Reach for the Skyscrapers

Thursday! It's not Tuesday, but one is still allowed to game in the right circumstances, and those circumstances arrived at 8.30pm for myself (Sam) Andrew and Steve. Steve was unfashionably early, so the quick two-player game of Just One Andrew and I settled on quickly became a three.

It's tough with three. For the guesser in particular, although Andrew and I did manage to duplicate our clues for Powder by both writing Talcum; Steve guessed we'd both written gun. A reasonable assumption - but the game as a whole didn’t  reach the heights of success that Tuesday's did. Nonetheless Just One is always fun. 

The meat of the evening, even if it's more thin-sliced ham than gammon steak, was New York 1901. It's New York - I forget the year - and we're all building, building for the skies in the days when the gherkin would have been frowned on as not nearly square enough. Turns are simple - grab a lot, place a worker on the lot. Build there now, or hope to grab an adjacent lot later, in order to build bigger and better buildings. 

But because you only have four workers at your disposal, there is a kind of economy to things. There's also rewards for having the most buildings on particular streets, and the possibility to demolish previously-built buildings in order to build better ones. Sadly, you can only demolish your own... 

Steve and Andrew were off the marks quickly and before I knew what was happening, they were dominating Broadway and Cedar Street. I focused my energy on building, building, building, and was the first to claim a legendary skyscraper in order to leap ahead on the scoretrack. But you can only build one of these in the entire game, so in the parlance of architects, I'd basically run out of scaffolding. 

As the lots ran out it was clearly a two-way battle between Steve and Andrew: I claimed nothing from the most-buildings-on-streets rewards and they surged past me. Steve getting two was key to his victory:

Steve 70

Andrew 67

Sam 63

With the time now nearing ten, Andrew headed for home, but Steve and I still had some games left in us, and we kicked off a delightful hour of 2-player silliness with Karambolage. This is a 25-year-vintage Haba game where a play area defined by string contains a number of coloured discs. Dice are rolled showing matching colours, and your job is to flick one colour into another, as Steve demonstrates deftly here:

The wooden block can be placed wherever you like before you make your shot. As deft as we - Steve especially - were, we were also regularly catastrophically over or under-flicking. Often the dice are unkind and the colours rolled are blocked from a direct shot, so you have to attempt a rebound. 

I never managed it at all, but Steve did a couple of times. There's a Can't Stop style point-scoring system where you can bank what you have or choose to roll again and push your luck, and we regularly fell foul of our own insatiable greed for points as well. If you roll doubles on the dice, you roll again and keep rolling until you get two colours, but every doubles roll increases the points value of your next shot. We had a lot of fun with this, and I managed to conquer Steve over three games despite getting the Uncontrollable Yips when on the verge of victory in game three. 

Sam 2

Steve 1

It was nearing eleven but our gaming tank still had fuel in it, so I introduced Steve to Kariba, the game of waterhole dominance, and overcame a terrible start in order to gain a second win - at least in part to a slight rules misunderstanding.

Sam 28

Steve 22

There was just enough time for me to try and drunkenly explain the rules to Outfoxed (I think I might have called it Fox in the Forest, which is, er, different...) to Steve before we called it a night. As always, splendid fun, thanks gentlemen!