RogerBW's Blog

For the sixth year (having skipped 2020 for obvious reasons), a bunch of us without family commitments got together for boardgames.

This is an actual tradition now (I've been jokingly calling it one since I started doing it in 2015). Several of my fairly-local gaming friends don't have much in the way of family commitments, so I invite them over; we were six altogether, including a couple I haven't seen in person since probably early 2020. So that was good.

We started with Among Thieves, also known (I think not unfairly) as "Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: The Game". It's another of those weird releases from Indie Boards & Cards that I picked up from them at Essen because I was being paid in product, but which I've never seen anywhere else. Nobody is trustworthy, and there are incentives for all sorts of weird behaviour. Only the second time I've actually got it to the table – it's 3-8 players, I'm unconvinced it would work at 3-4, and at 5-10 in an untrustworthy mood I usually get out The Resistance instead – but I had a great time.

(Note to self: make a player reference card with the various ending conditions on it.)

Then Flamme Rouge, on a promo course (Buonocore Boulevard). It's an odd set of constraints but I ended up making the most of it and winning (though my sprinteur was a long way behind by the end).

(I did work out a new way of setting up quickly: find and make a stack of the next five or so track tiles, and pass them out for other players to join together while I search for the batch after that.)

Finally V-Commandos (now renamed V-Sabotage thanks to a legal threat). It's been rather too long since I played this at all, let alone in person, and I probably didn't do a great job of a combined setup/teach – but the players had a good time anyway. (Scout (me) and Spy went through the Explosives Factory like a dose of potassium chlorate, while Sapper, Sniper, Medic and Officer had a tougher time in the Station.)

I invented this particular meeting and I'm very glad to have been able to do it again, as a break from wall-to-wall Christmas and as a way to see people I don't see often enough even in normal times.