29th October 2025
It was a busy nearly Halloween session with 17 gamers playing 8 different games, a few of which had a spooky theme.
Fancy a cozy game of introverts and their book collections? Then A Place For All My Books is just what you need. Having been offered up on our Discord beforehand, 4 players decided to puzzle out how to rearrange their existing books and gain more without draining their social battery too much. As a mix of pattern building and worker placement the game has players arranging books on their player boards – representing their apartments – and making the occasional foray into the village as represented by the main board. Movement and action costs are performed using a social battery which is charged up within the apartment by sorting books and admiring their collection, but is drained by having to head out into the world and interact with it. The apartments are split into 4 rooms, plus a backpack space for when you’re purchasing books, and there are main and personal goals which revolve around forming patterns with your books, such as having 3 stacks with red books at the top in your bedroom, or having 4 tall stacks each with a green and yellow book in.
Most of these are relatively easy to accomplish, the trick is in how many you can score in one Admire action. This is when you sit back, look at all your books and gain a nice boost to your social battery, generally the biggest boost you’ll gain. Stacks can be up to 6 books high, and other actions include Gathering, where you pick up a stack and re-distribute the books on top of other stacks, or Sorting where you take the top book off a number of stacks and create a new stack. These will also gain you small boosts to your social battery and will be the first few actions you take as you charge yourself up ready to face the world outside. Stepping outside costs 5 social battery points before you take any actions, and will also advance the sun, which acts as the timer mechanism for the game.
In the village are locations such as the Library where books can be exchanged, the Shops where Other Neat Stuff (records, boardgames and other items which generate bonuses) can be bought, and of course the Bookshop, where you can add new shiny books to your collection. All at the cost of depleting your social battery of course, so make sure you’re fully charged before heading out, or it’ll be a short and inefficient trip. Also in the village is the Park, where you can get a brief rest and recharge, but you can’t choose to go there, you only head there if someone else enters the shop you were already in. With only a limited number of shopping trips available from the timer it’s a case of balancing both sets of actions to ensure you have enough books of the right colours to meet the goals and have enough time to rearrange them as needed.
The mechanisms are not too complex, so Darren gave a brief teach, albeit in a circuitous manner, and it wasn’t long before Iain, Steve and Steph joined him in idly moving books around their apartments, with only 5 or 6 comments on why we were piling books in the bathroom. The first few moves were all about gathering, sorting and having a little rest before some attempts were made at admiring collections. In what some may call a predictable fashion the boys all either managed to misread their goals and found themselves only scoring 1, or started admiring prematurely in order to only score 1, whereas Steph wisely paid attention to her sorting and gathering to score several goals with her first admire action. This, dear reader, may have set a precedent for future admiration attempts.
A bit more book shuffling took place, accompanied by the soft murmurings of such sweet endearments as “Oh, there’s only one yellow in that stack”, “The red should have been on top”, and that old classic “Oh bugger, that’s not the kitchen”. Seemingly only in the deeper voices for some reason. And then someone finally felt they were ready to step outside and explore the Village (luckily no Rover ball was waiting to engulf them [editor note - a Prisoner TV series reference]). Books were acquired, along with a boardgame naturally, and successfully returned to the apartment without the anxiety inducing meeting of anyone else, and more sorting ang gathering commenced. Seeing one had survived the outside world, others soon began to make tentative forays into the hallowed realms of the book store, and also managed to collect boardgames, presumably ones with good solo modes.
However, it wasn’t long before the sun timer was closing on the end of its track, and some hasty shopping trips and re-arrangements took place, hoping to net enough points to make up for failing to grab the major accomplishments in a timely manner. Gentle reader, you may not be surprised to learn that it was indeed the boys doing this scrabbling, as Steph had clearly been paying attention to the requirements. As we all settled back into our deep, comfy armchairs to contemplate our libraries it was certainly Steph who came out ahead with her prestige signed edition of 62, followed not at all closely by Iain and with his Reader’s Digest 49, and Darren and Steve shuffling their measly collection of dog-eared paperbacks with 40 and 39 respectively.
After all the book shuffling it was decided that Steve should be introduced to the midden shuffling of Skara Brae, last played in session 111. Steph talked him through the intricacies of neolithic village management (no bookshops here, and the Other Neat Stuff was, well, not so neat) and house-cleaning, and after a brief reminder of the special tiles the game was off. It wasn’t long before the muttering began and the midden was piling up. There was some fierce competition for the coastal villagers as they were in short supply, and occasionally the muttering was broken by a triumphant cry of “I can get a COW!”. There were also some despondent noises from Darren as he was forced to take villagers after other players took those stone balls he’d been eyeing up. “They just make a mess though”. Softened slightly by the fact that he remembered to use his Tend Land card properly and often this play-through, and that he managed to have several deep cleans to clear away the midden those scruffy villagers kept depositing around his village.
By the end of the 4th round Steve had managed to get a good grasp of maintaining his village, but Steph was once again triumphant and emerged as chief of the Orkneys, closely followed by Darren who was by now honing his no-villager strategy from previous games.
Kathy had brought Ark Nova again and had no difficulty tempting 3 new players into trying this popular zoo building game.
With 3 novices it took a little while to explain the rules and get going but people quickly got the hang of the action card sliding mechanic and were soon building enclosures and filling them with animals. Reynaldo started well with some nice complimentary African and Primate cards. However it was Paul that was racing up the conservation track first with a lucky find of a new goal that matched his predator and companion zoo acquisitions. Kathy and Diego struggled to get such nice combinations and were cash starved but started expanding and conserving. Then Reynaldo was able to support some good conservation projects and overtook Paul on that track, so Paul added some new attractive animals and took the lead on Zoo Appeal and also Reputation.
The night was getting late so everyone agreed to have 2 more turns each and count up rather than wait for the score tracker crossover point, though it would not have been many more rounds further on. Diego added some high scoring animals in his last turns to be the biggest scorer on Appeal but Reynaldo was way ahead on Conservation. In the end as no one had managed the crossover when including end-game scores, it was Reynaldo on -14, Paul on -30, Kathy on -32 and Diego on -39. Which made Reynaldo a clear winner and everyone else pretty closely matched.
The third table played a quick game of Azul while waiting for their final player to arrive. Then got stuck into Habemus Papam with a novel theme about choosing the next pope.
Habemus Papam presents eight candidates for pope each with five characteristics (their leanings on church doctrine). Each player is assigned a public scoring card which indicates their desired characteristics for the new pope. The game is played over a number of rounds (up to five) and at the end of each round if a pope is not elected then one of the candidates is removed based on influence. Influence is the currency of the game but also victory points. You must spend influence to promote your preferred candidate, but not too much otherwise you are wasting points.
The spending of influence is coupled with cards, some of which provide very powerful abilities. These two mechanisms drive the game play in each round, with a push-and-pull to try get your preferred candidates into a position to be elected, and promoting the dominant characteristic which generates influence. There is one final piece, the hidden goal. These are mostly another way to score points, but a couple of them have game changing effects.
Four sat down to try this game and immediately something interesting happened, two players had three traits in common and none in common with one of the other players. This set up a lopsided position of mutual co-operation. There was little the other two players could do to stop the linked-pair from driving the tempo of the early rounds, scoring highly and relatively easily. It all looked like a settled game, but then the final twist. One player had the secret goal that eliminated everyone’s influence… resetting everyone to zero. Using this they swept to victory, although the elected candidate had few characteristics tt matched that player’s public card - that doesn’t matter as much as victory points.
The lopsided setup felt a little off, but this might be a quite unusual combination. As a table we mused that it might be better at five players, but after a single play who can say. It was interesting and another play looks likely.
The final table were the ones most on theme for the night with a game of Zombicide and then Mysterium Park, with the psychics solving a murder in a creepy amusement park. They finally switched to Railroad Ink Shining Yellow to finish off the night.
Zombicide was brought out at the start of this Hallow’s Eve session so a longer scenario “Escape Plan” could be tried. We had six characters on the go shared by 5 people. Neil chose slippery Josh, Richie chose fast moving Amy, James chose even faster moving Wanda (due to roller skates), Dan played Phil - a cop with a pistol, and Jeremy had two characters (at least to start with) - Doug and Ned who both started with pans.
In this scenario we had to find and pack 6 supplies and ourselves into the 2 cars and exit the map - simples. So we started by half of us rushing for the police car for some better weapons, whilst the other half opened the big building that dominated the map - spawning all the contents. Unfortunately this triggered zombies from the sewers to appear - which caused Wanda to be hit and drop her pistol. The next few turns saw Ned, Doug and Josh come to Wanda’s help - with only two pans between them - which were tossed between survivors as we tried in vain to whack the zombie! Whilst the others tried to thin out the other zombies, which was going well until Phil met a grisly end due to some spawning runners. With a quick rearrangement - Dan took over Doug and we carried on.
With the lone police car protecting zombie gone, many guns were looted from the police car, including double sawn off shot guns for Doug. Doug and Josh also jumped in the police car and tried to mow down some of the encroaching hoard - which was most effective apart from bouncing off the fatties, and ending up in a bad spot when a runner caught up with them and Josh wasn’t slippery enough.
Inside the building, looting was going well with rice, water and canned goods being found, as well as more weapons and a short lived Zombie hiding under some rags. The next disaster happened when Wanda, after looting the pimp mobile for Ma’s shotgun decided to skate off and use it against the big zombies, but got jumped and died before using it.
Doug had more fun running over zombies, whilst the remaining survivors, Amy and Ned stashed provisions in the pimp mobile and then drove off to help. Unfortunately things didn’t last much longer, the threat level had increased due to all the zombie splatting in cars, and we hadn’t thinned out the fatty zombies, which meant they had an extra go and claimed Doug. Soon after Ned succumbed, and then the lone survivor Amy went out in a whirlwind of bullets. We had stashed 2 of the needed provisions, lost 3 others due to deaths, but had racked up about 70 zombie kills between us, though Wanda only had one to show for it.
The next game played was another spooky one - Mysterium Park - where 4 psychics tried to understand the visions from Richie (who had died most recently in the last game). Anyway, it was not an easy task handing out useful visions, to everyone, and James had a difficult time figuring out one of the innocents and it took 3 attempts. Deciding the location where the crime did not take place was much easier for James, but unfortunately Dan (even with help from the others) still couldn’t guess the his location before round 6. As it was a few players first try and the game we moved onto the final phase and tried to guess the killer and location, but Richie has used up all his tickets (for getting new vision cards) and gave us a pair of cards that completely misdirected us - so we failed anyway.
Saying goodnight to James, left us four to play Railroad Ink Shining Yellow (out last session), which after a round of refreshing the rules, had us all putting down rails and roads like pros, snapping up the objectives quite quickly. In the end, Richie had made a few wrong turns, so ended up in last place, but the railroad crown went to Neil with a healthy 68 points and only 1 unfinished track.
The next session is the 12th November, do join in on Discord if you want to reserve a space on some of the pre-session game suggestions.
With the end of the year approaching a reminder that the club doesn’t run game sessions in December as people often have clashing activities. There will be a Club Meal at The Welcome Chinese Restaurant on 10th December, if you would like to join us please reserve a space and a deposit will be due in November.
The first session of 2026 will be on January 7th.
- Total Session Attendance: 17
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Board Games: 8