A marble-ous evening

On the last Tuesday before Christmas, I turned up at Joe's ten minutes late and found that I was still only the second to arrive. Ian was already there, looking tired and hoping that beer would give him a second wind, while Andy showed up just as Joe was explaining the roll and write game of Twenty One to us. And so he joined us.

It's pretty basic. There are five rows of six dice on your score pad, different for each player, and each turn someone rolls six coloured dice and you have to fill in each dice with an equal or lower score, completing one row at a time. Bonuses are awarded for exact matches. That's the jist of it, anyway. The game ends when a player completes their last row, and when Ian decided to take fewer points to do just that, it left the rest of us desperately writing in whatever shitty scores were allowed. Poor old Joe scored just four points for his last row.

Ian 118
Andy 97
Andrew 94
Joe 87

Sam had arrived mid game and watched proceedings with interest. Next up was the main event. Joe suggested Colosseum as a big Christmas type of game, but in the end Calimala was chosen. It was new to Joe but with his years of Eurogaming behind him, we felt that shipping silk and contributing marble statues wouldn't pose a problem.

Ian shot off in the early stages, winning all four of the four opening scoring rounds, giving him a 12, 3, 2, 1, 0 lead. But then Andy's patient planning paid off as he started a mid game revival. Sam was the last of us to score any points at all but then made great leaps up the score track until he found his player mat devoid of resources or silk with the final round looming. He had to resort to choosing an action he couldn't complete, hoping for a bit of luck with the cards he'd pick up as compensation. He didn't get any.

Joe did fine for a first time, but he admitted that without time to go through the rules once, he struggled with any game. The mid-game discussion about the (almost imperceptible) difference between Greek and Swedish jazz probably distracted him too.

Andy 32
Ian 29
Sam 28
Joe 21
Andrew 18

Next up was a game that was new to all of us except Sam: Tag City. I was intrigued by its vague air of Jet Set Radio graffiti art. It's another roll and write game (or, as we hilariously put it, a Roland Rat game) but this time you are assigning dice to some tetris type shapes that all players can choose to fill up their grid. Points are awarded for completed rows, columns and areas.

We were pushing the boundaries of the game, playing with five players while the box suggests only up to four. We did this by utilising the fifth board supplied with the game and then using a die from Twenty One. Sheer anarchy. The game seemed fine, though. In fact, it seemed better suited to five players than Calimala did, with the previous game having a sense of lack of control over unfolding events.

Maybe Tag City had a sense of too much control since Andy had an attack of AP in one round as he arranged and rearranged the dice, unable to decide. "Are you min-maxing it?" asked Joe as Andy continued to prevaricate.

I enjoyed the game, but the lack of single square shapes made me paranoid that I'd leave a shape, row or column unfinishable. We made it to the end with no one accidentally outing themselves as Banksy and, after a series of recounts that saw first Ian then Sam briefly in first, it ended in a tie.

Ian 43
Sam 43
Andrew 35
Andy 33
Joe 21

Although the hour was late, we had enough in us for one last game: For Sale. Sam began by declaring that he never wins this game so he was going to do the opposite to his usual cagey start, opening the bidding with big bold six, with the promise of a 27 for the winner. I bid eight and eventually won. I was quite pleased with it until the next two rounds saw Sam pick up a 28 and Joe get a 29 for six coins each.

Joe went from tragedy to triumph in the cheque round, picking up a zero dollar cheque despite bidding a 19, but then he netted a $14k cheque with only a 10. Similarly, Sam was delighted in the final round when he discovered his 16 was, improbably, the highest card showing and he picked up a $13k cheque with it. Ian ended the game in his second draw of the evening, but this time at the wrong end of the score board.

Sam 65
Joe 61
Andy 53
Andrew 44
Ian 44

And so, the evening ended. There's no chance of a Tuesday meeting any time soon, what with Christmas and New year in the way and a possibility of a mid holiday games evening so I'll bid everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year now. Cheers, all.