Dice overboard!

Despite being only seven minutes late, I was last to arrive and as I sashayed into Joe's kitchen I saw them (Katy, Gareth, Sam, Martin, and Andy B) getting a rules explanation to a new game from Joe. However, it wasn't a game that played seven so, whatever it was, it was put away and we split into two groups.

Martin was keen to play Noli. Joe mentioned that Katy had requested Yokohama or Lords of Vegas. Vegas needed four but, really, so did Noli. Instead, Yokohama was chosen with Katy and Joe joined by Andy. Thus we remaining four played Noli.

I must admit I was intrigued that Martin should be suggesting such a euro-looking game. Set in a vague idea of the Middle Ages with a storyline about some Italian families competing for fishing rights. But I shouldn't have worried: there was no worker placement or engine building. Instead, we had blind bidding and some frantic dice rolling, interspersed with cries of "man overboard!" if any die should skitter away and off the table.

The blind bidding part of the game allows the highest bidder to do any of four actions. 1, move up the favour track (decides tied bids in favour of whoever is furthest along). 2, buy a buoy (reduces the number of dice you need to roll during the boat race). 3, build a boat (at the end of the race you pick up one reward card for each boat you have). 4, build part of your tower (a tower six blocks high will win the game).

Pretty simple. And exceedingly silly. Despite the eurogame stylings, we found ourselves desperately trying to roll dice as quickly as possible in one part of the game and then hopelessly misjudging how much to bid in the other. To our annoyance, a couple of rounds went by with no one bidding on the tower at all, which is the whole point of the game.

We accidentally played a much more punitive game than the rules specify. In our version, anyone ending a round with no money stays poor whereas in the rules it says any cashless player gets two coins and a new boat, which is a useful catch up mechanism. But we didn't realise this until Martin had gone through two rounds in extreme penury. 

I'm not convinced we worked out the optimum strategy. There were plenty of occasions where someone bid high for an action, only to see that no one else had bid anything at all. 

But the boat races at the end of the round, with its potential rewards of money or damaging opponents' fleet or tower, were the defining moment. Sam finished most of them in last, while I was so frustrated at my last doe's inability at rolling the desired symbol that I span it and sat back while Martin kept rolling his final die. He won. My die ended up on a blank face anyway.

Finally it was all down to the favour track: the one part of the game that I'd ignored throughout. Our pitiful towers were all only two blocks high and Gareth got to the end of the favour track, thus triggering the end of the game and, since the favour track decided ties, gave him the win.

Gareth 2, wins on favour track

Sam 2

Martin 2

Andrew 2

Yokohama was about half an hour from the end so the four of us indulged in more short games, almost as a reaction to the migraine enducing (according to Martin) sight of Yokohama's modular game area.

We played Harvest. A very simple game. Each player has a 2x2 field and together we need to play cards of particular crops and when there's a row of three then they score and are removed from the board, but only cards in your 2x2 board go in your score pile. 

But there are plenty of cards with negative points to ruin things for your opponents. It's a cunning and mean game and we played it twice, taking the opportunity to take revenge on Gareth's mastery of Noli.

Martin 140

Andrew 100

Sam 80

Gareth 70

And then…

Martin 180

Sam 120

Andrew 70

Gareth -10

Then we played Block Party. There are few notes because Katy used my pen and paper to write down her next move before she forgot it.

I do remember, though, that Martin thought my Rudolph the reindeer was "beautiful" but my light bulb was mistaken for a sheep.

Martin was confident about his string of sausages but everyone thought it was a worm. 

Sam 7

Martin 7

Gareth 5

Andrew 5

Yokohama was still ongoing but clearly in its final stages, so we waited. Joe admitted that this epic undertaking hadn't been made any easier by our cries of "man overboard!" earlier. Finally Joe was victorious, beating Katy who seemed to have spent most of the time insisting in frustration that she hated the game (or the game hated her, I don't recall). Andy explained his last place by saying it had been a long time since he'd last played.

Joe 125

Katy 116

Andy 110

My (and Katy's) last game of the evening was Fun Facts. We began with the absurd notion that Joe would ideally like 101 snowy days in a year! "It'd be magical," he insisted. Katy reacted to almost every question by remarking that "we've already done this one."

We did pretty well, but our only perfect score was to the question "how interested are you in bungee jumping? (0-100)" and all of us wrote zero except Katy who wrote 2.

Final score 44: hitting our stride, according to the score sheet.

Finally, after Katy and I had left, they played So Clover. Sam messaged me later to say it had all been going fine until his and Andy's clovers. Their first guess for Andy's clover had no correct words at all!

Thanks for the evening everyone. See you all soon.