Tricked into Space

Tuesday, and chez Joe's alongside the host sat Katy, Martin and myself (Sam) with Steve on the way. Unusually both Andrew and Ian were missing! Instead I took blogging duties and Steve provided the fatalism.

Martin's return from Eastbourne signified an influx of Essen-smuggled games in his bag, and first onto the table was Hurlyburly. This is something like a cross between Rhino Hero and Castle Crush - everyone is building their own tower a la the former, but trying to knock each other's constructions down like the latter - only with catapults!

The home-spun components smacked of an enthusiast's labour of love, and apparently the designers are father and daughter. Very sweet! The game itself - not so sweet. But a lot of fun. On your turn you can add sandbags, take blocks, construct more levels (fast for height or strong for sturdy) - or attack. As the winner is the player who has a four-level tower at the start of their turn, it's beholden on everyone to attack each other when that threat becomes imminent. Like Joe did to Martin here:

You can also improve your catapult. This is rather key, as the starting catapult is pretty flimsy and reaching the other side of the table with it is a bit of an ask. But when you slide in extra layers of card for rigidity, suddenly your blocks can go that much further.

We liked it so much we played twice - Katy won the first game, and Joe the second.

By that time Steve had arrived, so without a great amount of further ado - one day, Tulip Bubble! - we settled on Decrypto. Katy was markedly suspicious of this choice as she remembered being too far away from the pad the last time she played. Martin suggested moving nearer. Katy narrowed her eyes, and joined Steve and I as we faced off against Martin and Joe.

It's definitely an advantage having two guessers on a team instead of one - spotting links (as Steve did) that someone else (me) might have missed entirely. But you wouldn't have known it at the start of the game as for three rounds we were completely foxed trying to find any meaning at all. Worse, it seemed like they were onto us. 

But then we had an inkling of one word (Picnic) and made a somewhat fortunate interception. We cashed in our laser tokens, identified picnic and won! What's more we were very close on two other words as well - we'd actually written Garden and Breakfast on our pad. Joe and Martin had worked out word 2 (Dance) but were otherwise stumped.

Katy, Steve, Sam - Decrypto!

Martin and Joe - Decrepto

The most notable part of Decrypto wasn't actually the guessing though, but Joe insisting that the word crap was onomatopoeic. We wondered what he'd been eating.

Next up was Die Crew, the trick-taking game of co-operative space exploration. We played the first Mission again to introduce the mechanics to Katy and Steve. Katy picked things up quickly, but Steve was bewildered. He told us we should continue the mission because that was his default state anyway. We liked that do-or-die attitude, and played several more rounds, taking three attempts at Mission 8 before we succeeded. "There's over fifty missions!" Martin exclaimed, perhaps marvelling at our ineptitude. Mission 8 is hard though.

Steve and I were keen for a different flavour of game so we played LAMA. For whatever reason whenever a Llama was played the active player would pipe "Llama" as though we were playing reverse bingo. Steve started rather badly, and things got worse when Martin and I dropped out of round two and he, Joe and Katy just kept picking up cards...

Then I had a hand of high cards and kept picking up more, pushing me into last place. But Joe played like a pro and wrapped things up when Katy fell apart in successive rounds to trigger the end:

Joe 6
Martin 12
Steve 30
Sam 35
Katy 46

After we packed LAMA away Joe told a story about being in the sauna which I now don't recollect the details of, and Katy called a leftover card a 'wanker', leading to a discussion about when cards should or shouldn't be sleeved. The details are probably all best lost though.

Despite the encroaching late hour, For Sale was quickly voted as the next game. It was a game of strange displays, with opening bidding cards tableaus having all high cards and then the final one all low except for the 30. Everyone picked things up cheaply, and there was a surprising lack of teeth-gnashing. In a tight game, Martin ran out the winner:

Martin 60
Katy 55
Joe 50
Steve 49
Sam 46

Before we wrapped things up with Just One, playing our house rule of guessing eliminated (duplicate) clues if the guesser guesses correctly. We ran into trouble with Katy's word being Muse (I only understood my own clue for that one) but did rather well overall, with our variant rule making up for any failures - we scored a 'perfect' 13, but the house rule does need its own separate scoring system really as theoretically you could score 26 points with it.

In the meantime, that was that! I didn't take photos of Just One, but here's a plastic bull.