Missing whirled

 When I arrived at around eight, I was surprised to see only three people around Sam’s kitchen table: Sam, Joe and Ian. What with people ill, isolating or absent for some other reason, we were down to a quartet for this week’s gaming. The three of them were midway through a game of Whirling Witchcraft and I sat down and tried to work out the rules but, apart from turning cubes into other cubes, I was kind of baffled. People said things like “My toads are overflowing!” which didn’t help. In the end, Joe won so easily he admitted he wasn’t sure if he’d been playing it right.

Joe 8
Sam 4
Ian 1
 
Then the four of us brought out Search For Planet X, the app-based game of logical deduction. Each player, via their phone, is drip fed a number of clues such as “no comet within two sectors of a gas cloud” or information about how many of a certain astronomical object are with a certain number of sectors. With these facts, we are left to deduce the location of Planet X, the only astral body to elude our sensors.

The board came complete with dazzling sun in the middle

It was nice to play it again, and I went scanning for gas clouds while Sam targeted two sectors with his first two moves. And I was progressing quite nicely and had worked out the comets, gas clouds and asteroids when Joe asked what he should do if he knew where Planet X was. He followed the apps instructions, typed in his guess and a little jingle told him he was correct. All that was left for the rest of us was the make two final guesses on whatever we thought we knew for sure, and that was the game. Well done, Joe.
 
Joe 22
Andrew 14 + tie breaker
Sam 14
Ian 7
 
Next we played Art Robbery, a quick game of stealing points from your opponents while trying to make sure you don’t have least “alibis” (little white dots on certain tiles). It was fast and mean and Joe won again with the highest score and most alibis. He ruefully noted, however, that having lots of alibis isn’t necessarily a good thing. “I was ice-skating and…”
 

Joe 29

Andrew 25
Ian 23
Sam, fewest alibis
 
Could Joe continue his run of form? We would have to wait and see as the rest of the evening belonged to So Clover. We played twice when I was there. I didn’t right the scores, but neither was a full house. A couple of guesses made me sad when they turned out to be wrong, such as “Friend” and “Moist” wasn’t loveheart although it surely should have been. It was fun as always, and I did have the interesting feeling of watching my friends guess every single one wrong before they reconsider and end up with three out of four.

Ian did not hint at "dirty" with "sister" although we felt confident he had

A tricky one, especially with Sunday, school, brother and religion all possibles for "Church"

 

Then I left, and the three of the kept going with scores of 10, 13 and 16. Finally, after Joe and Ian went home, Sam and Sally played and got 21. Or maybe they played 21? Anyway, next week is the Christmas do. Assuming it’s not illegal, of course.