Duplicating pansies

Covid 19 continues to dog the land and so z for the third time, we met up virtually again for our weekly fix. Ian, Katy, Sam, Martin, Joe and myself used the full force of technology to simulate leaving the house.

We began with Codenames using a basic but functional website and it worked pretty well. The teams were Blue (Martin, Sam and me) against Red (Joe, Katy and Ian).

I was called away for the first round to try and fix my girlfriend's monitor and by the time I got back, I discovered Katy and Ian pondering Joe’s clue of “masturbation, two” (the two answers were “hand” and “pants”).

Katy got the yips over clicking on squares to advance the game after she accidentally revealed an opposing team’s clue and all of us had reason to pause over who was clicking what and was it okay to go on. This caused Joe to go into a lengthy reverie about how similar it must be for those manning the button for nuclear missiles. "Shall I do it?" "Now? Is that okay?"

In the last round when I was spymaster, I managed to overlook that fact that “fly” is an insect whereas my intended target “spider” wasn’t. Happily, I managed to recover with clues like “Halo” for “Angel” and “Crown.”

Blue 2
Red 1

After this Sam left for an early night and the remaining five of us eschewed specialised websites and instead played Just One on Google Hangouts. We all got our own stationary and Martin noted that his pen didn’t work properly “which is par for the course in this game.” I duplicated often, which at least gave us two bonus points for correctly guessing the eliminated words. Joe managed to guess (somehow) that, for the clue “flower”, Katy and I both wrote “pansy”. It was suprising enough when I saw Katy had read my mind, but pretty astonishing when Joe did it too.

We did very well. It would’ve been perfect but Katy wasn’t able to match Martin’s clue “greased” with the target word “lightning”. When it was explained that it was a song in the musical Grease, she said she’d always thought it was “Grease Lightning”. How we laughed.

Score: GNN bonus point method: 14. Off the scorechart! Official method: 12. “Incredible!”

Then Katy wanted one more game to play before she went off to watch her gig in twenty minutes. After that, she said, the four of us could go and play Tichu. The silence that followed told her that, actually, she may as well go now. Taking the hint, she departed to spend some quality time with her favourite band.

The remaining four of us upped sticks and set off for a website where we can play Tichu. Early on we ran into an issue: every move was restricted by a timer. Martin didn’t notice and immediately got a “slow play 1/3” warning. This rather strict aspect meant that going to the toilet had to be carefully timed. Next we found another slight issue: Auto-fold meant that the site automatically made a player pass if they didn’t have a hand strong enough to compete.This meant that bluffing was almost impossible. So we turned it off until Joe needed to go to the toilet and he turned it back on again.

But we put these down as minor teething troubles. That was until Ian picked up his third Slow Play warning and the game suddenly ended. And that was that. Nothing we could do - we had just angered the Tichu Gods and there was no button to click to make it all right.

I’m pretty sure that Joe and Martin were winning when the game ended. We then acquainted ourselves with how judgmental the site can be by looking over the list of “cheaters” and “leavers” that are available to peruse on the site. How odd.

But the best thing for me was that I have Tichu on my phone and I changed the names of the AI opponents to Martin, Ian and Joe and here I was in exactly the same situation. They were ever sitting in the same place! Living the dream, baby!

And that was the end of the evening. We turned off our cams and went to bed. Thanks all. Let’s try it all again soon.