Chips with everything

At eight o’clock I arrived, and saw that one game - Vulture Culture - had been completed with the scores looking a little curious:

Katy 7

Sam -1

Martin -2

Ian -99

Andy -99

It took a while to work out, but Ian and Andy had tied for first place with 18 each, but the rules of VC say that ties cancel each other out, I suppose, so they were sent packing with a somewhat unnecessarily high punishment.

Along with the above mentioned five and myself was also Joe. We all dove into a seven player game of 6nimmt because misery loves company. Most miserable at first were Sam and Katy who both reminisced about how good they used to be at this game. However, Sam put a halt to his free fall while Katy kept on plummeting, relying on Andy and Ian to have worse luck than her to avoid last place. 

Martin came first despite the rest of us talking up Joe's chances. 'Only six points behind!" we'd say, encouragingly. That's about as close as he got, though.

Martin 48

Joe 39

Sam 36

Andrew 30

Katy 11

Andy 7

Ian -16

Next up was a dose of analysis paralysis as we struggled over what to play next. Joe even went so far as to suggest a two player game. Three of us, Martin, Katy and I, went off to a new Google hangout and wait to see who joined us for some clever trick taking game. Then we realised we would have no idea if they'd decided to play a four player game. 

Then Andy popped in, while Ian, Sam and Joe played Ninety nine. The four of us played Chip It, which is not a golf-themed card game, but a game involving disposing of two distinct resources in your hand such that you run out of both before anyone else.

The theme chosen for this abstract card game concerns nachos, jalapenos of various values and cheese. Use them together to put down sets of cards of the same value, using the cheese to adjust values of cards upwards.

We had no idea what a winning strategy might be. Go big early on, get lots of cheese and then spend the rest of the whittling the cheese away? We played twice and Andy won both times. Still not entirely sure how.

Then Katy, Joe and Sam all left, with the game of Ninety-nine abandoned. The remaining four chose Marrakech. Once again Andy began by dropping off carpets and then sending Assam off in the other direction and once again he formed a big old mega carpet out of those pieces he'd left behind. I (once again) would have been on the receiving end of Andy’s evil cloth empire, so I kept sending Assam into the corner that was furthest away. Happily, I happened to have a fair bit of carpet down there, so that worked out fine for me.

Andrew 68

Andy 32

Martin 30 plus cash

Ian 30

And so that was that. We logged off and went to bed. I had a dream that I was gaming online again and Ian was cutting a shape out of a folded up piece of paper. When he was done, he opened it up for us to see - it was a snowman. So I’ll see you all, snowman or no snowman,  next week