Commanding presence

Tuesday evening rolled around with a diminished attendance this week. And a later start time. And an earlier finish time. But it still contained enough intrigue and strategies to send us off to bed happier.

We (Andy, Ian, Martin and me) began at 8 with a new game, Mapmaker. It seemed very appropriate that, with the election looming, we should be playing a game of area control with a first-past-the-post criteria for winning. The game is simple enough. Each player puts down four dividers such that they have the highest value within a particular area once it is completely surrounded and below a certain size. 

It was tricky to understand at first. Andy was in last (3, 3, 3, 1) in the closing stages, but had the vast majority of tiles in the remaining part of the board. Then he put down his four dividers to create three new regions, winning each one and finishing the game. Martin called it a "sneaky bastard of a move," with admiration in his voice.

Andy 4

Andrew, Martin, Ian 3

Next we passed over a couple of suggestions until we decided on The Crew. It was a bit daunting to return to Mission 38 (in the heliosphere, looking for planet X), and I flinched a bit when I saw the eight tasks we had to do, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, I suppose.

I didn't start well and my mistake led to mission failure on the very first hand. Then we suffered a similarly swift fate in attempt two before finally sailing to victory in our third attempt!

Mission 39 began well, as we all chose two tricks each of the same colour. This should be easy, observed Martin, optimistically. Unfortunately Ian was too eager to give a card before it was supposed to be taken. None of us noticed so we were all surprised when the “Fail” message appeared on screen. After a couple more turns, we got another perfect colour spilt, and this time we succeeded. By now, though, Ian was sick of always being the commander.

I don’t recall how many attempts we had at Mission 40, but I do remember Ian, when asked why he’d taken a Green 8 as a task when he told us his highest green was a six, admitted “Yeah, I panicked.” But we scraped past, with a little help from Martin who’d pretty much worked out where each card was by the closing stages. Ian chucked his green 6 and then in the penultimate hand, won the green 8 with a trump. Nicely done, and it’s onwards to mission 41, and I think Martin’s the only one to have been there for each one. There’s only 50 in the game. Is Martin’s trick-taking epic nearing its end?

Well, it was nearing the end for us this evening. We went our separate ways at about ten to ten. See you next week.