Candles in the Win

Saturday, and with Sally up north visiting her folks, the boys were given free rein on Amazon and elected to watch Spiderman: Far From Home. Meanwhile in the other room I was prepping the play area. With Steve, Katy and Ian on their way, I'd asked what kind of mood they were in. Although Steve suggested an epic (and I was very amenable) Ian preferred something moderate, and as he has an epic already in the form of the journey home, I forewent idle thoughts of SpaceCorp and was instead setting up Ecos: First Continent.

Here the players are kind of deities, building landscape and populating it with animals. The nice thing about it is the bingo-style mechanic, where a tile is drawn and everyone gets to place a cube on a matching symbol on their cards. If they don't have a matching card, they still get to turn their dial, which will eventually trigger more cards into your deck, or adding a card to your tableau from your deck, or gaining an extra cube for your limited economy.

When a card has all its cube spaces filled up, it activates: adding landscape tiles or animals, mountains or trees, possibly eating animals, and scoring points in all manner of incongruous ways. And you get to shout Ecos! like a bingo-mad old fart who has forgotten what words mean.

At the start it's pretty fast-moving. But even then, we were all figuring out how to best use our bespoke decks - you start with only three cards face-up and the deal is constructing an engine with the other cards in your deck, or the other cards available from the general supply. Steve was baffled. Katy was building mountains, reasoning they'd be helpful for her gorillas. Ian was turning his dial the wrong way and finding the arrows confusing.

I sped into the lead after about 20 minutes, and remained competitive for another 20. After that, I merely looked at my cards and wondered where on earth any more points were going to come from. On the other side of the table, Steve was having a Ganz Schon Clever-style activation party, with cards begetting cards begetting cards. Katy kept crying Gorilla! in a manner that reminded me of Kid Carpet. Ian pulled off his 'one big move' for a huge points haul, but then found himself in a stasis similar to mine.

In fact the longer Ecos went on, the less enamoured I was of it - there was so much waiting for activations to be resolved, sometimes of two or three people at a time, that I felt like we were merely minions computing a somewhat erratic program. And I worse Minion. The minor caveat of down-time I'd had in my game with Stan had exploded into a major one.

Katy however had no such qualms and sailed serenely past all of us to trigger the end-game.

Katy 81
Ian 55
Steve 50
Sam 37

Katy liked it. Ian didn't. "I'd play it again" Steve. But he won't, because it's going straight in the trade pile!

Next up was a game Steve brought with him - Welcome To... a flip and write game where players are seeking to score points in a variety of ways by building a housing estate; with every turn a decision between three available numbers and three attendant thingies such as a pool, tree, or more-points-for-certain-sized-estates. You get to name your own town, too, and Ian was furious to see I'd written Pootown on my sheet. "I was going to do that!" he exclaimed. He went for Pooville instead and Steve called his Weeville. Katy disappointingly called her town Katy, but she was to make up for her apparent lack of immaturity later.

Welcome To... has an inherent tension to it in there are planning objectives that score points, so it feels a bit like a race, assuming you're paying attention to what everyone else is doing, which I didn't. I grabbed one of the planning objectives, but in doing so had spent a lot of time erecting fences that otherwise wouldn't be bringing me many points. I neglected trees, didn't build pools at all and, come the end, had time to repent at leisure as my arid Pootown scored very little. At least it was better than Pooville though:

Steve 81
Katy 68
Sam 57
Ian 48

Next up was Wavelength. Ian suggested - in hindsight, an excellent call - that we play co-operatively rather than have the active team not be able to converse with anyone. The rules supply a co-op variant: Seven cards only, and the target scores 3 points, not 4. But if you hit the target exactly, you get to add an extra card. Much as I enjoyed coming to hate Ecos and building too many fences in Welcome To... this was the highlight of the evening for me, even though we all struggled to think of clues at times...

After giving Steve a brief overview, we kicked things off with a pretty impressive run of target-hitting before finding we fell just short of a win in the Just One-style scoring system. "We need to play again!" Katy cried, and nobody objected to that. I don't recall in which game all these things occurred, but we do now know that I don't rate Henry Cavill as an actor, nobody finds slugs sexy and Steve doesn't want to time-travel to the zombie apocalypse.

But the clue of the night was perhaps Gwyneth Paltrow's Vagina which Katy invoked for Bad Smell/Good Smell. Obviously the vagina in question has been in the news recently as Gwyneth has been selling dubiously-themed candles from her otherwise totally-sane website, but still, this had the three men present stumped. Good enough to be made into a candle didn't necessarily mean good at all in Paltrow's case. Steve imagined that Gwyneth was very hygienic and maybe therefore would smell good. Ian wondered whether hygiene came into it at all and simply the fact it was Gwyneth Paltrow meant the smell would be bad. Were we comparing it to all vaginas? Or all parts of Gwyneth Paltrow's anatomy? It was so subjective. I can't even remember what we or Katy surmised in the end, but at least our second game was a win, so along with the Power of Doctor Manhattan, the Age of a Horse and the Harmfulness of Bleach, maybe we have Gwyneth to thank after all, even if the final clue of the night was a miss, as the saddest song I could think of at the time was Candle in the Wind, and perhaps all the previous candle-talk meant nobody found it particularly sad at all.

Wavelength is just brilliant. But Ecos made me want to play SpaceCorp again. Anyone up for that?