F:AT Thursday

In a safe house located east of the wall in the divided city of Berlin, cloaked cold-warriors gather in a cinder block walled room. Its one dim bulb hanging nakedly from a cord descending  from the ceiling. Clandestine plots are to be hatched but they are of no concern for four nameless agents of the free West. They are here not to trade in top secrets. They are here for board games and they care not who knows.

All the true believers were in attendance this week and we started off the night with The Legend of Drizzt. We played a team scenario with Josh and I on one side and Uba and Al on the other. Our object was to be the first team to locate the entrance to the lost dwarven city and then kill a shit ton of monsters that were guarding it. Josh and I found the door first but we fell beneath the onslaught of 8 billion spiders and a couple drow swordsmen and the goblins ... oh yeah and the half elf half spider guy...all at once...well...it just wasn't pretty.  Uba and  Al were not really having a picknick either as every passage they took ended up in a dead end except for the one that spawned the three story tall troll that was enjoying punting them down the passage like a football. Nobody came out a winner. (Engineer Al specifically wanted it mentioned that while he and Uba did not win...they did not technically lose either as our team died about 3.2 seconds before theirs...ya whatever!)

I am a big fan of Ashardelon but I'm not so keen on Drizzt. Maybe it's the lack of vowels. Maybe it's the overuse of apostrophes.  Or maybe I've just always hated the character of Drizzt. It's totally a theme thing though because the game play is just as good as it's sister game.

Then Josh Look went fishing in his Toy Box That Time Forgot and pulled out a copy of Conspiracy. A crazy little game put out way back in 1971 by our friends at Milton Bradley. This thing must have blown some minds when it was new because it is nothing like other games of that era. Anyway, the box lid doesn't lie. It is a "Spy game about bluffing and betrayal". You move spies around a board trying to pick up  a briefcase and bring it back to your home base. The thing is though, everybody gets 10k in cash and they use this money to bribe agents to do their bidding. These payoffs are kept secret from the other players. So if you want to move Ms. B. Havein (yes all the spies have horribly awesome names) but I've not only bribed her but bribed her more than you, I can cancel her move or if she moves to a space where I have an agent I've really paid well maybe I'll  just have Earl E. Bird put the cold steel barrel of a .45 in her mouth and blow her freakin' head off! (Ok the game calls it "blowing an agents cover" but we all know that is just 70's lingo for red death)

Uba won this one by having control of one of the last two agents and getting back to base. The rest of the agents had all been assassinated. F:AT Thursday is full contact board gaming. Always. It was a fun game and if you like bluffing games with a bit of "fuck you" in them then you'd probably get a kick out of this. I did find the agent pawns to be a bit creepy as they are just large heads but I'm weird that way.