For those about to Rok

Just like last Saturday, the same four gamers faced off over the provinces of Rokugan: Adam the phoenix, Ian the crab, Andrew the crane and me the scorpion. Last week's post goes a little into the intricacies of the game so I won't go into them here, but it's probably worth repeating how combative Rokugan is, and so it was right from the start. Adam changed from snacks Andrew hates (nuts) to ones I do (liquorice) although I exacted some measure of culinary revenge with salty padron peppers halfway through the game that he looked actually offended by....

Adam expanded early and somehow managed to control two territories at the end of the very first round. I controlled three, but two of them were the Shadowlands: not worth points, and the power they bestow is always a bit of a double-edged sword. What's more having the most territories made me starting player for round two, which isn't something I really wanted.

Ian decided after the second round he didn't like the game after all, after his attempts to expand ran into trouble and once again, he was bereft of territory cards. I was mostly happy on the western and central parts of the board, but my comeuppance was on its way. Andrew meanwhile over round three gained control of the island and as Ian regarded the whole affair ruefully and I remembered that the Shadowlands score nothing, it started to look like a two-horse race. In fact I decided not to attack Ian for this very reason, and that decision in hindsight was possibly a mistake!

As rounds 4 and 5 played out Ian staged a recovery, mostly at my expense as Adam and Andrew tried to kick chunks out of each other. In round five I lost no less than three provinces and ended the game in distant last. At the other end of the triumph stick, Adam's calculating brain proved to be the difference in the Hillmann-Endersby face-off:

Adam 40
Andrew 30
Ian 15
Sam 12

After that we needed something light, silly, and maybe co-operative too, so we introduced Adam to the joys of Belratti. We mostly stuck to demands of 2 or 3 paintings and Belratti kept his distance, save for his bizarre painting of a syringe. Andrew and Ian toyed with giving Adam and I a target of six to finish the game with a flourish, but perhaps wisely decided not to...

Us: 16
Belratti 4

It was still very early but with everyone a little tired out we finished the night with the odd curio that is Spy Tricks. Ian won big early on but Adam pegged him back, before Andrew staged a recovery in the final round. I did no such thing:

Adam 21
Ian and Andrew 10
Sam 0

On the imaginary form table, normal service is resumed! Thanks chaps.

Handsome beyond words

With mass absences ruling out Tuesday's gaming, we gathered together on a Thursday for our weekly fix. There were five of us around Joe's freshly cleaned kitchen table: Joe himself, Sam, Ian, Martin and me. Martin was itching to get started, having not played any games for ages and we began with some light hearted luck pushing with Push.

Deal yourself some cards, avoiding duplicates of colour or number, making up to three columns to help you avoid going bust. You choose which column to keep but, and here's the twist, your neighbours get the other two columns. Added to this is the little matter of the die which, when rolled, requires you to discard all of your cards of the colour showing on the die.

It's a fun game, where a lot of the fun is watching other people struggle with bad luck. Especially if the person in question is Martin. "Random nonsense!" he declared as the die sliced away another high scoring set of cards from his collection while leaving the rest of us relatively unscathed. He couldn't even take solace in his beer since his regular subscription ales were nasty sweet tasting novelty flavours.

Ian and I both banked cards to keep them safe and when Ian did suffer at the hands of the die, he was able to shrug off losing twelve points with a unconcerned "I can live with that." But it turned out to be pivotal.

Andrew 64
Ian 56
Joe 41
Sam 38
Martin 29

After this we played the Dixit / Face Cards type game of Belratti. We only had the rules in German, so Martin searched for the English version online.

In this, we are artists and collectors. We all have a hand of nine cards with pictures of objects and then two more picture cards are revealed, indicating the topics that the collectors want in their art works. But in among these hand picked cards are four randomly drawn pictures by Belratti, the famous painter of forgeries. Picking his cards instead of ours is a minus point and six of them will end the game in defeat.

We began optimistically by declaring that Sam and Ian (our two painters) could successfully chose six paintings to sell to me, Martin and Joe. To cut a long story short, they couldn't. Belratti snuck three of his paintings into the deal. He was already halfway to beating us and we never recovered. We had only nine pictures successfully identified when Belratti hit six which, according to the score sheet, is "a picture of misery."

Next up, we needed something more meaty to go with the just-opened crisps. Northern Pacific was introduced to me as a simple but mean train game set in the US. Put your cubes in the city where the train is going to be sometime in the future, but all the other players are doing the same. In doing so, alliances are forged and rivalries are cemented.

It was a difficult game to judge and we all struggled with the problem of trying to make a move that doesn't immediately make people move the train elsewhere. Joe stoutly defended himself against any accusations that he was taking a "Joe turn" pointing out we'd all had moments of excess pondering. It was a bit mean of us since he was in last at the time and needed a decent round to get back into contention, which he got.

In fact it ended very close. After leading for rounds one and two, Martin found himself caught by Sam right at the end, despite his great joke about dropping a big one in Butte.

Sam 21
Martin 20 (fewer wasted cubes)
Andrew 20 (more wasted cubes)
Joe 19
Ian 18

With the news that England were winning 3-0 against Norway in the Women's World Cup ringing in our ears, we played L. A. M. A. The fun game of picking up or putting down cards. So simple yet so amusing. I adopted the role of cock blocker for this game. I suggested that Martin should start and then, having checked his cards, he immediately had to pick up. Then I kept ruining Sam's plans with a sequence of moves that kept increasing the value of the cards past the one he wanted.

Joe played a clear round and got to put back a ten. He also went to the toilet and while he was away we complained about how long he was taking over his turn. Hilarious. But he had the last laugh with a decisive win.

Joe 11
Martin 32
Andrew 34
Ian 39
Sam 46

At this point, Ian set off home but we were still very much in the zone. We tried Kami, a very pretty Japanese themed game from France (I think) which was simple, although with a frustratingly opaque rule sheet that spent more time telling us the characters’ back story than how to play the game.

The basic jist is that one player plays an attack card and the next player has to play the same card (or an empress) to counter it and then they can play an attack card of their own. Winning team (you play in pairs) is decided by the first person to play all eight cards in their hand. It seemed simple and a bit random. The winning total is supposed to be fifteen but when Joe and I ran into a 9-0 lead after two rounds, the game was ended.

After this we played Handsome, An Elegant Word Game. This game comes in a tiny pack and it concerns making words from the five communal cards in the middle (one supplied by each player and one drawn randomly at the start) and the two cards in each players’ hand. Only consonants are supplied, so you have to come up with the longest word using whatever vowels you choose. In the “party variant” consonants can be repeated. These people party hard.

Sam was in his element, winning on QUASHED. I just checked and we owe Joe an apology since HELIXES is a valid plural of HELIX, which would have got him an extra point for longest word that round. Martin was all musical, starting with VOGUED and JIVE while I was channeling my inner fisherman with WHELKS and an underwhelming (and non-scoring) BOX.

Sam 11
Joe 8
Martin 7
Andrew 4

Finally, we had another go at Belratti. This time we stuck to low numbers of paintings to match to our topics, and we made sure to use those useful special action cards. With this, we did far better. I clearly thought that either familiarity or a smaller player count had improved matters but what I said was “This is so much better without Ian!” Then they insisted I blog that, so here I am. Sorry, Ian. Didn’t mean it.

Joe, Sam, Andrew and Martin 16
Belratti 3

A marvelous way to end the evening and set off into the hot June night. See you all soon, I hope.

Razing Your Game

Rokugan! Legend has it that one Friday night, long ago, the Phoenix, Dragon, Crab and Hippo - it might not have been a hippo, I can't remember - sent their warriors out over the landscape, swords a-blazin', to make the land their own. Who would shape destiny to their own will? Would it be the shrewdest, wisest leader? Or the one who kept their Territory bonus card until round five?

Round five is the final round in what is best described as an epic punch-up. All of us - Ian, Adam, Andrew and myself - controlled five provinces each at the start of the game, and you pretty much come out swinging and keep swinging for the duration. In each round players get six tokens that have varying degrees of power, from 1 to 5 more in Army, a less-impactful (and less common) navy, plus a few special tokens: Blessing, Raid, Shinobi and Diplomacy.

Everyone takes turns placing five tokens face-down on the board: either defending provinces they control, or attacking from them. The Shinobi can attack anywhere they like: they're kind of a travelling ninja troupe, intent on destruction.

The catch is, however, that every token - bar the Blessing, which bestows extra strength and immunity - is played face-down, before all being revealed simultaneously - then defenders versus attackers are resolved, with the winner claiming or keeping the province in question. If the defender wins, their defensive strength improves as a result, and the province gains extra 'honour' - points value.

Into this mix come the previously-mentioned special tokens: the Diplomacy brings peace to a province and it cannot be attacked, but the controlling player can't attack from it either. The Raid essentially razes a province to the ground, rendering it obsolete. Additionally, everyone has a bluff token, which can be used to misdirect your intentions and encourage opponents to spend tokens needlessly. And controlling all provinces in a territory grants you a special card that can only be played once - if you cease to control the territory, you cease to own the card as well...

What this all amounts to is a tense, swingy, obscenity-laden, four-way punch-up, with everyone relishing the moments when someone else was attacked, and indignant with disbelief when they were. Adam's attempt to establish peace was undone when Ian razed him to the ground before diplomatic talks could even be opened. Ian returned from the loo to find Adam and I had both attacked him - although I was bluffing. Andrew managed to spread his wings reasonably well, though as it turned out this wasn't actually want he wanted to do...

Players score a considerable bonus for controlling a territory at the end of the game, and we all have a secret objective too, meaning you really cannot tell who's won until the final count-up. As it turned out, the winner was me, as not only did I control a territory but I also hit my secret objective which got me a whopping ten points. Ian came second and Adam - who was perhaps targeted more than anyone else due to his habit of Winning The Games - trailed in third. Andrew had the double-edged sword of only hitting his objective if he controlled the least provinces - but having expanded successfully, he couldn't get us to attack him enough!

Sam 39
Ian 23
Adam 18
Andrew 10

A modern classic! But one you do need a recovery period from, and with that in mind we played competitive team sushi-stacking game of Maki Stack. It was Adam and Ian versus me and Andrew, racing to be the first to score points. Each point is a card that demands you stack various pieces in specific fashion, with the caveat that you either (when the card is yellow) do the stacking using one finger each, like chopsticks, or one team member wears a blindfold whilst the other instructs them.

It was hilarious: silly, rapid and over in ten minutes:

Andrew and Sam: top stackers!
Adam and Ian: bottom stackers

After that we moved swiftly on to non-team Push It, playing the official version of furthest-from-the-jack plays next. Ian and I surged into early contention as Andrew found his pucks flying everywhere but close to the jack. Adam kept inadvertently helping me by knocking me closer, and this played no small part in my eventual victory:

Sam 11
Ian 7
Adam 4
Andrew 3

Then we played four-player 6Nimmt. I'd not even considered this with four, but as it turns out the same Nimmty moments are present and correct, as it only took us three rounds to go from giddily optimistic to aghast and destroyed (Andrew) or giddily relieved (me)

Sam 15
Ian 35
Adam 51
Andrew 68

A fine ending to a very fun night, even if we probably had a few more crisps than even hardened gamers should ingest in 24 hours... but who's counting?

Yoko splits the band

Tuesday! You know what that means. But with no Andrew and no Martin, who would provide the acerbic commentary and euro-related disdain? As it happens, Katy stepped up to do both.

Hannah was our initial host, with Adam upstairs trying to lull Arthur to sleep. Joining her at the table were Adam T, Ian, Katy, Joe and myself. Before we knew what was happening we'd been talking for a full five minutes and realised we should probably play a game. Owing in part to Hannah's recent experience with five-player Root, Just One was chosen. I didn't take many pictures, but I recall three people clueing Girls for calendar, but Ian getting it anyway thanks to Gregorian and Advent. Everyone was thrown by Katy's clue for glasses (Hearing Aids) but again, no damage was done. In fact two turns later Joe clued "Hearing Aid (singular)" for glass. Strictly speaking that's three words, but we weren't counting. Except for our points - we ended on a shabby 8 ("average") when I encouraged Joe to guess on his final turn and he got it wrong. "I should be good at this game" he ruminated. "I like words"

With Arthur still circulating somewhere above us, Adam and Hannah swapped over and a debate broke out over Yokohama, which Katy asserted was her favourite game ever, but didn't want to play it because of the time it took. Joe and Adam T were keen, though, and eventually she was reluctantly persuaded, prophesising a late finish as she sat down. Joe said they'd be done by half ten and started explaining the rules to Adam T.

On the other table, our little band turned our faces to the stars. I talked Ian (NASA) through the rules to Orbit as we (I was Russia) prepared for our imminent defeat to Adam H (China). While I was concerned with the movement of the planets, Adam - perhaps inhabiting his China role a little seriously - became distracted by the feng shui of the room, eventually getting the denizens of Yokohama to rotate their table 180 degrees for the better to see Adam T's face with.

Back on our board, I made an error right at the start, calculating that I couldn't realise my Pioneer card (flyby of Mercury) as both Adam and Ian had already set off toward it. However my calculations were incorrect, as when Mercury came around I was the starting player and could have grabbed an early three points and an upgrade. That would come back to haunt me - much as failures at basic maths would haunt a real rocket scientist, I like to think.

Adam completely ignored point-scoring early on, focusing on getting his fuel, speed and build capacities up while Ian and I pottered around getting single points here and there and establishing a lead that looked, to us, disturbingly surmountable. I picked up Missions. So did Adam. So, eventually, did Ian. He looked at the cards like they had just shat in his astronaut suit.

On the other table, things had started moving around the city about a quarter-way through our game, but they were now picking up speed. Katy moved pieces around with the confidence of someone who was playing their favourite game, and expected to win it. At this point, everyone seemed happy.

Except back on the Orbit board Adam was, as we anticipated, moving up through the gears. He was even picking up more missions and not making any annoyed noises about them, which was doubly concerning. Ian said he was losing anyway, so picking up more missions couldn't hurt. But it did. When I took the same risk, the only plausible (I thought) mission was landing on the inner planets, but as it turned out I needed one more round to get to Venus, and when we counted up the 3 point failure was critical:

Adam 44
Sam 42
Ian 27

Yokohama was still going strong, so we had a quick game of Flotsam Fight. It's a very Oinky Oink game: a numbers-propelled mechanic enabling plenty of oh shit moments and paltry scoring of 2pts, 1pt,  and -1pt for first, second and third. The story is you are entitled rich folk loading your trinkets onto a series of lifeboats as the ship sinks - seems kinda topical - and the person who loads all of their goods first wins the round. In a bizarrely surreal twist, however, each lifeboat - there are eight - can only carry certain goods, and may brusquely refuse your Persian rug to keep space for someone else's Ming vase.

It's weird. We couldn't figure out exactly how much control there was, reminding me of my first couple of plays of Maskmen. "But Maskmen is better" Ian pointed out. I don't know; I do think Flotsam Fight is less random than it first appears, and that suspicion is backed up by the fact Adam came back from second place to win on the final round...

Adam 4
Sam 3
Ian -1

As we packed that away to mutterings of various moods, Yokohama finished only a little way past Joe's predicted end time with Katy upset that she hadn't won. "They cock-blocked me - twice!" she cried, and rejected suggestions she might have enjoyed playing anyway with a firm "No." Are her euro-playing days done? Joe seemed happy, and I think Adam was enamoured enough to try it again... but when? Yokohama has a habit of disappearing for a year at a time, so who knows. We didn't note down the scores, but it was a triumph for Joe, who later added happily "I didn't even get the rules sweats". That's some Yokohama-ing.

Joe
Adam
Katy

Ian and I were getting drowsy and Adam has a five-year-old, so with 11pm looming we called it a night. There was just enough time for Joe's smutty riff on Caylus - the game your wife won't play with you - on the way home to endanger our lives as I nearly lost control of the car. Fortunately, we live to play again!

So Uwe Rosenberg and Doc Brown walk into a Bar...

Several play-tests and too many beers to count later, they walk out with Anachrony.

Anachrony - a game so weird and complicated that it could have been called Cronanhay. Or maybe Ryan Cohen. When you play this game, jazz hands just might help.

yowzer

It's The Future - specifically the 26th century. Mankind survives in a perilous landscape with blah blah blah blah blah. At first, it seems like a somewhat over-ornate game of worker-placement: you're building your own personal city, but - at the start at least - your workers (Engineers, Scientists, Administrators) troop off to the capital, wearing exo-suits to protect them from the perilous blah blah. Some are jauntier than others, and - if you give them a suitable job to do - will return at the end of the day refreshed and ready to go again tomorrow.

actions

Others will lay about in bed complaining of feeling jaded. You can get them up an about with water - a glass or a bucket; it's unclear - or simply force them up. Water is good for morale - forcing them isn't. So far, so very much like Fresco in space.

Six jaunty workers, only four exo-skeletons...

The actions in the capital are pretty easy on the brain too: recruit more workers, gather resources in the mine, build buildings (in your own city!) using said resources, harvest some water or trade with the nomads on the perilous blah blah.

Easy!

But wait. This is all Uwe and no Doc. The latter is also at large, in the form of... time-travel!

We, the hardy survivors in this future world, know that at specific moment in time in the future - let's call it round five - an asteroid will hit the planet, and the capital will fall to collapse, by which time we hope to have our cities built and ready to shelter the screaming space yuppies running our way, forced to eat their words about how parochial we were and that we didn't need a post office.

How do we know? Because we've come back in time, and told ourselves.

Embedded in the asteroid is the precious neutronium that allows time travel to function, not only delivering the terrible news from round five back to here in round one, but also sending stuff back to help us - in each round, we can request things from the future like a kind of bendy galactic loan system: if you want it now, you need to make sure you send it back later. Or paradoxes will build and grow, potentially turning into the contorted space-time horror of minus 3 points.

If you're doing most of the borrowing, you're also the most likely to be picking up Anomalies - and not only are they a drag on your city's success they also Take Up Space, a bit like the kind of anomaly still in the kitchen at the end of a big party who you just wish would piss off, only if you really want them to go you have to pay a scientist to drive them back in a neutronium-powered taxi.

Asteroid background; precious metals foreground

Fortunately, there's also a way to avoid these paradoxes developing into a more obtrusive guest, which is to travel back in time yourself and pay off your aforementioned debts. To do that, you need to build specific buildings of course, and then send workers there...

This is all just the first four rounds.

Round five doesn't even exist - it's just a massive explosion! Suddenly the complexion of the board changes drastically: six of the key action spaces are one-use-only between now and the end of the game - which could theoretically be very soon indeed. These actions are abruptly changed from moderately helpful to extremely alluring. But another action is also available, and this one is your potential game-changer - or game-saver. You can evacuate people from the city, with the whopping caveat that you can only do this once. How, and how much, you score in doing so depends on which faction/colour you are: I needed engineers with titanium, Stan needed neutronium.

oh no

Post-asteroid, there's a maximum of three more rounds - which we played tonight - but there might well only be one. My cack-handed plan was to evacuate early and try and take up all the special one-off actions as quickly as possible... my problem was that post-asteroid, exo-suits are rather hard to come by and all my workers could do was potter about at home, achieving very little. Considerately not cackling at my foolishness, Stan took his time and harvested a shedload of neutrino before taking his evacuation action, outscoring me on that count...

Stan 72
Sam 44

Nuts. I'm not sure what's more nuts, the game itself or the alleged 30mins per player to supposedly complete it. It took us two and a half hours! Though to be fair we were learning as we went. Stan laid in the dark upstairs and whispered that next time we play "it shouldn't be in the evening..."

I'm not sure who this game is for. I think the Adams might love it. Probably though it needs an evening to itself - starting early. Otherwise you might need some neutronium to get home.

Shouting "llama, llama, llama"

Our weekly games night arrived through the cold June drizzle at Sam's house. It began with Sam, Martin, Ian and Adam T playing L.A.M.A. for a couple of rounds until Katy and I arrived ten minutes late. The game was reset and all six were dealt in but before we could play a single card, Joe arrived.

We split into two groups and played two new (to GNN) games. Martin persuaded myself, Katy and Ian to try Situation 4, a team-based, simultaneous play jigsaw war game from the sixties.

Joe, Sam and Adam T played Xanadu. I know little about it except for someone saying something about tea. Adam T's post game summary of "Honestly, sometimes it's fun" didn't inspire confidence.

Adam T 41
Sam 33
Joe 29

If a jigsaw war game free-for-all sounds like crazy knockabout fun, then prepare to have your assumptions overturned. There's a strange frustration in not being able to find the right piece you need in ordinary jigsaws and this is doubled by the presence of other people trying to find the same piece.

This is war

It was fast moving in my head but often slow moving on the board, as certain pieces eluded everyone at times. It was so new and unfamiliar that we didn't deploy our tanks efficiently, and didn't deploy our paratroopers at all. Perhaps it was only right that it ended in a draw because, as Ian pointed out, there are no winners in war.

Brown land with orange pieces, me and Martin, Green with yellow pieces were Katy and Ian.

Martin and Andrew 1250
Ian and Katy 1250

Adam H arrived at this point and joined us to make a cosy fivesome at one end of the table. We got out Beowulf, the fun game of Viking epic poetry. It was Adam H's first go, but the rules are pretty straightforward. We set forth on our journey, spending a lot of time with Sea Hags, and enjoying Katy and Martin's bad luck. Adam, though, kept winning auctions and before long, he looked like the one to beat. Adam didn't seem to be enjoying it, though, and when he saw that Xanadu had been replaced by Orbit, he asked if he could swap games. I'm sure he only said that to shock us.

Beowulf in the near distance, Xanadu in the far.

Katy kept picking up wounds and Ian used his special cards to good effect. I was very good at being the starting player on rounds where we get to choose new cards, but that didn't help much. Adam remained bemused: "I don't know what I'm doing," he insisted. You're winning, Adam. You should recognise it by now.

Adam H 24
Martin 19
Ian 18
Andrew 12
Katy 7

Orbit was still unfinished and Ian was looking pensively at his watch, so we had another game of L.A.M.A. Once again, Adam H won while Ian ended the game on purpose so he could go and catch his bus, but not before he spouted the line that became this blog post's title. Thanks Ian.

Adam H 6
Katy 19
Martin 24
Andrew 25
Ian 42

Orbit had ended too. There must have been a fair amount of AP since I remember Sam asking "would it help if I move the planets now?"

Sam 41
Adam T 35
Joe 24

While they were just finishing up, the other four of us played a single round of Kariba.

Martin 17
Katy 13
Andrew 11
Adam 10

Now Adam T bade his farewells and left us to our final two games. First was Zogen, a Dobble-esque game of playing similar cards and calling out the name of the item that has changed. Its a crazy game of lightning reactions and I stopped playing halfway through, not finding it much fun. Martin had an early lead but was challenged on an illegal move and had to pick up all his cards again. He started to steam-roll his way back into contention, but too late since Sam put down his final card.

After this, showing little concern for the late hour, we played Just One. We started brilliantly, and started to believe that this was the time: a clear round. But duplicates crept in and when I was left to guess "Cinderella" with only "charming" as a clue (I guessed "Prince") our dreams were sunk.

And so, having failed to crack the Just One code, we set off in the night in Joe's car. Thanks for the lift, Joe and thanks to all for the fun.

I had a funny title, but I didn’t write it down

This week's games night was staged around Joe's kitchen table with Joe, Sam, Martin, Adam, Katy and me seated expectantly around it.

Our first game (after an unsuccessful attempt at a conversation to keep us occupied until Katy arrived) was L. A. M. A. A clever card game, not dissimilar to what The Mind might become should it get shitfaced and go out looking for trouble. Like the aforementioned genial co-op game, L.A.M.A involves putting cards down in steadily increasing values (one to six and then the llama card resets things back to one). But this time, there is a real delight in screwing over your opponents. Holding on to a card of a value that has otherwise been exhausted causes wails of anguish from your opponents as they have to pick up card after card, stuck behind the logjam you created. It was a lot of fun.

Katy 11
Adam 12
Sam 14
Joe 29
Martin 30
Andrew 41

The group split into two at this point. Adam, Sam and I played Orbit, the new slightly sol-esque game of space exploration. Basically, we send our three ships to fly-by, orbit, land and/or return from the eight planets while they slowly move around the circular board.

Sam got into an early lead with a quickly accomplished Pioneer card getting him three points. Adam managed to fly-by Jupiter and Saturn at the same time! As the game went on, Adam moved further and further into the lead such that Sam and I were reduced to picking up Mission Cards, hoping that it'd work like Ticket To Ride and give you a set of criteria that you've already achieved. Turns out it doesn't work that way at all.

Adam 31
Andrew 18
Sam 13

We all enjoyed it and we were confident that Ian and Other Adam would like it too. Then we speculated about the players sitting across the table from us. Right in front of them. Joe, probably, but as for the others... Who knows what floats their boat?

They didn't respond to our musings (that I recall) since they were still finishing the second of the two games they'd played.

The first was Res Arcana, a game I haven't played simply because it would be too embarrassing. The names of the different cards are so absurd they must be deliberate parody. And while Martin sounded suitably portentous when he told them he was destroying his Corrupt Altar, when Joe said he'd got a Hypnotic Basin he sounded more like a disappointed ebay customer. Nevertheless, Joe grabbed first placed thanks to some clever tactics that generated lots of gold that everyone seemed impressed by but I didn't understand it at all.

Joe 13
Martin 11
Katy 8

After this, they banged out a three handed game of L.A.M.A. with Joe victorious again.

Joe 16
Martin 20
Katy 41

Now we were all together again and Martin floated the idea of Decrypto. Adam wasn't keen but when we found out that Katy hadn't played, our decision was set. Decrypto it was. Martin, Katy and I faced Sam, Adam and Joe.

It went to the seventh round and that makes it sound very close but in retrospect, Team M.K.A. were struggling. Thanks to one word, Barracks (spelt without a 'c' on the card) which caused us no end of trouble. Both me and Katy gavs clues for it that equally applied to another word we had: Sword. I put "wooden" for Barracks because they are but Martin and Katy immediately focused on "wooden sword". Miscommunication one. Then Katy used "fence" for Barracks (because they have fences) but Martin and I were convinced by the sword/fencing link. Miscommunication two and defeat.

But that's not to take anything away from team S.J.A. (I forgot to note the actual team names) who cleverly gave a clue to a word that we knew we'd deciphered, but we failed to see the connection. The word was "wedding" and the clue was "Idol" which kind of linked to our suspicion that they also had "heaven" as a word so we chose that instead. But, of course the link was Billy Idol - White Wedding. Well done Joe for fooling us so late in the game.

Joe, Sam, Adam: James Bond
Katy, Martin, Andrew: James Bay

Finally, in a frisky mood, we played Dead Man's Chest. And what a game it was. Joe, in his pomp after two victories, made short work of Martin with some audacious bids that Martin failed to read, including a bid of 2-2 when he'd rolled 5-2

But his run of form couldn't unsettle Katy who saw through Joe's bids and he was out next. I followed thanks to Katy rolling Dead Man. Sam went out to Adam, leaving the final two: Katy versus Adam. Adam won the first round, bringing the score to one life left for each. But then Katy rolled Dead Man again, and Adam could only challenge. No hope.

Katy wins!
Adam
Sam
Andrew
Joe
Martin

And we were done for the night. A sterling night's entertainment, with a promising newcomer (Orbit) and a game we wondered why we don’t play every week (DMC). Thanks to Joe and to all who attended. It was special.

Races for the Galaxy

Stan and I went to the UK Game Expo last weekend and I was intrigued by a little indie game called Orbit: The International Space Race. Partly because of the theme, partly because it looks absolutely lovely (outside of the box, which is awful), and partly because my (functional, but maybe not that exciting) idea for a game called Orbital from a few years back had the same idea of planets moving along orbital paths during play.

But whereas that was kind of Lords of Vegas in Space, in Orbit there's a more exploratory vibe: each player (it plays up to six) takes charge of a space agency circa 1960 and heads for the stars. The agencies have some mild asymmetry to them, so from the get-go you each have slightly divergent paths to travel. And this asymmetry is heightened somewhat by everyone getting a Pioneer card that gives them bonus points - if they're the first to achieve it.

Outside of that, everyone's aims are initially the same: to win the propaganda war by being the first to reach Mars, Venus, and beyond. Essentially, it's a multi-directional set of races, where meeting achievements at the seven other planets - flybys, orbits, landings or the tough-to-do return to Earth - score points. But because being the first to reach an achievement also allows you to improve the functionality of your rockets, there's a flux to what happens on the board - you might spot that NASA are going to beat you to Neptune, say, so you change direction and for Saturn instead. Nobody's orbited Saturn yet!

The problem with changing direction, of course, is that it costs. Every time you manoeuvre a rocket - changing direction, going into orbit, landing or launching - it costs fuel, and fuel is heavy and hard to come by. At the start of the game you'd be lucky to have more than one fuel with a rocket, and once it's spent it's spent, meaning your astronauts ends up floating in the firmament, waiting to be retrieved.

After you've moved and manoeuvred all of your rockets, you get to take a single action.

There are only four of them: make a minor improvement back at your space agency, retrieving as many 'lost' rockets as you like, building new rockets, or risking mission cards.

Your agency has four dials showing the speed your rockets can move at, how much fuel they can carry, how many actions it takes to actually build one, and how many points you score for reaching an achievement. This is where the asymmetry rears it's potentially frustrating head - while strong in other areas, for instance, it's critical for China to improve their point-scoring capacity early on, or achievements won't score them anything. So improving the functionality is important - and you'll notice (below) that it often takes more than a single action to do so.

NASA halfway to doubling their build capacity

Retrieving rockets simply gathers your fuel-less lost souls from the board and plonks them back at the start of the building path, and the Build action pushes them along it - a higher build score gets your rocket ready to launch that much quicker.

Finally, taking Mission cards is rather like extra routes in Ticket to Ride: there's a luck-pushing aspect to them because you pick up two cards and must keep at least one of them. Just like TtR, this can be risky - especially later in the game as uncompleted missions count against you in the final scoring. Conversely, you might just pick up a mission you've already completed...

So the actions are quite simple, but - outside of the idea of retrieving rockets - they all have a thematic sense to them, and keep the game moving along quickly. The puzzley aspect is on the main board though - at the end of every round, all the planets move along their orbital paths and planning your rockets' movements around this is what I find so engaging.

The game has exactly 24 rounds - half of Neptune's orbit - so the end is calculable, and there's a ramping up of momentum as the board fills up with various rockets, each hoping to maximise their use on a minimum of fuel. I'm a sucker for the look of it and I love the theme too.