Sunday Board Games Club - Spartacus and Coup

It's been a few months since I was at the games club, so I was looking forward to it. One of the regulars, Jason, who brought Frag a few months back, had Spartacus ("a game of blood and treachery"):

No so much blood, really, but a fair bit of treachery, and we soon set about stabbing each other in the back, almost to the point where the action in the arena didn't really have anything to do with it. Quite a good game.

Jason also had Coup, which we played a few hands of:

It's an odd game, mostly bluff. You have two face cards and your actions are based on what cards you have, or rather, say you have. Other players can then call your bluff, but only at the cost of losing one of their own cards. If you have enough money, you can call a coup and a player loses a card. It took a little getting used to, but was quite entertaining. I'm not even a natural bluffer, but it soon brought it out.

An Afternoon at The Old Star

I joined a boardgames group on Meetup that meets at a pub near The Houses of Parliament, called The Old Star:

It's a very popular group, with nearly forty people. What's nice is that it fairly mixed, husbands/boyfriends bringing wives/girlfriends, making less of a "forty-year-old geezer" feel to it (careful!).

This week I played Notre Dame:

It's a resource building game of a fixed number of turns, the aim to aquire victory points. It's not bad and I held my own, despite coming last (the winner got 50-something while I got 39). My attitude with a new game is that I'm going to lose anyway as the winner is usually the one who knows the rules the best, so I just play to have a bit of fun, enjoy it and gain some experience.

The second game was Frag!

Basically it's Quake Deathmatch as a boardgame. The game's a bit brutal and you don't have much time to enjoy success before being fragged yourself, but it's good fun when you get going.