Squid Games

Six doughty gamers assembled around the table last night - Gareth and Martin were first to arrive, followed by Joe, Ian and finally Katy. We kicked things off with My Gold Mine, an Incan-Gold-esque escapade of trying to make out of the mine with the most gold and not be dead. On your turn you can either move towards the exit, or stay where you are and grab some gold; the catch being that doing so may provoke the ire - and movement - of the dragon, who will roast you its fiery flames if you're caught, like it's been reading the Daily Mail its entire life.

Some movement cards allow you to swap places with someone. I was discouraged from doing this and praised when I took Katy's advice. She then praised Gareth for swapping places with me! I had won round one, I suppose, and put a target on my back. The game was mainly notable for these dick moves and Joe despairing at everyone else referring to the exit direction as 'forward' - he explained it's obviously backwards because we were returning the way we came in. But are we? Other rationales were discussed. 

Maybe we should have paid more attention to Joe, even if his talk of being roasting was conjuring some unsolicited images in our heads:

Joe 6

Gareth/Sam 4 each

Ian 2

Katy/Martin 0

We split into two gangs of three, with Mille Fiori  set up one end of the table (Martin, Katy, Ian) and Calimala the other. One game involved passing cards and swearing, the other was a weird mash up of area majorities, token activations, and silk. 

Calimala's USP is that each turn you take an action, but if someone took it before you at any point in the game, they get to do so again as well. The actions are generating resources, using them to build infrastructure, or shipping silk to far off destinations. Whenever an action is taken a fourth time a scoring round is triggered, meaning the game starts off sedately but escalates into an every-turn-scores display. I thoroughly enjoy that mechanic and the manic pace it gives rise to, but it's not an easy one to jump into from a strategic perspective, and Joe confessed to being bamboozled by it. "I thought it was about calamari" he rued, leading to the post title. 

Despite that however, he did enough to ultimately draw on points with Gareth, who claimed the win on the tiebreaker of council seats. I was some way behind!

Gareth 35

Joe 35

Sam 28

They'd finished Mille Fiori and Ian's romance with the game continues to endure:

Ian 208

Katy 175

Martin 165

And also reversed their positions in Gang of Dice:

Martin 96

Katy 38

Ian 27

We shuffled seats with Joe, Katy and Martin setting up Tajuto and myself Gareth and Ian embracing Quantum. I confess I lost track of the meditative bag-plunging drama at the other end of the table as Quantum developed into an epic. Things didn't look promising for Gareth and I when Ian got a cube down on his first two turns. Moreover, he picked up beautifully synergising cards that allowed him to tweak resource and dominance in either direction, like a madman with a nuclear etch-a-sketch. 

He needed stopping. 

Somewhere in the stopping-of-Ian, we managed to eke our way forwards as well, slowly catching him up and placing the game into a fragile state where all of us were poised on a single cube for the win. Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, Tajuto continued apace, complete with what now looks like a face-pulling contest amongst the fun-loving monks.

Ian kept engineering himself into one-turn-to-win conditions, cooking up a seemingly-imminent victory, and Gareth and I kept shitting in his pie. We hampered him with attacks and when that didn't work, I sabotaged him by moving one of his cubes into the planet he was ready to win with, meaning he now needed to migrate elsewhere.

It was a dramatic and ding-dong battle, and I managed to sneak the win courtesy of a bit of guerrilla tactics and a couple of spawny dice rolls!

Sam - 0 cubes

Ian and Gareth - 1 cube left

With everything in cosmic balance on Tajuto, they wrapped up at the same time. Joe proved to be best at monking:

Joe 18

Katy 16

Martin 14

And although I waved my new purchase Cafe Order Overload around hopefully, we elected to finish the night off with the classic that is So Clover. And it was so clovery, as Martin and my clovers kicked us off with a couple of six-pointers and we followed that with Joe's, which was nearly a car crash until we spotted some links we'd missed. We did less well on Katy's, surged back with Ian's and then Gareth revealed he'd ignored our demands he not make up words when we saw he'd written Margarglerita and Mashhhhhh on his clover. For shame, Gareth!

On the other hand, they were damn fine clues and we got all his clover leaves immediately. And then everyone left immediately, as another fine Tuesday came to a close.