A turnip for the books

Two o'clock on a drizzling afternoon between Christmas and New Year is not usually an occasion to celebrate but this Saturday saw the annual GNN Christmas do and I was there right at the start. Katy was the only other gamer at Sam's table and, after a brief chat, we began the day's gaming with Misfits. This is basically Bandu but we all share a single tower and we're all trying to make it impossible for other players to place pieces without collapsing.

Katy initially thought it was co-operative but Sam assured her to be dastardly. So she left it almost impossible for him to add anything, prompting him to say “That's dick dastardly.” Katy won the first round, having never picked up a single piece. 

Joe arrived and we began again and Katy began with a very mean upright circle. It didn't last long but soon our tower had one section, a narrow but usually flat-topped part of the tower, where we kept building up and it falling down. No one went for too long without picking up more pieces and Sam soon said that it was the longest game he'd seen “by about 150%.”

Katy won again after I thought I'd stopped her from placing her last piece with a clever use of an upright circle. But her cube perched happily on top.

Then we played Word On The Street, a sort of tug of war with letters. A card suggests a topic and you have to think of a word that fits. Then spell that word while dragging certain letters of the alphabet towards you if you use them. Drag them far enough and they're yours. First to have eight letters wins.

All of this must be done within the time set by a very strict hourglass, which made it all very stressful. Katy left the spelling to Joe, lacking confidence in her own abilities. She also demonstrated a strange habit of answering "crucifix!" to a number of questions.

Sam & Andrew 9

Joe & Katy 7

During this, Laura arrived with pizza and then Steve and Anja turned up with crisps and children. After some rearranging and making sure the children were happy with videogames, we split into two groups. 

Sam, Steve and I played Apiary, the thinly themed game of bee-based science fiction. Laura, Anja, Katy and Joe played Quest for Eldorado. The table hummed to the sound of simultaneous rules explanations. Just as things were beginning, Martin arrived. We'd known he was coming but somehow we expected to be further into our games than this. “If I'd known, I wouldn't have been in such a hurry to get here,” he said.

Despite his insistence that he was fine to relax and watch, Laura decided she could happily sit out Eldorado and join him in a two player game, so they took over the sofa, grabbed a stool as a table and played Romi Rami, a variant on rummy.

Eldorado was new to Anja but it was Katy who found it hard going, spending ages stuck behind “a wall of nonsense.” Joe won and Anja came second.

Apiary was slow moving. Steve found parts of it baffling but it didn't seem to hurt his strategy. I, for some reason, focused on the favour track (“That's one up the Queen's favour!”) and ignored the end of game scoring. A hopeless idea. Even if I'd maxed out the favour track, I still would've been last.

Steve 81

Sam 71

Andrew 46

In the time it took us to finish Apiary, two other games were completed.

Hitster was a Timeline-style game with QR codes on cards, read by an app that would then play a pop tune, anywhere from the 50s until today. Put the card in the correct place (once you've tried to identify it). Since I wasn't playing, I found it easy to guess the songs but me and Steve agreed that, should we actually play it, we'd find it impossible. Katy had trouble with song titles, having to sing Dancing in the Dark by Springsteen right up until the chorus until she was able to guess its name.

Joe won, and Laura must've come last based on her (good natured) refusal to ever play it again. At this point Joe had to leave, because he had friends visiting from London who, apparently, would think it strange if he wasn't there to greet them.

Adam and Hannah arrived (with Arthur, who swiftly disappeared in the front room). They all played Cross Clues, and scored 22 out of 25. Anja had the highlight of the game by cluing Red and Light with “district.”

Finally, with Apiary finished and back in its box, everyone was available again. The next game we played was Food, which is a resource management game concerning the pizzas that Laura brought from Lidl and Adam and Katy walking through the rain for chips, mushy peas and curry sauce. Just like Agricola, we had to also feed the children but unlike Agricola they weren't able to eat wood.

During the meal, we did the annual GNN quiz. With Sam as the quiz master we split into teams according to where we sat around the table. 

This lead to a slight imbalance in terms of regular attendees, with Martin, Adam, Laura and Katy on one side and Steve, Anja, Hannah (“I think I was at the start of one games night this year”) and me on the other side.

But we did okay. Steve got up to get a beer just as Sam asked a question that he would've known, which was irritating but equally he did help me get the answer to What was Joe's clue for Nail/Young in So Clover.

In the end, we did okay, but I think that if I'd just answered Joe every time, I would've scored 6.

Katy etc. 14/25

Andrew etc. 10/25

So, having been reminded that Joe kissed Kylie Minogue and finding out how much Katy loves Fields Of Arle (she had to stop playing it when she began dreaming about it) we began gaming again.

In a tussle for players, Martin lost Katy’s commitment to Big Top when Sam and Laura started to set up Raccoon Tycoon, leading to some falsetto claims/denials of betrayal between the two of them.

Adam, Steve and Anja set up Cascadia at the sensible end of the table, while Martin and I returned to the games cupboard to choose a game for us and Hannah. We plumped for Spots and we were just setting up when Laura got a call from home, asking for help with getting the kids to bed. She had to go, leaving Raccoon Tycoon not yet started. 

With this new development, Martin gallantly did not insist that's exactly what Katy deserved but instead we joined together for a five player game of Texas Showdown. We played with the New Rule, in which playing the highest card in a winning suit means that suit is cancelled and can't win, unless all the other suits are cancelled too. It makes the game much more uncertain as playing a suit that you're sure no one else has may still win the trick if everyone else plays a suit that is subsequently cancelled.

It was great fun. Sam's first round was appalling and maths genius Martin helpfully pointed out that he was already halfway to the losing score of twelve. But then he turned it around and by round three he was still last but level with me and Hannah and only three behind leader Katy. But he picked up four tricks in round four while Katy went clear for a comfortable win.

Katy 5

Martin 9

Hannah 11

Andrew 11

Sam 12

Cascadia had been bubbling along with occasional phrases drifting across the table. “Anja, always with the fish,” said Steve, sounding like a disappointed Jewish grandfather at Passover. “I've got no elk,” Anja realised late on while Adam wondered if it was “too late to get into bears.”

It looked like being a tie for first place, until Adam mentioned that pine cones also score points, a rule that newbie Steve hadn’t been told about.

Adam 94

Steve 92

Anja 87

Then there was a period of general kerfuffle while Adam & Hannah and Anja & Steve made arrangements to leave, taking their clans with them. Laura, meanwhile, returned from parenting duties. Despite it being 8 o'clock, I only had one game left in me, so we chose So Clover.

We played twice and during the first game, Martin got so agitated by our logic when doing his clover that we began to worry that he was genuinely annoyed.

“Look at all the words,” he hissed, unable to stay silent any longer. Sam said that was cheating but Martin insisted that he was merely telling us the rules. But thanks to this rules refresher, we noticed that Medusa went better with his clue of Snakeskin than whatever we had at the time.

24 out of 30

In the second attempt, we started well and Katy, Sam and Martin all created perfect-scoring clovers. Then Laura turned over her clover and we were intrigued to see that “Joe Berger” was one of her clues.

Our sense of intrigue changed to bemusement as nothing seemed to fit. Soon we saw Paintbrush which seemed good, but what to pair it with? Putting Foot/Envelop with her clue of “sock” seemed right but that gave us Turnip/Paintbrush for “Joe Berger” which seemed unnecessarily rude.

In the end we settled on Old/Paintbrush even though it didn't quite fit with the other clues. 

“I like old paintbrush,” Martin insisted.

“I like him too,” said Sam, “but…” 

In the end we went with it, but it was wrong. This left us with only one option: Old/Turnip. It was correct. We were baffled and unfortunately Laura was laughing too much to explain what she meant. 

We then thought about phoning Joe to tell him about this before he read the blog - a conversation that quickly digressed into a discussion about how posh his visiting friends might be. If Joe's ears were burning at this point, no one would've been surprised.

My final (and relatively boring) clover was solved, giving us a final score of 28 out of 30. Not quite a perfect score, but a game worth remembering for its own reasons.

But on that note I went out into the persistent rain. What a Christmas do. Thanks all. 

I'll hand over to Sam for coverage of the final stages...

*            *            *

After Andrew left we found ourselves an incongruously tiny four and debated what to play. We kicked off with Big Top, Martin's new auction game. This is quite bonkers but basically you score points by getting cards and everyone takes turn auctioning them. You can buy your own cards but, as Martin pointed out, it's not a great habit to get into. The cards themselves then need to be 'filled' by covering the numbers with coins, and you do that by bidding that number on subsequent cards (whether you win them or not). It's crazy. 

Being a little drunk possibly helped me. I think Laura was the most sober of us and subsequently the most confused. But we were all confused. I won this one with 71 points, with the others back in the 50s and 40s.

What next? Katy introduced her strawberry gin so that helped us decide, jettisoning Misfits in favour of Hitster. This was my first experience of it and we tried the co-op version, playing tracks and trying to align them in chronological order (much like Timeline) before revealing our triumphs/errors. It didn't take that long to make the five mistakes we needed to end the game, but it was enough time for Laura to display impressive audio prowess, correctly placing a track she didn't even know just going on the production style. 

I drunkenly demanded we followed that with Rankster, and the others allowed me my little fit of pique. With this little ditty, players are trying to match their rankings (one active player, then everyone else, Wavelength-style) of three historical characters in a given situation. EG Who'd make the best drummer in your rock band? Martin favoured Henry VIII over George Washington, and we agreed. We also agreed that Pele would eat more donuts than the Queen. 

This was incredibly funny even though Martin and I both managed to interpret King David as King Herod, which explained our slightly inebriated/jet-lagged mirth. We wrapped up Rankster scoring (I think) 5 out of 8. I drunkenly demanded more games but was this time ignored as three tired gamers went out into the abysmal weather to end a dramatic day in a dramatic way. A lot of fun, thanks everyone!