Fridays wasn’t just Crackerjack for British kids on tv. Over on BBC2 it was tv shows like The Water Margin and Monkey also.

I loved those shows. Yes they were dubbed. But they had great stories that caught my imagination. The struggle between the rebels in Liang Shan Po against the corrupt officials. Or the moral tales and humour of Monkey protecting Tripitaka a monk on a spiritual quest to find some scrolls, aided also by Pigsy and Sandy, two guards from heaven punished by being changed to look like “monsters” and to help, if I remember correctly.

I look them up now and I’m surprised how few episodes there are of these two great shows. Time and fading memories seem to have made me think there were way more episodes.

Now grown up me has a new Friday routine. It’s Friday Evening Gaming at The White Lion. Last night was the first one of the new year.

It was just Jonathan and myself last night.

After getting a pint of our usual beverage (Heck we have a usual! I think we are regulars now. How did that happen?), Jonathan and I had a two player game of the just arrived House of Borgia.

House of Borgia is Liars Dice with a twist or two.

I’m not going to say much about the game now. It works as a two player game. But this is a game that needs to be played with the higher end of players that the game supports, so 4 – 6 players I think. So once I’ve had a chance to play the game with that sort of player count I’ll go into the game in more depth.

I will say the production values of the game are amazing. Really high quality.

Our second and final game of the evening was another new arrival Batman the Animated Series Dice Game.

This is Zombie Dice with a Batman theme. Steve Jackson games have gone the AEG Love Letter route here. Take a classic, great, fun game, tweak a rule or two but keep what made the original so much fun.

This version is limited in that it is capped at a maximum of four players. That’s thanks to its first change to the classic Zombie Dice formula. Players choose randomly one of the four villain tokens at the start. So you are playing as a Batman villain in this game. Your villain has a special ability. I had the riddler that allowed me to roll four dice at the start of my turn and a reroll them if they were all alarms. Jonathan had Pioson Ivy who could ignore one blue Batman symbol on a dice. You get the idea.

There are ten great looking dice (not thirteen as in Zombie Dice), and you play to thirty points not thirteen. Plus there is a rule tweak to what happens when you can’t draw any more dice.

I really liked these additions to the core game. They improve the game, while not getting in the way or over complicating things. The designers behind Dalek Dice should take note.

This could replace Zombie Dice as a light filer game for smaller groups for me.

I hope that Steve Jackson games have promo characters to release for this game. I’d get them. I’m going to approach AEG to see if I can buy 120+ of the Love Letter Batman tokens to use with this game to track scores. Now that would be a great pimp out for this game.

Having finished our pints of Thatchers by the end of Batman the Animated Series Dice Game, it was time to return back to real life, pick up a kebab, and deal with reality once more. 

Yes it had been a shorter session this time. But sometimes life dictates that is the case. Still a great evening though.

Last night saw our second Fenland Gamers Meetup of the holiday season.

Attending this one we had Jonathan’s brother and his wife (or Debbie’s mum and dad as they are also known) who were visiting from Malta, join us. They were “enjoying” our seasonal cold snap of the past week. Jo made a rare guest appearance, while Debbie’s bo Nath joined Debbie in attending. Which meant Jeff and myself were the only none Warren family folks there. 

The lovely large wooden table at The White Lion was easily big enough to accommodate use splitting into two play groups.

So Jonathan, Jo and mum and dad split off to play Imhotep. While the rest of us holed up in our castle to fight off the attacking horde of monsters in Castle Panic.

We were playing just the classic base game of Castle Panic, despite me having the expansions. Debbie and Nath hadn’t played it before, Geoff had (?), whilst this would be my second game. Besides adding in the expansions would require some fiddling around intergrating them.

I like Castle Panic. Well I must do if it’s still in my collection after playing it. Plus I bought the expansions for it. Which I wouldn’t do if I didn’t like the game.

It is a nice co-op game, brutal, but nice! The publisher/designer really thought about the game adding in variants, and ways to adjust the difficulty level up and down.

And although it’s a co-op, like Marvel Legendary if you all win by beating the game there is also a winner! In Castle Panic the number of monsters you kill are totalled up and the highest score is the “Master Slayer”.

We got over run and lost. But I don’t think we did that bad, we had nine monster tiles left in the bag. Granted two of those tiles were boss monsters. But still we were close to success I think. It was visible on the horizon. 

In a break from the rules, we did total up points for everyone, despite losing. Our Master Slayer was Jeff. 

After all that fighting it was time to head off to the nearest inn, and regale each other with stories of our heroic deeds over flagons of mead in Braggart Second Edition.

This was just being received by Kickstarter backers just before Christmas. Well I’m assuming that because John at The Hobbit Hole (my FLGS) had just got his box of the game that made up his store level pledge.

I have to say when John opened the box and saw what was inside, I swear he wet himself in excitement. He’s really a big fan of the game.

Yeah I bit and asked him about the game. Initially I wasn’t sold on it. Wait story telling I thought, I’ve got to make up stories? I have StoryCubes for that. Then John opened a game up, showed me the cards and how the stories are created and I was sold on the game.

This game is good fun. We ended up playing it twice. 

It has a little take that in it. There is hand management, simple drafting. Quick to learn. We learnt from the rules sheet, within a couple of turns had it learnt. 

I thought the game would take ages to play based on the size of the deck. But we got through that deck a lot quicker than I thought we would.

As you can see from the above photo some of the stories you come up with can be funny. And the interaction with the liar cards just adds to this.

Nope this is a fun lightish game, replaces Fluxx for me I think. And that’s despite Jeff winning both games.

Our final game of the evening was King of Tokyo. 

While we were duking it out for control of Tokyo. The other group were on their second game of Pandemic. At one point we over heard them say “go to Tokyo”. We chipped in “no don’t go to Tokyo! It’s a mess.”

Unusually for games I’ve played Jeff won with a points win. Usually the games have ended with a single monster standing on top of the corpses of their defeated opponents. 

We also only had one player eliminated. That player was Nath and it was Debbie that finished him off!

Ok by the time Jeff got his “boring” victory, none of us had lots of health left. It could have been my victory due to a knock out if I’d have gotten another go. But hey that’s the way the dice roll.

A really great evenings gaming. Let’s do it again next year!