Calmer chameleon

Tuesdays at Joe's. Six gamers: Joe, Katy, Martin, Sam, Steve and myself. We began with The Chameleon, a new Spyfall-esque game of pretending to know more than you really do. Perhaps I should be concerned that I seem to be quite good at it.

We played three rounds. In the first round Sam was the chameleon and the clue was Rom-Com. Halfway through this round Steve finally worked out that all the non-chameleons knew the same word. This probably made things clearer.

Our words for rom-com mostly seemed based around vague references to Four Weddings and a Funeral, but it wasn't clear enough to Sam. He was outed as the chameleon and incorrectly guessed Comedy as the mystery word. We'd won.

At the start of the next round, Joe remarked that it'd be almost impossible to not be identified as the chameleon. I checked my card and discovered that it was me this time. I found it surprisingly stressful. Suddenly the game turned into Codenames as I frantically (but calmly) tried to think of words that would cover as many potential answers as possible. I chose Grey and, boy, did I get lucky. The mystery word/thing was Game of Thrones, which involves a family name that contains the word Grey. All the suspicion fell on Joe who was last to think of a word, and it did not impress. I won!

For the third round I was appalled to find myself as the chameleon again. The subject was historical people, and I worked out that about a third of them had connections to islands, so that's what I said, realising that if the secret was Anne Frank that I'd be caught out pretty quickly. And I got lucky again, since it was Charles Darwin. But not lucky enough. The vote to identify the chameleon was split three ways and Martin had the deciding vote, and he voted for me. I was exposed. I successfully identified the secret so technically I won, but I was still disappointed.

After all that stress, we split into two groups of three. Sam, Katy and Martin chose a number of short games. The first of which, I think, was Spires.

Sam took a risk on the last turn and, apparently, got royally screwed for his bravery. This lumbered him with a pile of negative points right at the end.

Martin 97
Katy 61
Sam 28

Joe, Steve and me brought Manila to the table. It was new to Steve but it's not hugely complicated. At heart, it's a betting game, appealing to the compulsive gambler in all of us. My early game went well, with a couple of choice pirating expeditions bringing in a heap of money. But the dice were being generous anyway, with one round ending with all of us earning over 30 in cash.

Meanwhile, the other three moved on to Steam Park. A massively complicated looking game whose main mechanic seems to revolve around cleaning up dirt. At the beginning, Katy and Martin kept protesting that they didn't know what they were doing.

But before long, those teething troubles were over and they were well into the swing of things. It ended:

Martin 88
Sam 79
Katy 76

In Manila, Joe was in money troubles and had to encumber some shares. He had to pull of an audacious tactic of getting money and also betting on none of the three ships coming in. And it worked.

Steve also struggled with cash but had no encumbered shares to worry about.

The other three played Lords of Scotland. I barely remember it, but the scores were:

Katy 41
Martin 31
Sam 16

Then they played Eggs of Ostrich, which Katy won despite bursting all but one of her bags, but having two lovely chunks of amber.

Katy 13
Sam 9
Martin 2

Finally, Manila was coming to a close. Once I was far in the lead in money mid-game, I'd played cautiously. Steve made a late conversion to piracy but it didn't pay out as much as mine. Joe managed to unencumber his shares to fight his way back to a healthy second place.

Andrew 157
Joe 125
Steve 98

Then we played a quick game about dirty pigs. If I hadn’t taken a photo I would have completely forgotten about it. I think I won.

Now we were all back together, and ready for a game of Fuji Flush. I started to flag during this game, and helped Martin to a quick win causing howls of dismay from the other players (although, in my defence, it also stopped me coming dead last).

Martin 0 cards left
Steve 1
Joe 1
Sam 2
Katy 2
Andrew 2

But then as some of us got ready to go, a hardcore splinter group of Sam, Joe and Martin stayed seated, contemplating another game. I was briefly tempted to sit back down and join them but was quickly reminded that I ended the last game on purpose. And so, banished from the games room, I snuck off into the night.