Beyond Salvaging

 This week GNN saw a mere four members online (Katy, Martin, Ian and I). But while we were mere in numbers we were far from mere in enthusiasm. Notwithstanding being a bit tired and me being late.
When I'd arrived they'd already played Eggs Of Ostrich with Katy winning (K 19, I 12, M 9).

Next was the online debut of Senators, the auction-heavy card game of Roman political intrigue. Katy got a rules refresher which I needed as well. The game worked pretty well on playingcards.io and Katy was impressed enough with how professional it was, and she asked “Is it difficult to do this?” “Martin answered “Not really,” and then Katy clarified “Is it difficult for a normal person to do this.”

The one awkward part was how to blind bid whenever there was a war: everyone bids, highest gets a senator but everyone pays. Martin suggested a compromise: we all flipped over our coins in our player area and then, on a signal, dragged them onto the playing area. If you wanted to bid zero, you would just say so. It seemed to work well, especially for me when my opponents said they weren’t bidding while I dragged my two coins onto the board. What a cheap Senator!

Andrew 10
Ian 8
Martin 8
Katy 7

Next up was Salvage - a brand new game, not even on Board Game Geek. It’s a trick taker in which you have to avoid winning tricks with flaming boats in them. Doing so means you lose points. However, you have a chance to collect oil barrels to offset the damage. (There’s a story behind all this, I think, but it's pretty tenuous) But anyway, there are 15 oil barrels in total and the players are expected to share them nicely without the 15th barrel being taken. If that happens, then everyone loses points according to how many oil barrels they took. Greed is bad, you see.

Anyway, I had trouble getting my head around it, although I did enjoy Katy losing to Martin, Ian and I playing 1, 2 and 3 red cards (all on fire) and she had the 4. This happened three times. How we laughed. Especially me, since I had nothing else to laugh about.

Martin 14
Katy 13
Ian 11
Andrew -1

Next up was another playingcard game - Krass Kareirt. This game of playing increasingly high hands without actually rearranging your cards. It works well on the internet.

Martin 2

Katy 2

Andrew 1

Ian 0

At this point Ian retired to bed and we three pondered our next move. We went back to BGA because otherwise we're just wasting our money. We chose Can't Stop (which appears to have some kind of desert island theme to it) which I usually do well at since I'm usually able to stop. According to the end of game statistics, I went bust only once. Martin, on the other hand, had only one successful roll in the first half of the game.

Andrew 3

Katy 2
Martin 1

And that was that. Off to dream our dreams of success and derring-do.