Breaking the fours, breaking the fours

 I arrived at 8.10 having already missed two games of Spicy.

Joe 29

Adam H 27

Sam 10

Adam T 10

Sam 27

Joe 25

Adam H 20

Adam T 7

With my feet snugly under the table, we now numbered seven since Martin and Gareth had arrived. We split into two groups of three and four. Sam, Adam H and myself played Llama Land while Joe, Martin, Gareth and Adam T chose Mille Fiore which is a Reiner Knizia game, albeit one that's somewhat over produced with shiny plastic ships and diamond shaped tiles.

Llama Land resembled NMBR9 inasmuch as your tessellating pieces while slowly building upwards. Collect items to complete sets and score points, but this means putting a Llama on your land, making further upward building a bit tricky.

It was okay. It felt as if someone had once played NMBR9 and wished it had more potatoes. Adam took to it like a duck to water and won by miles. Sam was hit by explainer’s curse.

Adam 137

Andrew 92

Sam 88

While Mille Fiore continued, we three played out two rounds of Take It Easy. Sam’s category was animals and after it, I was in a slender lead. But then I was caller. I chose snacks (including “pouring hundreds and thousands into your mouth”) but my mojo had gone (breaking the line of fours was the least of my issues) and I didn’t even break three figures.

Adam 314

Sam 309

Andrew 274

On Mille Fiore, it all looked very complicated. People were berating Joe for insisting that he had no idea what was going on while building up a healthy lead. In between people asking “Is this Nick Lowe?” to the music, Martin likened it to being “stuck inside a pinball machine” and Adam T had a late surge to finish in a respectable rather than disastrous fourth.

Joe 183

Martin 163

Gareth 160

Adam T 145

During this time, Joe’s wife Charlotte interrupted us to offer fruit cake which was a keen to finish off soon. “Cake Rubble” she called it, as most was in moist chunks, but it was still very tasty and made a change from chipsticks.

Now we split up and reshuffled again. Well, Sam and Gareth swapped seats. Adam H, Gareth and I went for that game of skill and technique, Kribbeln. Sam, Martin, Joe and Adam T played Scout.

Adam played Kribbeln almost as annoyingly as he’d played Llama Land and Take It Easy. On his first Krib (goal: just roll a high score) he got 24. And then on the following Kribs (goal: score higher than the previous Krib) he rolled 25, 26 and 27. Gareth recovered from a slow start to finish comfortably in second.

Adam H 20

Gareth 15

Andrew 10

As for Scout, apart from Adam T’s opening move of playing four 9s, I didn’t follow it.

Martin 27

Joe 26

Sam 22

Adam T 16

And with that, Adam T and Gareth left. The remaining five got out good old So Clover. The first two words I got were “Toy” and “Outlet” and I blurted out how easy it was. I found other words harder, but I’m relieved that I hadn’t jinxed myself and my clover was correctly solved. So was everyone else’s except Sam’s who was unlucky enough to have Shell and Painting among the possible answers for his clue of “Oil”.

There was a brief interval as Charlotte made another intervention, this tiem to tell us about the remarkably pretty full moon currently visible. We went up to Joe’s living room, cautiously avoiding hitting the coffee table with our shins since the light was out, and admired it’s bronze hue.

Back in So Clover, I must tip my hat to Martin who had to distinguish between “trophy” and “award”. To do so, he chose “Wife” as his clue for “trophy” especially since it also went with the other word next to “trophy”: “screw”.

With that, we were done. Off into the sultry night, under a fat orange moon that was so pretty that even a total stranger in the street told me I needed to see it. Thanks all. Next week, eh?