Staring into space

After a last minute email from Ian saying fatigue had caught up with him, we were down to four this week: Sam, the host, Martin, Joe and me.

Initially, it was just me, Sam and Martin. Joe was running late so we employed that old tried and tested method of making people arrive: start a game. Usually this prompts a knock on the door and a hurried putting away of the game for something more suitable for the newly adjusted number of players.

We chose Eggs Of Ostrich, and Sam seemed to be very rusty on the rules as he misjudged a couple of rounds. His wife, though, was very impressed by the "white smartie" playing pieces. And they are nice. Martin and I liked them in equal measure.

Martin 8
Andrew 8
Sam 5

Joe arrived as the game was drawing to an end. Since the number of attendees was just right, we played Decrypto, the Codenames type game of giving repeated clues to the same four words in such a way that your partner can guess them but the opposing team can't.

It was tricky, giving clues to the same words without making any obvious link. In the end, Martin and Joe demonstrated their mastery of word puzzles by constantly being successful in their clues and then, after Sam and I failed to do well in ours, they guessed what our words were too. Sam was so upset, he put the game away in the lid, and had to take it all back out again.

Joe and Martin: Lexicon of Love
Sam and Andrew: Words of Regret

After that, we pondered our choices in front of Sam's games wall. In the end we decided on The Expanse, the game that Sam has been mentioning recently as "El Grande in space". This gentle drip feed of suggestions had eventually got us interested enough to try it. Sam really should be in advertising.

The game didn't start well, when a strange difference between the printed rules and the game pieces had us second guessing typos in the rule book. Once we were started, Joe and Sam had moments of cognitive dissonance with Sam going through a scoring round confusing water bases with food bases, and Joe plaintively asking "What does 'up to three' mean?"

I found myself equally confused, but kept my questions to myself, preferring instead to play a non productive move and then realise what I should have done later. Martin was least confused, but that was because he'd hit upon a simple tactic and then stuck to it.

Halfway through the game, with bonhomie at a minimum and the clock ticking, Sam made an executive decision and thinned out the remaining draw deck of cards to reduce the running time of the game.

I think we all found it hard going. Since none of us had seen the TV show the game's theme came from, none of us were emotionally invested in it. But that's not an essential part of a good game. After all, I wasn't keen on the sight of ostriches in varying stages of sexual arousal, but I still enjoyed Eggs Of Ostrich. However, emotional attachment to the theme of the game can paper over the cracks in a game's mechanic.

The Expanse suffered from an enormous amount of text on cards, each one offering a game breaking option of varying strength to some (not necessarily all) players. Otherwise, the player could use a card's AP number and take that many actions, except that the action would remain available to other players. Or even, if you choose, the choice of keeping the card for a later round.

Joe decided that he simply wasn't good at area-control games, while I defended El Grande from comparison to this game. It was all a bit perfunctory. As I try and pin down why I didn't like the game (and I've already deleted two paragraphs discussing it) it occurs to me that it was really quite bland. Compared to Quantum or Eclipse or Impulse, it's a poor attempt at a sci-fi triple X game.

Martin 100
Sam 74
Joe 73
Andrew 72

After this, it was approaching half past ten, so what could bring us out of this slough of despond? Why not Krass Kariert? It's a clever game of whatever the opposite of deck-building is. Deck-whittling? Both Sam and I forgot the rule limiting a played hand to just three cards, which meant Sam's long straight was useless.

We all lost a life, which made the fifth round sudden death. It fell on Joe who had put the X card in the wrong place in his hand to react to the following round. How cruel.

Andrew, Sam, Martin 1 life left
Joe none.

Finally I was tempted to stay for one more game: The Mind. With Ultravox as our soundtrack, we made our way through the lower reaches of the game until we found ourselves in round six with four lives still intact.

Level 7 was cleared despite Midge Ure distracting us by singing "look at the sound of the voice!"

By the end of round eight (Joe had 14-16-18-20 and we ended with me having 63 and Sam having 65) , the last before The Dark Mind, we had one life but two shurikens.

We carried on bravely, not using a shuriken to blunder through round one. Instead we placed all our cards. We turned them over. Oh, we were so close. 3 - 28 - 67 - 66.

One out. One measly number. How cruel. But such fun.

Thanks for hosting, Sam. And I'm glad the wasabi crisps were a hit. See you all soon.