Tea o'clock

Technically speaking, I was bang on time this week. At least, I had logged into Discord on my phone and was present as Katy, Joe, Martin, Adam T, Ian and Sam arrived. Alas, I was distracted by other things (making a salad, for example) and once I got to a PC, a game of Codenames was already underway.

This meant that my team mate Joe had to decipher spymaster Sam's first clue of ONLINE, 2 and he did it perfectly, picking out Amazon and Web.

Martin was not so lucky with his clues to Ian, Adam and Katy and his clue of WEIGHT lead to them picking one of our clues and then in the second round Martin chose TREASURE as his clue which prompted his colleagues to choose Temple. Alas this turned out to be the assassin and the game ended before I'd really got comfy.

By now Andy B had turned up and so we split into two groups of four. Martin, Joe, Katy and Sam played American Bookshop. Sam described it as a “devilish trick taker” and it was the word “devilish” that swung it for Katy.

They set off to a new Google Hangout so I have no idea what happened there, except that Sam won.

Photos courtesy of Sam

Meanwhile Ian, Adam, Andy and I went for Palaces of Carrera. It was Ian's first go and so Adam gave a rules explanation. Andy took the opportunity to go and get food but later admitted he'd overestimated his familiarity with the game as he had to reference the pdf of the rules. Ian was so quiet and still that I asked him if his avatar on Hangouts was a photo of himself. Adam discovered that you can’t say “bugger” on BGA.

It ended in a rare double victory for Adam. Firstly, for the game of Palaces of Carrara and secondly for the game of Race For The Galaxy that he was finishing off as we were playing.

Adam 78
Andrew 60
Andy 50
Ian 20

We learnt that the other four were playing King Domino, so we sped through 7 Wonders. Andy went into a lengthy debate about whether the left and right arrows on markets meant clockwise or anticlockwise. He must have been very frustrated about this, because he suddenly went big on military in round three. It was a futile gesture, though/

Adam 53
Ian 48
Andrew 44
Andy 39

Kingdomino was still going on so we, in our over excited state, figured we could squeeze one more game of 7 Wonders in. We couldn’t, and they finished halfway through our game. Ian went big on military and yellow commerce buildings on his way to a win.

Ian 56
Andy 51
Adam 48
Andrew 36

Kingdomino ended

Sam 53
Martin 53
Joe 49
Katy 41

Sam won again, this time on a tie-breaker so absurd that Martin scoffed at its very existence.

At this point Ian, Sam and Joe left and the remaining five of us played For Sale. Katy picked up 2, 3 and 4 and wanted the 1 as well except someone beat her to it. It was the most audacious tactic in For Sale since Katy decided to just pass on each round of bidding and pick up whatever. Today’s game ended that same way as that did. With Katy in last.

Andy 57
Martin 53
Adam 49
Andrew 45
Katy 40

Then Adam left which left us as a quartet. We ended the night trying out a simple yet tricky game called Tea Time. It's a set collecting game where each set has a mirror image. Collect two opposing cards and they cancel out. But this may be good because having no cards in a set gets you five points. This makes it better than having one or two.

Martin 41
Andy 33
Katy 27
Andrew 25

Katy 39
Martin 34
Andy 29
Andrew 24

And with that we were done for another week. Thanks all.