Viva Las Vegan Cake

I (Ian) arrived at Hannah and Adam’s at 7.30pm for a rare Easton-based games night, where not only were we there to play games but to wish Katy a Very Happy Birthday.  As well as the hosts and Katy, Joe and Martin had arrived before me. The table was bare of any games, instead the space being used for tasty vegan and gluten free cake.

Whilst waiting for Mel and either Steven or Anja (exactly who would be attending hadn’t been specified, meaning Anja/Steve existed in a quantum superstate until one of them arrived) we set up 3 Wise Words.

The game is a variation on the tried-and-tested “guess the word from the clues” formula. The twist here is that the players are in teams, and whilst you want to make your clue words obvious enough for your partner to get the secret word, the other team can try to guess what clue words you’ve written to score points. As such, it plays a little like an anti-Just One.

We initially started playing as teams of 2 vs. 3, but Mel arrived shortly after starting so we regrouped into 3 teams of two and restarted – Katy and Mel, Adam and Joe and Martin and me.

Whilst explaining how to play 3 Wise Words to Mel, an example in the rulebook was read out where it suggested somebody might clue “Sponge” by writing ‘Bob’, ‘square’ and ‘pants’, so it was with some amusement when ‘Sponge’ came up in the live game as the word I had to clue to Martin. Trying to avoid the obvious I instead went for ‘Sea’, ‘Absorb’, and ‘Dishwasher’ which unfortunately wasn’t gotten.

The less said about Katy’s unintentionally(?) smutty clues of ‘Ball’, ‘Face’ and ‘Hide’ for ‘Mask’ the better.

As Steve arrived (observing his arrival collapsing the quantum field) we only played 3 rounds of 3 Wise Words, the final scores being:

Adam and Joe – 8

Katy and Mel – 5

Martin and Ian – 4

3 Wise Words was an interesting enough variation on the word-clueing and guessing formula but I’m not sure I’d choose it over Just One or So Clover.

We split into two groups for two chunky games – Martin, Joe and I joined Katy for her birthday choice of Lords of Vegas, and Mel and Steve joined Adam for a host’s choice of Railways of the World (Mexico map).

Lord’s of Vegas was an interesting, if unusual game. After the set up phase there were four Silver Casino Cards already dealt, which in a sensible, statistically normal game it would be a poor choice as it wouldn’t pay out often. This meant everyone shunned the Silver Casino.

How wrong we were. Time and again the Silver Casino Cards were drawn, simultaneously scoring nobody any points and making the Silver Casino’s less alluring for future investment, yet still the Silver Casino cards showed their face.

Whilst the Silver Casino defied all expectations, we slowly built our other coloured casinos on the board, with virtually every tile except Silver being used. Katy saw no Birthday kindness as her casinos were all taken over by opponents.  Joe built up two mammoth Brown Casinos, which surely had to pay out soon as only two brown cards were drawn in the set up. But somehow Brown was the inverse to Silver, never appearing – quite literally; 7 brown cards and all but one of the Strip cards were in the last quarter of the draw deck, underneath the Game Over card.

The unusual card distribution meant there were a few late rounds where players had very few options, either due to no cash or ample cash but nothing worth doing!

The final scores saw Katy scraping a third place:

Martin – 49

Ian – 40

Katy – 23

Joe -20

Railways of the World as just coming to its conclusion, so we played Ghosts of Christmas, the new version of Time Palatrix. It’s a slightly mind-bending game where three tricks are played simultaneously to the past, present and future. Scoring is based on correctly predicting how many tricks you think you’ll win, and I failed on both rounds we played, first time underbidding and second time overbidding. The final scores were

Martin - 4

Joe – 3

Katy – 3

Ian – 0

Railways finished up with Adam (perhaps predictably) winning, but I was assured that everyone had a good time. I didn’t gather much information unfortunately, but understand Adam managed to complete most of the Major Line bonuses.

The results were:

Adam – 63

Mel – 50

Steve – 43

Steve and Mel departed, leaving Katy, Martin, Adam and I to play a quick round of Crossclues. My main memory of the game was Joe misreading “Snow” as “Mons” in the setup, but we performed very well, only dropping 1 point!

Crossclues – 23 points.

And with that we departed. Hopefully we can see those who were unable to attend soon!