th December.<a href="https://www.newportpagnell-boardgames.org.uk/calendar" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://www.newportpagnell-boardgames.org.uk/calendar</a>

Dates For Your Diary

How many of us have played <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/13122/antiquity" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Antiquity</a>? For a 20-year-old game it continues fairly high on BGG's rankings, and I can see from <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/guild/collection/4412?own=1" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">the club guild's collection</a> that we have 4 copies between us; so maybe a few. It was new to me, but unlike <a href="/tournament/2024/round3" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Mosaic</a> earlier in the week, which everyone else has been playing for the last couple of months, I can sound reasonably clued-up about this one.We were a bunch of city states, in (I think) pre-Reformation Italy. Officially the aim was to be the best civilisation, obstruct the others and achieve our own specific win conditions first - so in that sense a bit like our chronological successor <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/242722/here-i-stand-500th-anniversary-edition" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Here I Stand</a>, which was being played downstairs. But practically the aim was to stay alive and not run out of food and building space, which we only partially managed.It's ultimately an engine building game, but with the rather nice twist that, the bigger it gets, the more your engine tries to tear itself to pieces before you can use it. The engine harvests resources, which come from the land around your cities; but each resource you farm/fish/mine leaves the land barren and useless afterwards. So your countryside steadily fills up with this "pollution", while your cities fill up with graves, for all the people you don't manage to feed. The idea is that this forces you all into a race for building space, while also racing to complete your victory conditions.That was the idea. Unfortunately, the starting setup means that you spend at least the first half of the game playing your own individual game with almost no interaction with other players. Possibly with 4 pros it would have been different; but only one of us had ever played the game before, and so it took us a while to get into a position where our territories overlapped. The Splotter game I know best is <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/552/bus" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Bus</a>, which is dominated by player interaction; and I was a bit disappointed to spend so long effectively playing a solo game in this one.So the main benefit of playing it in a group was the great company. And also the fact that we could all talk about what we were doing and learn from one another's mistakes. And of course the usual Splotter challenge of ambiguous bits in the rulebook: there were several points for which we found different interpretations, and had to go to the BGG forum to find the designers' clarifications.I had to leave at 4:30. Having started at 9:30, with an hour's break for Ousebank House's excellent breakfast, we were not finished by then. We had chosen to skip Karen's suggestion of a trial round, which was probably a good thing - for the rest of us, anyway - as she died first. Steve was on the point of dying soon after, which would have just left me and Claire to fight it out for the win. Which prompts a strategy tip not mentioned in Splotter's own offering: get the buildings that allow you to re-use the space.For the record, those thematically-dubious buildings are the dump, which just absorbs a load of pollution; the alchemist, which revitalises spent fields and mines; and the hospital, which brings people back from the dead. Or as Karen suggested, digs them up and uses them for research - though I think that may in fact have only started after the Reformation. I think that's another Splotter speciality - the thematic dubiousness? We also had woodcutters who needed wood before they could chop any wood, and miners with the Midas touch, who on their say-so could turn an entire mountain range to gold so that it no longer contained any stone at all.Anyway, Claire was onto these space-savers early on, and never seemed short of space despite not expanding her territory much. I got by more on expansion, but gradually learned from her example and built them too. Eventually, having avoided the early-death challenge, it looked like the size of our territory did eventually become important, as Claire looked further from her win condition than I did at the end. But either way, we both didn't die, which felt like a victory.We mostly said we would like to try the game again. I do like the mechanic where, the more you produce, the less space you have to do anything else. And I think if we had been a bit more sensitive to the early pitfalls we would have got through the solo phase quicker. But that long solo phase is the killer for me - games should be about interaction between the players, and for me there wasn't enough of that.Also at games day this month we had <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/182028/through-the-ages-a-new-story-of-civilization" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Through The Ages</a>, and a table who hadn't booked a game in advance - I think I saw them playing <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/118/modern-art" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Modern Art</a> at one point. And <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/334827/starship-interstellar" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Interstellar</a>, a kickstarter that Paul brought along with some very bulky-looking planets/stars on the board. No idea how that went - they seemed quite engrossed in it every time I went past. And <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/368966/ark-nova-marine-worlds" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Ark Nova: Marine Worlds</a> - which sounds thrematically dubious in the Splotter tradition, since you wouldn't really put fish in an ark. Or rather there's no actual ark in Ark Nova, so I guess it's fine.

Great write up Robin… as far as I am aware the last time Antiquity got played was at the December games day with Paul, Ian, Karen & myself. Had really enjoyed it & totally appreciate where you are coming from with the long solo section, I didn’t mind it as we eventually began to crowd each other but can see why others may not enjoy it.

I did find it was very clunky in terms of the amount of stuff you keep adding & removing from the board. Not very elegant in this day & age but it is 20 years old… not sure how that could be improved/steamlined.

Ark Nova was great, must go buy a pet monkey since Dan absolutely steamrolled us with his primates. Followed by two plays of Zoo Vadis & one of Concordia.

"Dan absolutely steamrolled us with his primates" - T-shirt quote?

3rd Aug 2024 Games Day - Antiquity

There were a few topical themes at the April games day: Container, in honour of the ship under a giant mouse-trap in Baltimore; and Weimar, a political game where the democratic parties fight to stave off the surge of populism. One of the tables downstairs had also listed Hegemony, but I didn't get down to see if they actually played that of if it was just a placeholder. They had previously listed their game as Monopoly, which had to be removed... For all(?) the Monopoly fans out there: this is a club that welcomes all gamers, but you may struggle to get sign-ups from our existing membership for that game.Anyway. The reason I didn't look around downstairs until late in the day was that I was very absorbed in Weimar. I'm actually reporting on 1½ games here: like many games of this kind, it has ways that it can be finished early. So, predictably, having set aside a good 7 hours for a full play-through, our first game finished early; we then started a second game, which was on course to go the full length when we ran out of time. But I left feeling like I could happily play it again and again and again - it was that good.As the name suggests, it's about the German republic between the wars. You play as one of four political parties: the centre-left and centre-right, who want to preserve the republic; and the radical parties (the communists on the left and the DNVP on the right), who want to bring it all down and take over. By the time I sat down, the radical parties had been bagsied by the two Davids, leaving me with the boring centre-left. "But being a Nazi is fun!" I protested - but Dave-E took the same view and had already assigned himself the fascists. Maybe a fairer reflection of our own political alignments anyway 🙂So I set about governing in a good socialist manner - not actually doing anything, but being very convincing in debates; while Richard - my right-of-centre coalition partner, devoted his time to ratifying the Treaty Of Versailles and other foreign affairs stuff. So we quickly suffered hyper-inflation and severe poverty, and the country duly collapsed into anarchy, triggering a premature game end.The assumption is that anarchy is bad for the conservatives and above all the government, because they get a big points penalty when it happens. So I didn't want anarchy, but the radicals across the table did. But out of all of us, the only one who'd actually been paying attention to how many points we'd all accumulated was my presumed ally Richard. He realised that he had scored enough to win despite the penalty for being in the failed government. So in this particular rewrite of history, Weimar Germany collapsed into anarchy in the early '20s, with the substantially culpable Centre Party emerging as the strongest player in whatever came afterwards. Hitler was still painting at the time so perhaps not such a bad outcome.As all Nazi afficionados out there will know, the DNVP was not the same as the Nazi party; and I have to say, it didn't look that fun. The one common outcome in both our games was that the DNVP came last. According to Dave-E, they come good later in the game, which we never really got to. But after the first game it was clear: the really fun party to be was the communists. So for the second run, when the centrists and radicals at our table exchanged places, I made sure I got the communists.Why is it fun? Basically, while everyone else was preoccupied with boring stuff like Versailles and inflation, I spent the second game trying to take over the state, largely militarily. For most of the time, I was just one turn, or even one dice roll, away from winning the game. I never managed it, but after the first game of faithful centrist stodge, this was a breath of fresh air.I started with a communist council in Munich, and soon got another one set up in Berlin. I just needed one more to win the game. Whereupon I was invited to join my socialist successor Dave-E in the government. Encouraged by my now heel-of-the-horseshoe radical friend Richard, I decided to give it a go. This led to an extremely fractious coalition, as my loyal comrades were betrayed by the establishment - whose socialist masquerade creaked under the strain of establishing their police state.Unsurprisingly, we were both booted out at the next election, and our more overtly right-wing successors promptly evicted my council from Munich. I quickly set up another one in Essen - in this game as with so many others, enjoying a somewhat over-inflated thematic significance. And I still had the cards to get the third council in place in Stuttgart - but for some thematically confusing reason, I was prevented from doing so by a vote of no confidence...And then we had to call time on the game. Even on points, which are supposed to be the winning mechanism for the centrist parties, I only lost the game by 1. In total, I think I failed to win the game by a whisker on four separate occasions. But what a fun way to lose!I genuinely think I could play this game repeatedly and enjoy it every time. For each party, there is such a variety of different approaches that each game can feel completely different. The card-driven central mechanic allows enough agency that, even if you keep drawing the same cards, you can do very different things with them each time. As the communists, I chose the coup-d'état "strategy"; but I could have used the same cards in parliament, building towards a majority government. The same was true in some form for each of the parties. I'd still choose the communists though 🙂So: part war game, part political game, part Euro game. It's hopefully got something for everyone. And probably worth trying on a Thursday night too: it seems like the premature finish will happen more often than not, and even if you have to stop before you finish it's still a lot of fun. One of most enjoyable games I can remember.

Glad you liked it.  Definitely one of my favourite games. 

6th Apr 2024 Games Day - Weimar

My first experience of "proper" board games was with war games, through my dad. It certainly lit a fuse, though the fuse led to economic and Euro-games; and with a few exceptions I've not really been into war games since then. On this games day, though, there was something for everyone, with war games, economic games and an assortment of space games, plus Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles, which I can't think how to classify.I guess war games come in all shapes and sizes. Napoleon 1815 is a 3-player game that claims to take 1-2 hours, though it turns out you can stretch that quite a lot further if you like, as the group playing on Saturday did. And there was Andean Abyss - the original COIN game - which apparently went on for 7 hours. According to Michel's summary, he spent much of this time figuring out how to play the game, then following some obscure strategic sub-plot that included trying deliberately not to win at one point - but ended up winning anyway. I guess we like our war games to run on a bit, which works well with the Saturday games day format.While all that was going on, I spent the day on two consecutive industrial economic games, with Automobile followed by Arkwright. I know Automobile very well, while Arkwright was new to me; though they had a lot in common - particularly the challenge of anticipating market demand, and what share of it you could wrest from other players. Automobile is by far the simpler game - that mechanic of spotting the gap in the market and muscling other players out of it is the greater part, while managing your own resources is a niggling sideline. Arkwright by contrast has far more diversity in the resource management side - and far more different resources to manage - and is thus more complex.I really liked Arkwright: it felt like a thematically faithful representation of the early industrial revolution. And it managed to do something quite clever, in retaining the importance of what other players are doing in the supply/demand tracks, while also allowing a lot of "building your own engine" mechanics, which gave a certain satisfaction regardless of how you were doing against your competitors. I felt that, even if I wasn't great at the direct competition element, I could potentially make up for it with how I built my production engine, to give me an alternative way to win. I would definitely want to try this one again.That said, Automobile remains my favourite game. It uses fairly simple mechanics to create a challenge entirely out of the competition with other players, of anticipating what they'll want to do early enough to outmanoeuvre them. As usual, the soundtrack from my fellow players was a mixture of marvel at what a great game it was, interspersed with mental meltdowns as they tried to plot the best course at each decision point. I don't understand why this is only rated at 7.3 on BGG: I guess for those who prefer the "build your own engine" games, there's not much in it for them.In both games I ended up following a similar strategy - broadly speaking, the "Ford" strategy, of manufacturing cheap goods in small quality and large quantity. In Automobile, this meant flogging more cars than anyone else in the "budget" market segment, while the others fought over scraps in the "luxury" segment. In Arkwright it meant investing in extensive automation and neglecting quality, and flogging my domestic surpluses overseas. So, very much subscribing to the ethos of these two games' respective paragons, Henry Ford and Richard Arkwright. It served me well in both cases. All in, these two games ran for the whole 10 hours of the day, so we mopped up our melted brains and headed home. The general consensus is that the games days are a great success, with widespread calls for them to run more frequently. What with the depth and diversity of games that they enable, and the chatty, friendly vibe in the daytime, it's easy to see why.

12th Aug 2023 Games Day - Arkwright & Automobile

We had similar numbers at this games day to previous ones, but this time consolidated into just 3 large tables. David-E had 5 or 6 on the next instalment in the ongoing series of 18xx games. This time they were playing 1861 - which is set in Russia. I was very tempted to sign up for this one but chose something else in the end: probably for the best as they were fully subscribed anyway.The second group in the main room was playing the trans-galactic grand strategy game Twilight Imperium. I'd never paid much attention to this very highly-rated game before, but it looked very interesting and I will certainly look out for it again. Given that this particular edition ran for something like 9 hours, I guess it will only ever be played on games days.With two games of large real-estate out in the main room, my group was moved to the side room for our even more table-hungry game: Sidereal Confluence. If you look it up in a dictionary (which I did), you find that this means "the act or process of merging with respect to the distant stars." Suitably confused, I read some of the rules as well, and was quite intrigued to see how this would play.It's set in space, and we each play the role of an alien race running an economy with lots of different resource cubes. But we're nice, friendly, pacifist aliens who don't invade or spy on or kill each other: the way we win this game is by building the most powerful economy, and dominating trade with the other aliens. It's an all-in negotiation board game, like Diplomacy with an overhaul for recent history. Where Diplomacy is set at the turn of the 20th century, when the object of negotiation was military alliance; Sidereal Confluence is a very plausible reflection of our post-Cold-War free-trade economy. Just with China and the USA replaced by a faction of space squids and a faction of interstellar pineapples, or some such.I've never played Diplomacy, but I'm told it can go on for days. By contrast, Sidereal Confluence could probably be played in an evening. With 6 of us, we were finished in well under 5 hours. It feels like there's potential for enormous depth and variety in the 6 rounds, and to get that in a relatively compact time feels like a great achievement. So I would definitely recommend this one.All of which meant that I managed to fit in another 3 games into the day: we raced through a quick game of Suburbia and an even quicker game of Perudo; and still had time for an introduction to Wormholes. This last is a new pick-up-and-deliver game set on a modular board, in which you're a space cabbie shuttling passengers around the galaxy or solar system or something. I can't see any particular new mechanics in it, but it manages to weave together a set of standard point-to-point stuff into a really enjoyable little game. It's a nice example of a short game (1 hour) that still manages to give you some nice tactical pondering.So, 4 different games played, and 2 great new ones discovered for me. And several impressive long games in play around the other tables: another games day well spent!

We played TI4 for the epic long game.  I did like the game although this one did go on a bit longer than planned.  We have to account for rules explanations, new players and lunch as well as Michael complaining and then gloating :)

Great game and will play again although I think I prefer Eclipse just for the shorter game time.

28th Jan 2023 Games Day - Sidereal Confluence

Just a quick reminder for this week's games day.<ul><li>Starts at 11 am.</li><li>The entry fee is £5 for members or £7.50 non-members.</li><li>Food will be available however book within the allotted time (12 - 2)</li><li>Sign up now for games so they can be arranged. (Use old website) </li></ul>

Dates For Your Diary

3rd Aug 2024 Games Day - Antiquity

6th Apr 2024 Games Day - Weimar

12th Aug 2023 Games Day - Arkwright & Automobile

28th Jan 2023 Games Day - Sidereal Confluence

Games Day Reminder for 28th Jan