I hear you knocking

Another week of social distancing means another week of logging into Discord and taking advantage of the internet's ability to entertain.

There were nine of us. Ian, Katy, Martin, Joe (trying to download Discord to his Mac because his phone was dying), Steve, Anja, Sam, Adam H, and me. With such high numbers, we decided to play 6nimmt. It was available on Board Game Arena, but one of us needed to be a premium member in order to set up a game and invite the rest of us to join.

Ian was impressed enough by the site to put his hand into his pocket and he invited us all to join him as we registered one by one. Whenever someone accepted the invitation, it was accompanied by a knocking noise that Joe found unsettlingly creepy and it did indeed sound like something you’d hear coming from the next room while exploring an abandoned log cabin.

The set up was all going pretty smoothly until Anja joined. Suddenly the site threw up a warning that two players had the same IP address. This is not allowed, due to the risks of cheating. Unless you're a subscriber, in which case it's fine. Anja dutifully paid the membership fee and suddenly the site went from sneering accusations to complimenting her moral integrity. Money talks.

The game played out as you’d expect. Death spirals, hopeless situations (such as the only available space being the one after the highest card 104) and impossibly lucky escapes. Katy bemoaned her bad luck but that was mostly because she couldn’t work out if she’d actually picked up cards or not. Turns out she did okay.

Katy 47 (points left out of 66)
Steve 45
Ian 35
Martin 30
Sam 18
Anja 8
Adam 8
Andrew 2
Joe -1

Then we split into groups, after Steve vetoed the idea of him and Anja playing as a team in Incan Gold. Katy, Martin, Joe and I chose Tichu, at Katy’s suggestion while the others played… Incan Gold. Of course.

Since they stayed on Discord and we decamped to Google Hangouts, I have no idea what happened on the other “table” but here are the scores:

Sam 31
Adam 22 (least thinky, according to the website)
Ian 19
Anja 15 (most thinky)
Steve 13

They also played Codenames, but I know nothing about that.

As for Tichu, Katy needed a rules refresher, so it was very good that Martin made sure to turn the timer off. Joe and I took full advantage of Katy’s cautiousness and ran into a 250-50 lead after round two. Then Katy called Tichu and handed the Dragon card to Martin, causing him to erupt with bafflement (if such a thing is possible). But after a tricky start, they came back into it and actually got within one card of winning (Martin had completed his Tichu and Katy just had one card to put down for a 1-2 finish) but Joe and I just got across the line.

J & A 490
M & K 410

Then Sam, Joe and Steve all left so the remaining gamers all gathered on Google Hangouts and played Just One.

We didn’t do nearly as well as last time, and it’s probably best if we skip over any details, but I will mention Katy correctly guessing “Revolution” and crediting Anja’s “Televised” as being the key clue (as opposed to my “Beatles” and Adam’s “Vodka”)

Score: 4 (try again and again…)

And with that we were done. Time to shut down and go straight to bed.