It’s our birthday! On Thursday August the 5th. There will be cake. Find the Facebook event here.

This month, I am interested in Waldschattenspiel, a boardgame to be played in the dark that centres on the light of a single candle. Gnomes must hide in the shadows and move between them. The light player closes their eyes while everyone else moves, and on their turn they get to move the candle, freezing any gnomes it reveals.

According to a reveiwer on Board Game Geek, it’s not a very good game, but it fails in a really beautiful way (Photo shamelessly stolen from there).

(Image by Feeling Croppy)

The next Gambling Lambs is on Thursday the 3rd of June. As ever, you can find it on facebook here, and join the group here.

This month, boardgame cover art has us all riled up. Cover art in boardgames seems to be like sound design for videogames: mostly neglected, underestimated, and given a tiny fraction of the budget it deserves, and with occasional good examples that really stand out. Too Much coffee Man Magazine once had a very funny feature called “Books Judged by Their Covers”. We may have to reprise it for games.

This month’s Gambling Lambs is going to have something slightly different, as well as the date, that is!

We’re really excited about it and we want you to be too, so make sure you come along this Wednesday 5th May.

You don’t want to miss it.

May’s Gambling Lambs got torpedoed by the General Election, and will now go ahead on Wednesday the 5th of May. Sign up to the event on Facebook here, the group here, and get regular updates or chat with us on Twitter.

New games this time include Through The Desert, which is a route building game without the rails of Ticket To Ride. The meaningless but flavourful bits of typographic garnish on the cover art are in fact Arabic letters that have been flipped, stretched and mashed up to make it prettier, and because of this nonsense we’ve decided it should be called “Unstoppable Camel Force” instead.

Board game box art is really awful, isn’t it?

(Tilt shift photo by bunchofpants)

This Thursday! It’s Gambling Lambs number 8. Infinite City was a hit last time, and will be there again. Maybe some new games too, but we never know. It’ll be at Lee Rosy’s Tea, on Broad Street, Nottingham, from 18:00. Come down. Find the details on Facebook, and hit us up there too.

(Image by the big bambooly, who does excellent long exposure work with light toys)

Yep, we’ve gone mobile.

In a nutshell, you can now access this site via mobile devices such as Android, Blackberry, iPhone/iTouch, Palm, Opera browsers etc. It makes it easier to have a look on here and keep up to date with our news.

If you hate mobile sites (like I know some of you do), there’s a switch at the bottom of the mobile page that you click flick and be taken to the default desktop view.

Here’s what it looks like in case you’re curious looking at this post from a desktop/laptop or something.

Thanks to everyone who came along last Thursday, it was great to see you all!

Firstly, apologies that we didn’t manage to get a game of Werewolves in at the end of the night. It seems as though certain games take a lot longer to play than we thought! We’ll have to think of ways to speed them up a bit!
We’ll just have to have an even bigger and better game of Werewolves next month instead to make up for it.

I’ve just put up the History page of GL that’s been sitting waiting to be published for a couple months now and I’ve never gotten around to it, you can find it here. So go and have a goose as it’s a wee bit of insight into where we came from. I’ll probably edit it and add bits when I remember here and there. Maybe.

Furthermore, as per my announcement on Thursday, I’ve finally opened the Forum for anyone who’s interested? It’s a way to get you GL’ers to mingle outside the safety of your monthly gatherings. Get together on there, discuss game ideas, share games you’ve found or just have a bit of a natter. You just go on right ahead and do what you do best!

And on a slightly similar note, I’ve put up a very basic and rather ugly unfortunately calendar which is here. There’s only the actual GL event on there at the moment, but if you’ve got something game’ish you’d like us to put on there, we’ll squeeze it in. Keep checking back on it to see if there’s something fun and exciting coming up!

And finally, as also mentioned on Thursday, this February’s Gambling Lambs celebrates the 3rd birthday of our wonderful games night. Now I know, I know, I can hear the cries of “Third birthday? Are you mad!? It’s only been 6 months!!” but you see, we mark the birthdays from the day we started DS Night (which is explained in the History section I mentioned above).

The idea is that whoever wants to, they bring things along for people to consume. Now this can be stuff you’ve made yourself (baking goods etc) such as cakes, cookies and pies for example, or you can even make little nik-naks if you’d like to give them to people as lovely gifts. Whatever you want to make and bring is fine. You don’t *have* to make anything though, it’s only if you want to.
There’ll be balloons, party poppers, streamers and other cliché birthday party titbits around the place, so when you turn up and wonder what the heck’s going on, think back on this post and remember!

Here and under the cut are a few pictures of the sorts of goodies baked and brought along to DS Night/Gambling Lambs birthday parties of years gone by;

“The Cake Is A Lie!” – Portal Cake from the hit Valve game, Portal.

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Snow has broken the world! Ish.

So, if you can’t make it tomorrow, we’ll understand. Ish.

Some of you might be worried about buses stopping tomorrow night, etc. Some of us will definitely be there with games, and we hope you can make it.

According to metcheck right now, it’s not going to snow any more until late on Friday:
http://metcheck.com/V40/UK/FREE/today.asp?zipcode=ng1

Most buses are running at least diverted services from town. If you want service information, NCT regularly update their facebook page here:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nottingham-City-Transport/144269959645

and their twitter account too:
http://twitter.com/NCT_Buses

Trent Barton are issuing service updates here:
http://www.trentbarton.co.uk/news-and-media/travel-updates.aspx

We also have a bevy of internet devices, so if you do come and want to check buses at any time in the evening, just give us a poke. If you’d like to receive more regular updates than this blog gets, join the facebook group.

(Photo by me. Composite made from long exposures of my housemate snowboarding with a great big maglite).

Gambling Lambs continues to be good fun, and I’ve stopped counting. Number 6 is this Thursday, the 7h of January, at Lee Rosy’s Tea Room, Broad Street, Nottingham. Look at the event on Facebook here, and join the group here.

Also, look at this:

How amazing is that for a Lego model? It’s by dasnewten on Flickr, who makes lots of stunning looking ones. Also make sure to check out Crimson Wolf and peterlmorris, who both also make incredible things out of Lego, as well as Lego Half Life by ORRANGE and Lego on Hoth by Avanaut. In the comments to this one, he shows the water tank he uses to make such good looking snow photos on such a tiny scale.

(CC image by ginnerobot).

At the December Gambling Lambs, we played a modded version of Werewolf for Christmas. We ummed and ahhed for a while over what to do with it, wanting at first to do something seer related with Santa: He knows who’s good and bad just like the seer, but can also give out presents. In the end we opted for something similar with just presents. Ross and I got a bunch of Christmas cards and doodled in them, with each to work as single use items during the game with specific mechanics. Some used mechanics we were already familiar with, such as the TNT suicide cracker working just like the hunter, and some were entirely new.

We set the game to fictionally begin on December the 23rd, kept track of dates, and gave out the presents to people semi-randomly during the night phase of the 24th. If we’d had more time, we would have had a present for every player, but as it stood we totalled nine. Keeping track of dates also meant the village had a very entertaining Christmas day lynching, and one on New Years Eve too.

Players who got presents kept them private, and all were single use items that made clear to the player when and how they could use them, and what effect it would have on the game. If you’d like to see the items we used as presents, click the read more link below.

Hat tips to:

Werewolves of Millers Hollow. The ouija playset cards basically use the same mechanic as the clairvoyance cards in the New Moon expansion, and some of the questions we used were taken from that too.

The David Letterman Show’s list of unsafe Christmas toys, which the Hasbro slippery step set came from.

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