Hold your breath...

...it's Underwater Cities! But Underwater Cities played at such a rate of knots you almost could have held your breath. Andrew and I played a rapid-fire two-player game this evening - so quick we were finished at 9.05pm. It's much quicker a. when you know what you're doing b. with 2 players and c. knowing Adam is not there to make you feel like every turn was a wasted opportunity should you fail to optimise.

Andrew built pleasurable, diverse cities with a lot of upgraded tunnels. He coined in the cash in production and, what's more, grabbed two of the government contracts. My cities by contrast looked a bit Little Englander early doors, focusing on only one or two types of building but then upgrading the biomatter out of them for big returns in production.

My metropolis also rewarded upgrades, and in the final count-up, these sent me into a convincing win:

Sam 100
Andrew 76

Brief though it was - accompanied by a visit and advice from Stan - we needed something silly afterwards, so played Tomatomato. Officially it plays 3-6 but it's been such a hit in the house we already have a two-player variant devised.

The game is just flipping tiles that say tomato, to, ma, or mato. As a row of syllables get longer, you take turns attempting to pronounce it - stumble or pause, and it's a tile to your opponent. It's very silly, especially when the rogue Potato tile pops up, and Andrew's familiarity with the Japanese language - I like to think - gave him a convincing victory:

Andrew 4
Sam 2

After that we tried our hand at a recent gift in the form of an educational/dialogue-provoking game in Less is Max, a Spanish publication aimed, it seems, at classes. Players win by developing the nine parts of their personality, and do so by bidding on cards that allow you to add your tokens on the board, where each constituent part is laid out. Some cards have bad effects though that remove tokens, and there's also a shared element in the common good, which fills up with suns to reward everyone with more cash, or poison to take it away.

Our game, thanks to an odd falling of cards, took about 15 minutes, after I grabbed the card that let me do sport once a week to tick off the leisure box. Both of us got very excited by the option of theatre, and I tried not to use plastic bags. It's not a gamer's game, but it was an interesting experience and very pertinent.

Sam - most rounded personality
Andrew - Loser!!! nyah nyah nyah-nyah-nyah

We ended the night with Push It, and what a masterpiece of gaming this was, including flicks of brilliance and - more often - flicks of pathetic mental collapse. Andrew surged into the lead; I pulled him back. He surged again; I pulled back again! Then he was poised to win at 20-19 but got the yips and I picked up double points to grab the victory:

Sam 21
Andrew 20

Although writing this now it occurs to me that the official rule, I believe, is someone has to be two clear points ahead to win! So Andrew - to be continued...