Not Your Average Joe

Joe and I arrived a little late to proceedings last night to find that, a quarter of an hour in, no games had been played. And such was our collective dithering that it was another fifteen minutes before we finally started a game. Everyone was distracted, to be fair - by Adam's hair:

And by Joe's new role as a latter-day emperor of Rome. Not only was he lolling horizontally sul letto, he was also (not pictured) eating a peach.

Having been rocked by these seismic changes, we rejected Joe's thematically-apt suggestion of Colosseum in favour of Texas Showdown. For those who've not played, or forgotten, or who just like reading stuff, this is a trick-taker where you don't want to win tricks. The suit led (eg yellow) must be followed if possible, but if someone can't follow they play a different suit (eg green) and now anyone still to play can lay yellow or green. The highest number of the commonest suit takes the trick.

I began badly, picking up five tricks on the first round - as soon as anyone hits twelve the current round will be the last - but staged a recovery of sorts, winning none at all in the next two rounds. Martin, Ian and Adam all cursed their cards at various stages, and Martin was first over the dozen line before I joined him. Adam tripped even further, leaving Ian and Emperor Berger with a shared win.

1 Joe/Ian 10

2 Martin/Sam 13

3 Adam 14

We moved on to feistier fare with the train/station-laying conundrum that is Northern Pacific: if the train goes to your station, it pays out. If it doesn't; it doesn't. But on your turn you can either build a station, or move the train - not both. So there's a dilemma and every station runs the risk of not paying when it ends up as a repurposed B+B instead. The simple rules are neat, but the protracted down-time meant I felt this one works better in the room. Waiting for turns was pronounced enough that non-players started fiddling with all the bits. This was one of the SFW versions:

Martin began well, but was swiftly overhauled by Joe, and then everyone else, as the mistake of leading after round one became clear. Despite leading after round 2, Joe seemed to escape a similar fate, and ran off with title of Railway Emperor:

Joe 21

Adam 20

Sam 19

Ian 18

Martin 17

With that, I was done. I think they were going to continue though, maybe long into the night? I'm sure we'll find out...

The Search for Planet Games

Last night Martin made his way to my house for some socially-distanced two-player games.

After a quick catch up, we kicked off with The Search for Planet X.

In this deductive undertaking, you are astronomers scanning the solar system for the mysterious (and actually plausible in real life) extra planet. The board is separated into 12 sectors (18 if you're feeling expert, but we did 12) and nine have a single thing in them (comet, gas cloud, asteroid, or dwarf planet)  while three are apparently empty (two are genuinely empty;  one will actually be hiding Planet X itself). Each game has some universal rules about how these things relate to each other, and also some specific ones that are furnished by the app. Your goal is to find the Planet, obviously, but the method of doing so is deducing what is in all the sectors, and while you're doing this the game invites you to submit theories as to what celestial body is where - because these theories score points, you can actually win even if you don't locate the planet first.

On each turn you choose whether to survey (look for a specific object in specific sectors) research (uncover facts about how objects relate to each other) and, only twice a game, target (establish categorically what is in one sector of your choice). All actions take time, and the furthest back on the time track is the active player - like a spacey version of Tokaido. Although the app suddenly needed an update halfway through, the mechanics are actually simple - and the submitted theories, when proved right, give additional clues to help you work out what's where. The brain-melting is applying the incremental drip of info to the elimination and clarification of what, exactly, is where, in the firmament.

My early targeting found an apparently empty sector, which didn't really help with my opening theory (you can't theorise that there's nothing ) but found the solitary Dwarf Planet with my second. Martin revealed later he'd located the two comets early on, and he led the running in the theories from the get-go. I could have been first to find Planet X but I made a critical error, surveying when I didn't actually need to. As it turned out, it wouldn't have been enough anyway: Martin's astronomy skills were superior to mine.

Martin 29
Sam 19

Having completed a great step forward for mankind, we took a couple backwards to try Martin's acquisition of Heir to the Pharaoh.  It's a tricky one to precis, but I'll give it a quick go: bid for God cards to put things on a track and get monuments and build obelisks and stuff that point at other obelisks and stuff for points and contribute to a pyramid and if things point at the pyramid they score themselves too and get Magic Animals.

Yes, it's pretty abstract, and pretty bonkers as well, but we liked it. There's a nifty bidding mechanic where sun cards beat moon cards in ties, and bidded cards go to the opposing player at the start of the next round. It was a mixture of Knizia and someone a bit more fiddly, but a lot of fun.

I led through much of the game, but having reached peak red wine around the halfway mark, couldn't quite crack the puzzle playing out on the board itself, satisfying myself with monument collections and pyramid contributions. Twice I ended up with a single God (along with Thoth, the God of catch-up mechanisms and round-resetting) and on the penultimate round I spent so much that my final bidding hand was predominantly a confection of low moon cards.

Martin - loads of points
Sam - about ten less points

We wrapped up with Letterpress, at which point my memories get a little bit blurry except to say I temporarily convinced myself I could spell advisable as advizable and my stashed cards for the final, critical round, looked like some kind of consonant-heavy secret code. I managed a thematically-apt DAZED, but Martin came up trumps with a very impressive BLUSTERY.

Lots of fun. I hope we'll be growing the numbers at some point, somewhere, soon. Meantime if anyone fancies a head-to-head evening of physically distant fun...???

Going to the docks

Another week of remote gaming saw eight people involved. At first, four of us (Martin, Katy, Ian and I) played Tea Time while we waited for the others to arrive. It's a nice game, but I don't really get it. When Ian began with a move where he picked up two cards that cancelled each other out, I thought that was a smart move so I did likewise (having no cards is better than having one or two), only to then learn that Ian had mis-clicked and my admiration had been entirely misplaced.

Martin 43
Ian 37
Katy 33
Andrew 30

During this game, Adam T and Andy B arrived. With still more to come, the six of us chose For Sale as a nice little filler before the evening's main event.

I couldn't tell if Katy's eagerness to play was sarcastic or not, given her poor history at the game, but she did mention the "joint second" that she achieved last week. She started by picking up a 24 card for free band she disparaged bidding exchanges as "dick wars". At this moment Joe joined us, and he must have wondered exactly what game we were playing.

As for the game, Katy got her first win while Adam said "I am able to confirm that there are two zero dollars cards."

Katy 48
Martin 46
Ian 45
Andy 41
Andrew 40
Adam 38

Sam arrived too and we split into two groups of four. Sam, Ian, Katy and Martin played American Bookshop.

Katy 8
Martin -3
Sam -8
Ian -15

While me, Joe, Andy and Adam decided on a real challenge: Yokohama. It had been ages since I played and I made a few sub-optimal moves, as well as forgetting how to score points. Adam, too, was working hard to re-familiarise himself with the game, which lead to "It's all coming back to me now" by Celine Dion going around his head. Andy worked as adviser to the rest of us, since he'd played the online version before. Joe's recent real life game against Katy must have been great preparation since he strode away from us almost from the start.

Joe 131
Andy 113
Adam 70
Andrew 49

During the final stages we noticed Martin, Ian and Katy popping in to watch but never staying long. I hopped over to Google Hangouts, only to see that Ian and Sam had already packed up for bed and Martin and Katy were playing Mandala.

Finally, we were all back together, but only enough for us to bid farewell. I was frazzled after Yokohama, so I popped off first and the rest must have gone soon after because a few minutes later Discord sent me a notification of Martin’s last words of the evening: “Can anyone hear me?... Bye then” which gave me the image of him as an astronaut drifting into deep space.

I'm sure he'll be fine. At least by next week.

Vindicate me, Andrew

Last night Andrew and I felt brave enough to meet for some socially-distanced gaming. I threw open the back doors, decanted crisps into two separate bowls, placed some hand sanitizer on the table and set up Vindication. It was wonderful to see Andrew's physical form come through the door, but we kept things sensible and refrained from an embrace, spending a few minutes catching up before Andrew had glanced at the board enough and decided we should start.

Vindication is quite silly. Though it pretends to be an epic - and it does have a sense of story - I'm pretty sure the inherent silliness is deliberate. You begin washed up on the shore of some distant - from anywhere - isle, and must rebuild your self-belief and self-respect by travelling this land and building some kind of rep. Thematically, that's making friends (-followers) finding relics (relics) developing traits (traits) and killing monsters. Each thing you do relates to an aspect of your character - strength, knowledge and inspiration are the basics (and all you need to make friends), but you can also develop wisdom (- get traits!) courage (- fight monsters!) and vision (- find relics!). Collectively these are all represented by distinctly-coloured cards. The cards score points themselves, and having the majority in a type of card means you get a mastery token for considerable bonus points at the end of the game.

You also have secret objectives that can potentially score points - it's a strange path to vindication really, as though the first thing you said upon waking was that you were bloody well going get three relics and befriend a gnome before the day was out. But it's fun, and despite the abstraction of how the wheels turn, really fast-moving also: on your turn you can do three actions in any order you like. You must move around the island; you can activate either yourself (free) or one of your followers (not free; coming to that in a moment) and either visit a location on the board, or 'rest'.

Everyone's got a board of cubes that functions as a sort of cosmic economy of your soul: it tracks your potential, influence, and conviction. Influence is where it's really at, as it's these cubes you spend to take actions and build up the character aspects mentioned above. Potential can be turned into influence by resting, and conviction is called for a lot less but can be helpful taking control of parts of the island, or stopping your followers from dying when they battle monsters for you - you never battle monsters yourself, as you consider it uncouth.

So a turn can literally be 20 seconds at times. How the game ends sort of escalates too: there are two random end-game criteria revealed at the start, but as players work their way up the score-track more and more are revealed - despite looking like an all-day undertaking, you can blast through it in an hour. Even though I vindicated myself and he didn't, Andrew blasted better than me though:

Andrew 100
Sam 82

We moved on to a light abstract stone-pusher in SHŌBU. Light on rules, that is. The gameplay itself asks for some shrewd decision-making: Your goal is to push all of your opponents' pieces off any of the four boards.  You have two home-boards (light and dark) and on your turn you first make a passive move: move one of your stones on one of your homeboards up to two spaces. Then you make an aggressive move: move one of your stones on either board of the opposite colour. With the passive move you can't push stones - with the aggressive move you can, so you're trying to shovel the other player over the edges of the boards whilst - as much as you can - protecting your own.

It's quite canny, because generally striking out aggressively puts you in jeopardy, but aggression is what's needed to win the game. Trying to keep the battle on your opponent's side gives you more scope for passive moves on your homeboards and keeps them hemmed in. It can be quite swingy, but my previous games against Sal, Stan and Joe gave me the edge.

Sam - wins!

And with that, we wrapped up the evening. I realised I was slightly drunk when I tried to get the whole family downstairs for a game of Wavelength, but it was not to be. Very nice to taste a hint of of Tuesdays past though, and hopefully future. Out, damned Covid!

More Technical Difficulties

The lockdown continues in one form or another, and so seven housebound gamers joined together for battle at a distance. No Joe or Sam, so our numbers contained Martin, Ian, Andrew, Adam H and Katy at first and then Adam T and Andy B a little later on.

We began with For Sale, where a bid of six is now called “the classic six,” thanks to its frequent use as an opening bid or raise. Katy was very pleased with her “joint second” or, as everyone else called it, “third.”

Martin 56
Ian 52+ tie breaker
Katy 52
Adam 51
Andrew 40

Then we waited for the other Adam and Andy B and while we did we sorted out those who hadn’t reciprocated friendship on the GNN group. This was mostly Katy who only had eight friends. How cold. Then Adam T arrived and we saw Andy B wink in and out of existence for a while until he joined us for a game of 7 Wonders.

Katy quickly found her internet connection was a little dodgy and she frequently ended up offline and had to reboot her machine. While we waited patiently, I quipped that it would be quicker to actually build the seventh wonder.

Adam H 57
Andrew 54
Katy 47 + cash
Martin 47
Andy 36
Ian 33
Adam T 29

Then we split into two. Martin, Adam T, Katy and I played American Bookshop, the cunning trick taker from Japan. It was my first game and I enjoyed it, even if I never quite understood what to play and when. Katy scored positively in every round and won by a mile. Adam never recovered from his -11 round, and I picked up -14 in one round myself.

Katy 27
Martin 1
Andrew -2
Adam -5

Then others played Downforce, which I kept an eye on. They played the variant with powers or something. Anyway, Ian bought three cars while Adam H only had one. And guess what it finished first, by a mile. And at the end of the game we discovered that everyone had always bet on it.

Adam $24m
Andy $23m
Ian $8m

After this they played Red 7 which went on for a surprisingly long time (also with powers, I think). The length of effort barely reflected in the scores.

Ian 2
Adam 1
Andy 0

We had finished American Bookstore and Adam T had left us, so the three of us played Eggs of Ostrich. This game was notable for Katy and I playing an identical game in round three. Amazingly, this ended badly for both of us because on the final card Katy thought she had no choice about what to play and so blurted out that she’d passed. I could see a winning move, but I had to pass as well otherwise I’d burst a bag. Our passing gave all the eggs to Martin who took them gratefully and used them to steal the win right at the end.

Martin 33
Katy 31
Andrew 24

Then the two groups joined together and since we played 7 Wonders with seven, it was only right and proper that we play 6nimmt with six. Ian went clear in round one, and I think that was the only time anyone managed that in what was a pretty brutal game. Martin got into a death spiral which not only triggered the end of the game, but then continued no afterwards thus giving him a shockingly low score.

Adam's turn. Hmm... which row would you choose?

Ian 60
Katy 54
Andy 24
Andrew 23
Adam H 0
Martin -27

And so we were done. I’m sure Katy’s aging tablet breathed a sigh of relief when she finally shut it down. In the meantime we’ll come back and do this all again next week.

Technical Difficulties

After last week's blogger-less games night, which is lost to history without a written record, six gamers (Joe, Ian, Adam H, Katy, Martin and myself) sat at their computers to do virtual battle once more.

But for much longer? Katy told us that she and Joe had played a real game, face to face, recently. Is this the first sign of life beyond the lockdown?

We were waiting for Andy who was expected in fifteen minutes so we tried talking for a bit. But as the time approached, we regretted not playing a quick game. We decided that he wouldn't mind watching for a while so we banged out a quick game of 7 Wonders.

Joe struggled with money but that might have been because he only had three resources and two of them were wood. Martin had lots of resources but still found himself unable to build much.

Adam 65
Joe 51
Ian 49
Martin 48
Katy 43
Andrew 39

Bang on cue, Andy arrived and we split into two groups. Adam, Martin and Joe played Race For The Galaxy. I did keep an eye on it but I understood nothing.

Martin 68
Joe 23
Adam 18

Andy, Katy, Ian and I chose Colt Express as an amusing slice of gaming. But it was short lived. At the start of the second round, after an eventful opener where Ian punched and shot Katy, Andy suddenly vanished. We waited for him to reconnect and then Sam arrived. We chatted and waited and after fifteen minutes we quit the game after we found out we couldn't start a new one until Colt Express was finished.

By this time, Martin popped in to make sure I'd got the details of his impressive win. Andy returned and we split into two new groups. Sam, Martin, Andy and Ian played American Bookshop. I know little else about it.

We played Tichu. Eventually.

First, Adam set up a table but didn't password protect it and a bunch of strangers sat there. Abandoning that, Joe made a new table but left a timer on. Again we changed tables (and Joe changed the web browser) and finally we got our own password protected timer-free table.

We began with Joe calling Grand Tichu immediately, reminding his partner Katy that this meant she should give his best card. He would have done it too except for three bombs at the table; his, mine Adam's.

Joe made amends in the next round, completing a Tichu, but then Adam successfully did a Grand Tichu with a 1-2 finish, netting us 400 points. Joe then completed another Tichu and then suggested we finish at 500 points. With the score at 495 - 205 Adam and I readily agreed. Joe called Tichu and Katy admitted that she wanted to call Tichu but now had to lose, a concept she was unfamiliar with. Joe mentioned if they go out 1-2 with the Tichu, then they'd win. But I had meant to call Tichu but had forgotten to press the right button. So I had a good hand and was able to take the win, ending on a bomb, for style.

I had the dragon, phoenix, three queens and a bomb. Possibly should've called Tichu

Andrew and Adam 570
Joe and Katy 130

American Bookshop had ended too, so while I was on a toilet break, Sam and Joe bade us farewell. When I came back, we remaining six chose For Sale as a quick six-player hit. Katy seemed reluctant, apparently believing this to be her gaming nemesis but this time she did better than she was expecting.

Andrew 52
Ian 49
Martin 46
Adam 43
Katy 41
Andy 34

A second game was agreed upon, and Katy’s gradual improvement continued.

Martin 50
Andrew 49
Adam 47
Katy 42
Andy 40
Ian 38

Finally we chose Perudo as our nightcap. Martin was keen to go to bed and went out quickly. He didn’t go, though, preferring to watch until the end. And what an end it was! The final two were Adam (5 dice) versus Katy (2 dice) and I’m still not sure what happened but Adam got himself into a death spiral. All the more astonishing after playing such a perfect game. Admittedly he pretty much threw away one die: when it was 2 dice each, Adam bid 3 twos. In other words, If Katy had no twos or aces, she could dudo with confidence. Which she did. A schoolboy error from Adam.

Katy 2 dice left
Adam
Andy
Andrew
Martin

And so that was that. Good nights were spoken and connections broken. See you next week!