In space, no-one can hear you eating too many chipsticks

Long-mooted and anticipated, yesterday at the early hour of 3pm Ian, Chris and I sat down to play Xia: Embers of a Drift System (unofficial tagline: it rhymes with higher). Ian was new to it, so we spent about ten minutes going through the basics, before embarking on an odyssean journey through space, time, and shitloads of dice. 

In this sandbox game, everyone starts out as 'unknown' but, like needy D-list celebrities, have a yearning for notoriety, and seek it through a variety of ways: exploring, trading, completing missions, mining for relics, blowing stuff up, upgrading their ship, helping others, buying their fame, or even just being lucky: a roll of 20 on a d20 instantly pushes you up the Fame track. Whenever the points leader hits certain junctures on said track, events or titles are triggered: the former as you might imagine (things happen/parameters change) and the latter offer faming opportunities for whosoever completes the criteria: first to do three blind jumps (exploring without looking) on a single turn, say. 

Everyone's ship has room for outfits (engines/weapons/shields/etc)  and any un-outfitted ship sections are basically room for carrying cargo. The ships are varied, and each come with special powers options: Chris, for instance, could never be stopped by planetary shields (although he could take damage from them, as he was repeatedly reminded by fate) 

I thought I was off to a good start in my Puddle Jumper ship until I blind-jumped into a star at the end of my first turn and died. Chris and Ian began with more caution, and were rewarded with life. But Ian's Numerator ship attempted to mine and failed, taking on a huge amount of damage. Xia does not ease you in lightly...

It also doesn't offer enormous amounts of luck mitigation. Over a long game, it balances out to some degree - or one would expect it to - but Chris' ability to repeatedly roll low numbers for everything he attempted was something to behold. Even when he rolled high, Xia laughed in his face: 

"I get a fame point if I roll a 20?" he clarified.

"Yes" I said, before he rolled a 19. 

That said, Chris was first to upgrade his ship (The Krembler, which Ian referred to as the crème brûlée) and Ian swiftly followed with his new Skimmer. Whilst they pimped up their rides, I was taking a more opportunistic approach, zipping around the outskirts of space, picking up points for exploring and doing the occasional but of mining on the side. I was managing to keep a slender lead on Ian in the Fame stakes while Chris, aided by his relentlessly bad rolling, was still dawdling back at the start points-wise. 

After an hour of pootling around picking up the odd point, players (and the three non-player characters: trader, outlaw and law enforcement dude) start to get a bit busy. Titles are available to claim, Missions are being completed, and people feel confident enough to kill each other (and claim both points and bounty for doing so). 

I nurdled my way to the 15point winning condition, but we were all enjoying ourselves so much we agreed to play on to 20, which was when things got really political. Ian killed Chris. Chris respawned and killed Ian. He upgraded his engine and killed the trader by ramming into it at high speed. I ran away, and by exploring and being the first player to do X (eg use the space-jumping gates) pushed myself within reach of the win. But Ian and now Chris were both hot on my tail, and when I failed to successfully mine for victory Ian nearly grabbed the win by looking for Signs of Life on a dead world, but he didn't find it. I saw there was a way to triumph, but I needed to grab the final two exploration tokens on the board, and thanks to some fortuitous rolling, I grabbed the 20th point and victory with it!

But stop-press because as I write there's a stewards' enquiry: I realised last night (at 2am obviously) that I might have (literally) cheated death on my penultimate turn when a comet moved handily out of my way. I'll have to clarify that on the rules, but either way a rematch feels most welcome. 

Plus, it was extremely early in GNN time, so we had the evening stretching before us to dispose of, and dispose of it we did. Whilst I read a story to Joe, Ian thrashed Chris at Pickonimo:

Ian 15 / Chris 4

Not as shaming as my historic 18-0 drubbing at the hands of my brother-in-law, but clearly Chris' rolling hadn't improved on land. Then we played a new Ticket to Ride-style game of spies: Spy Connection. 

In Spy Connection you're completing missions by getting your spy (big meeple) to visit them. But your spy can only visit them if they're on your network, which is established by your agents (little discs). It's easy rules-wise: you either take another mission from the available four, or expand your network: when you expand you can move your spy before and after doing so. The catch is your only have fifteen agents, and they have to do a lot of work: as well as making your connections (which can cost two agents per connection if another player is already there) they also keep tabs on where your spy has been on your mission cards, and might also be needed to pay for taking a mission card in the first place.

Fortunately, you can drag as many agents back off the board as you need at any time on your turn. Unfortunately, doing so breaks up your network, arrgh! It's quite a nice combo of simple-rules and head-scratchy decisions that doesn't take too long. Ian completed the game-ending 7 mission target before anyone else, and Chris and I couldn't catch him with our last turns:

Ian 32 / Chris 29 / Sam 24

It was about 9pm now so we felt, with Andrew due at the unseasonable hour of 10.20, we had time to squeeze in a game of Quantum. We put together a tight, claustrophic board and were very quickly in each other's ways and faces.

 Ian was roaming around beating people up and pushing up his dominance. I established and early lead, and became Furious enough to hold off several Hickman-driven attacks. Chris seemed to be in neutral, but suddenly got a fourth ship out and a power than gave him four actions if any two of his ships had the same number. He powered past Ian and I for a win so fast we were packing away about 27 minutes after we'd started!

Chris - wins / Sam 2 cubes left / Ian 3 cubes left

With time on the clock we broke out (to my mind, the underrated) Menara, a co-operative tower-builder where you place columns to add levels and try not to make the whole thing collapse. Unfortunately, the levels were coming out at us in fairly unhelpful order, with a series of little ones followed by a series of big ones: it was like trying to construct an inverted pyramid, and we should have taken the option of expanding our base (if I'd thought to suggest it). Things were looking sort of navigable, if not easily-so, when I caused the entire thing to collapse right after Chris said "That should be fine". 

Everyone loses. 

We had a fairly average (15 points) crack at Cross Clues, and then Andrew arrived! Straight from work, I offered him a cup of tea but he said he would prefer whisky. Ian and I joined him as we played Cross Clues again, this time with an assemblage of words that seemed more fluid and the mind of Endersby to pitch in, strutting our stuff with an almost-entirely non-cheating 25!!!

Although Andrew had only just arrived, he was already making noises about going home, but we squeezed two more games out of him and ourselves. I managed a win at a fairly low-scoring NMBR9:

Sam 66 / Andrew 47 / Chris and Ian 42 each

Before we wrapped up an epic session with High Society. Chris came back from the dead here having spent the vast majority of the game with the "Minus one card" card in front of him. I was points-leader but spend too much. Ian compiled a decent score but then took the minus 5. Andrew sailed to victory through a stormy sea:

Andrew 18 / Chris 8 / Ian 5 / Sam BUST

And eight hours after we started, we were done!