Senator, you are spoiling us

Missing GNN planetoids Andrew and Katy as well as several orbiting satellites, at one stage it looked like just Ian, Martin and myself. Would Martin be persuaded to play Underwater Cities? Fortunately for him, Adam T and Joe swooped in to save the day, abetted by Stanley.

Joe was running late and Stan was in the garden attacking his brother with a space-hopper, so we started the evening with a quick play of Kariba, a very Knizian game by, unsurprisingly, Knizia.

Animals (numbered 1-8) come to the waterhole to drink, but three or more animals of a higher number will scare away the next-lowest numbered animal - and these scattering prey become your points if you played the card that did the scaring. The lowly mice (number 1) aren't completely hopeless - they're the only animal that can scare away the otherwise-indomitable elephants (number 8).

Sam 15
Ian 14
Martin 12
Adam 7

By the time Kariba wrapped up (it only took ten minutes) Joe had arrived and enticed Stanley into a try out of Shards of Infinity. I played with Joe at the weekend so can give a quick precis: it's a battle between players to be last one standing: each player begins with 50 health and then damage is done via the medium of cardplay and deck-building. The neat twist with Shards of Infinity is that you have a Mastery score that, when improved to certain points (5/10/20) empowers some of your cards: get your Mastery to 30 and it's possible to destroy your opponent outright when you pull the Infinity Shard into your hand.

While that epic played out at one end of the table, we were busy with Martin's latest sentient-vegetable game, this time another old Knizia in Too Many Cooks. This is a trick-taker of sorts where each player announces what kind of soup they intend to make at the start of each round, with the cards themselves the ingredients. If you're making onion soup, you want to win a trick with lots of onions in - and no chilli. If you're making a chilli soup, you don't want bouillion. Because the trick is only complete when the collective score of all the cards reaches ten points - and some cards reset the score to zero - it's more than likely that someone will throw some chilli in your lovely pot of onions, or even pick them up themselves. The 'wrong' ingredient doesn't necessarily do any damage, as long as it's not really wrong.

But as well as that reasonably-simple premise, there are cards that score zero when led but a whopping ten when played in a 'live' trick, complicating things somewhat. Additional complications arrive in the form of these cards being erroneously labelled zero instead if ten, and one recipe being 'no soup' - don't win any cards at all. The fact that previously played recipes can't be played again muddies things further, as the last couple of rounds you are more at the mercy of fate, depending on what cards you get.

Ian began badly and announced he didn't like the game. He surged back into contention and seemed briefly more enamoured. Then he fell away again. I stagnated too, but Adam made hay in the penultimate round, establishing a lead that was too strong for Martin to catch him:

Adam 20
Martin 16
Sam 14
Ian 12

Martin and Adam liked it. I was somewhere between their enthusiasm and Ian's chagrin. The main take-away for me was to have the song from Too Many Cooks going around in my head all night.  Just after we finished, Joe vanquished Stanley in a nail-biting finish to Shards: with them both at death's door it was Joe's turn to attack and Stanley didn't draw the shield he needed.

Joe: wins
Stan: off to bed

Which left us as a five. Martin was keen to play Senators so after brief speculative mentions of Battle for Rokugan (one day...) and Northern Pacific, we embarked on our weekly bunfight for the senate.

forgot to take any more pictures at this point, here's Senators being played at Martin's house

It was brutal. Adam in particular suffered from a dearth of money and fortune, as he constantly found himself penniless and senatorially bereft. Martin kept trying to extort money from me and being appalled when I sold things to him. Ian kept up a cash-supply with impressive consistency, especially in a game as barmy as Senators is. He at one point pulled off a spectacular 4-senator cash-in to take the lead, only to have Adam exact some minor pleasure from the game by immediately taking a senator off him.

Martin gambled on events that didn't arrive, and I paid nine sestertii for a Senator when everyone else bid zero. But despite that lavish spending, I pushed ahead of Ian and Joe to claim the seat of power:

Sam 12
Ian 11
Joe 10
Martin / Adam: 5

Adam, exhausted from Senators work, now took his leave and we were a four again. We ended the evening in proper GNN style, with some short silly games.

pic courtesy kalchio, BGG

In Tomatomato you pronounce increasingly long variations on the word tomato: get it wrong and your opponents get to - possibly - claim points; by spelling out the word 'tomato' obviously. Martin's speed at this game was so spectacular that neither Joe, Ian or I could keep up with him and had to trust his word that he wasn't just making random tomato-related noises up. Ian and I stumbled the most, but Joe and Martin tried to claim the same reward - cancelling it out - and I snuck the win:

Sam 3
Joe 2 (wins tie-breaker by owning a potato)
Martin / Ian 2

Then we split into teams to play Push It. Ian teamed up with Joe and I with Martin, as we sat diagonally across from each other. In the past we've played Team Push It pretty much to the same structure as solo Push It, but Martin spotted the team variant in the rules suggests that whichever team is furthest from the puck is currently active. This changed the dynamic of the game considerably, as it escalates the need to be close to the puck: remain furthest away, and you can swiftly run out of discs to fire at it, leaving your opponents with 2 or 3 free shots. Martin and I capitalised on the rule as we raced to a surprisingly one-sided victory:

Martin + Sam 21
Ian + Joe 2

Their only points came from me accidentally hitting the puck off the table. So astonished were we by this lopsided result that we played again. Joe was sure that going first was key to success, and his theory looked like it might hold water when he and Ian quickly established a 5-1 lead. But then it imploded as we raced past them again to another victory:

Martin + Sam 21
Ian + Joe 5

Despite their lack of success both Ian and Joe liked this team rule - we all did, as though it didn't make for the dramatic finales you often get when playing rigidly clockwise, it does enable some big results - and potentially big comebacks as well.

It was reasonably early for a Tuesday, but Ian especially had an early morning to look forward to and the evening came to a natural conclusion. Thanks all!