We may lose, and we may win

Friday night games briefly threatened to be a four-player affair before settling into a cosy head to head between Andrew and myself. We started with Welcome To... which is a roll and write game with no rolling. Instead, cards are flipped and you choose one of three sets to add a number and a feature to your growing neighbourhood. Maybe you put up a fence, or build a pool. Maybe you plant a tree. It's all points, and though often it's hard to tell from an initial play, we found it a little underwhelming in comparison to the delightful agony of say, Rolling America, or Avenue.

I won, but should mention Andrew allowed me a significant do-over when I realised I'd built a fence in the wrong place.

Next up was Heaven and Ale, such a hit earlier this year and still much beloved by Andrew and myself. It was a very curious game, as I began spending big and realised I'd run out of money with little recourse to more. Instead I had to pick up scoring markers and sacrifice a card in order to get anywhere, and I felt it was all a terrible error as Andrew was moseying along grabbing as many tiles as it seemed he felt like, building sheds and the money rolling in. Weirdly though my early scoring meant I didn't have to fret over picking up scoring markers in the final round, and Andrew's momentum stalled slightly. The scores were close - we didn't write them down - but I nabbed it right at the end. A baffling play that suggests there are still avenues to be explored in this game...

My reward from Andrew was a fortune cookie that said I should learn from my mistakes. Oddly enough this is exactly what Andrew said he should do when next playing Heaven and Ale before I opened it.

The night was still young enough to squeeze in a nightcap in both gaming and whisky terms, so we broke out trusty old Take It Easy.

Andrew called video games and I did board games. It was noticeable for the agony absent from Welcome To... recognisable from every previous play, and our acknowledgement of our terrible maths as we both reached for calculators to work out the scores. My maths was so bad I turned on the torch my accident. Andrew won the first round, but was scuppered by nine-based optimism in the second, when Beowulf came out to stump him... meanwhile I recovered from some appalling hedge-betting as I skirted the edges, before finally having to commit somewhere more central...

Sam 308
Andrew 281

Lovely to play again! And now I have the Eagles playing in my head.