Three's a Punch-up

With no tumbleweeds rolling through Joe's kitchen last night, we made do with the trotting, harrumphing, and at one point extremely lazy toileting of Sybil. Outside of the host (Joe, not Sybil) gamers were thin on the ground - just Ian and myself (Sam) with Laura initially expected but latterly absent. Three! Whatever in the world...

We kicked things off with a game of PUSH, Joe's luck-pushing game of set-collection: like Coloretto, you're creating piles of cards on your turn, but catch number 1 is that other players get the piles you don't take. Catch 2 is no pile can have duplicate colours or numbers, so you can go bust. Catch 3 is that instead of drawing cards, you can bank (some of) what you have already. Joe pushed his luck a lot, and found his love of risk wasn't matched by reward...

Sam 90
Ian 72
Joe 46

Then I introduced Lucha Wars, a game of Mexican wrestling that has a bit of Strike-in-spandex about it. Dice are rolled and compared, but before the comparison dodge results (the arrows) can be rerolled to knock opponent dice out of the ring. With three of us there's a slightly bonkers rule that we take turns to go two on one, and work out the edge case rules ourselves: Lucha Wars' manual is a bit fuzzy. 

It's a bit of faffarama for what's essentially a dice-chucker, but it made us laugh, with dice careening out of the ring, random weapons available, and special moves aplenty: mine involved throwing first Ian, and later Joe, into the air by their heels and crashing them down on my spiny back. Except I rolled badly and missed each time. As wrestlers get weaker, they become pinnable: Ian pinned Joe, but Joe reverse-pinned him! Then Ian pinned him again and Joe was out for the count. It only remained for me to jettison Ian out of the ring off a seesaw: a frankly ludicrous end to a silly 20min game.

By now we knew Laura couldn't make it, so broke out the evening's main course in Thurn and Taxis. Joe also announced at this point he'd drunk a lot of wine, but seemed reasonably coherent during the rules explanation to Ian. It was only when he realised he'd connected two unconnected cities in his route and, worryingly, announced he was taking the Station Master (who doesn't exist) we wondered if it was time for a cup of tea or a bucket of cold water. 

For Ian, it was a rough reintroduction to the game as he too lost a route and best-laid plans were harpooned by my finishing my seven-city route and wrapping up a third win in a row. Could I make it four??? 

Sam 21

Joe 13

Ian 9

We found out by playing Hammer Time! Joe enjoyed it more than he appears to be enjoying it here.

Each player has four carts they need to fill with gems, one cart at a time. Each turn you hammer the box to knock gems off, taking the ones that suit you and stopping immediately when at least one gem falls. But if you knock off more than eight, you're bust. Mix in some simple objective cards that give you wilds when achieved (knock off an odd number and so on) and you have a HABA classic. Ian's approach was surprisingly dainty; often knocking off a single targeted gem. Joe and I were more bludgeoning, and we paid the price on a couple of busts but made more progress overall.

1 Joe - carts full!

2 Sam - one cart left

3 Ian - two carts left

It was a little past ten, so we finished off a fairly rambunctious three-player night with So Clover, where I forgot to take photos. We began with Ian's clover and hit a six straight out of the park. But then things went south with some poor clueing on my part, where I had to listen to Joe scathingly say "You wouldn't write Missile for summit and duck!" which was, of course, exactly what I'd done. Ian and I struggled with Joe's clues as well, and we scored an okay 12/18 all told. The game was mostly notable for Sybil having a kind of protracted, noisy, and doomed investigation of under the fridge, stopping only to give Joe an unpleasant clearing-up job. And on that bombshell, we called it a night.