Gwyneth Paltrow *is* a Person

On Saturday Katy, Ian and I (Sam) met at my place for some extra-curricular gaming. Katy was running slightly late so we set up Project L, but after a couple of turns she arrived, so after the briefest of chats we reset and started again as a trio. As touched on previously, this is the simplest of games to learn - bar perhaps Gold Fever - and all you're doing is gathering tetris-type shapes to complete puzzles, which equal points. The juice is really in the bits, which are gorgeous, and that tactility (along with the satisfaction of completing each puzzle) counters any shortcomings. Although I'd won very few of the previous 25 times I'd played it, 26th was a charm:

Sam 25

Katy/Ian 19 each

After a brief discussion we moved on to The Quest for El Dorado, Knizia's always pleasurable deck-building racing game. I couldn't recall if you were allowed to buy more than one card on your turn, and as my rules were in German I texted Martin, assuring Katy that this would probably be quicker than looking up the rules online. Sure enough it took only a few moments for Martin to reply with not only a clarifier, but in the form of a screengrab of the relevant rule. This astonished Katy, who became convinced Martin is a robot. Maybe that's why she didn't win. 

I know why I didn't - I loaded up with money to buy good cards, then kept finding I was just buying good cards with handfuls of money. Until I arrived at the place where I needed money, only to find I had a hand full of machetes. Ian meanwhile sashayed to an extremely convincing win:

Ian - El Dorado!

Katy/Sam - El Stupido

Then we played a new game called Cabo: each player is dealt four face-down cards from a deck numbered 0-13, and the goal is to have the four lowest-numbered cards collectively. Everyone looks at just two of their cards before play begins, then on a turn you can draw the top card from either the deck or the discards. 

If it's the discards, you simply exchange it with a card in your tableau. If it's the deck, you can either a. do the same b. simply discard it or c. discard it and take the action on the card (if there is one). There's only three actions: Peek at one of your own cards, Spy at one of someone else's and Swap with someone else. Or, if you think you're in a good position numerically-speaking, you can forego drawing at all and call 'Cabo'. Now everyone else has one final turn before cards are revealed and scored. Points are bad, so a successful cabo scores zero. Everyone else scores the number value of their cards. An unsuccessful cabo scores the number value plus ten, and as soon as someone goes over 100 points the player with the fewest points wins.

There's two twists: if you manage to hit 100 points exactly, your score gets halved to 50. And if when cards are revealed you have the 'kamikaze' hand - two 12s and two 13s - you score zero and everyone else scores 50!

(There's a rule I missed as well: you're allowed to swap a card you pick up for multiple cards, but the catch is they must be the same number. If you flip them over and they don't match, you have to keep them and the card you drew - I'm not sure any of us were ever quite aware enough of what we had to attempt this though!)

Ian sailed through this game as he had through El Dorado: calmly, drinking strong beer. Katy and I regularly imploded, both of us calling cabo more often than was sensible and suffering as a result. Poised on 97 points Katy needed either a 3 point hand or a kamikaze to save her, but I called cabo before she could engineer either of those things. Inevitably, Ian won. 

Ian 57

Sam 112

Katy 121

Next up was Fae, or the Land of Old Men's Penises as we fondly christened it. 

Turns couldn't be simpler: move a penis, or a group of penises, from one region to another. They will refuse to go into an empty region, and instantly throw a party if the region they gather in is (somewhat topically) isolated: if there's no penises in adjacent regions, they score points. The catch in this game is all colours score and nobody is can be totally sure what colour anyone else is until the end of the game, when identities are revealed. My gray penises - don't say anything - triumphed, though I didn't write down the scores:

Sam 

Ian

Katy

"We need something fun after that" said Katy, who had found arranging all the plastic pieces into a socially-isolating party on her side of the table more entertaining than the actual game, although I like Fae quite a lot myself. And so we played the most abysmal game of Wavelength ever: very fun, and funny, but a point-scoring catastrophe: we finished with two points. Ian's clues were probably the most logical, but at this point I was a little drunk and forgot, for instance, that there are many thousand tv programmes that are inarguably lower-brow than You've Been Framed. Not able to take that result lying down, we tried again, appalling Katy with our guess that Gwyneth Paltrow looks 'somewhat' like a person. "Gwyneth Paltrow is a person!" she cried in despair, revealing that the target was very much in the person zone and accusing us of guessing a place that would be occupied by a potato. Another mostly-inarguable truth, but Ian and I were factoring in Katy's recent candle-related disdain, that had threatened to turn into a late night rant about "the system". 

I didn't take photos, we were having too much fun/scorn. 

Then we played Push It, which Ian won. My memory of this is mostly about Katy trying to cheat. I think it was before or after this game that we had a long cereal-based tangent that took in kitchen size, milk type, relationship status and the joys of living alone. Katy also insisted she knew "nothing" about us, as we all conceded games nights were mostly "business". I told Katy I have one kidney. Ian stayed enigmatically silent. Who knows how many internal organs he possesses?

And finally we midnight looming we broke out Gold Fever, the simplest bag-builder/deconstructor there is, where you're trying to be first to draw four gold out a bag made of mostly rubble. With Ian having won El Dorado, Cabo and Push It and my name on the Project L and Fae cups, Katy finally picked up the win she craved, with Ian poised on three gold and myself a pitiful one. 

A fantastic night of games and silly fun, thanks guys!