Gettin’ chilli with it

Joe's at 7.30 was this week's destination for the first weekly meeting since the big games weekend. Sam was already there when I arrived and Martin wasn't too far behind.

At least I think so. I'm writing this on Friday, a full three days late so, just like AI rendered hands, things might be a little out of place.

First we played Rome In A Day, a game in which you have to build areas of tiles with matching buildings to score points and you get these tiles and buildings from your neighbour who has taken their allocation of tiles for that round and split them in two.

Sam played while still in his fluorescent orange jacket and (unconnected, I'm sure) we kept forgetting which neighbour we were supposed to be taking from.

At the end of the game, Joe was counting up the scores and added up one column to the total 47 and said “urgh” in disgust, thinking it was his. But it was Adam's. 

Sam 57

Joe 49

Adam 47

Andrew 46

Martin 37

Sam's winning strategy was to simply take which ever set had the most tiles. Can it really be that simple? It was entertaining enough 

Katy was expected later so we began another quick game: Too Many Cooks. It's a game about German cuisine in that you have to collect cards to make soup (Pea, Mushroom or Onion) while avoiding chillies because they ruin everything, apparently. Unless you're making chilli soup, of course. You collect these ingredients by playing cards to the table until the value adds up to 10 or more, then that player collects all of them.

We played all of round one before we remembered the rule about one of the zeroes actually being worth 10. And I had trouble recognising some of the mushroom cards since they had illustrations of butter on them. But I was fine in the end, taking a win without really knowing how.

Andrew 23

Joe 22

Adam 19

Martin 11

Sam 10

Katy arrived and we split into two groups of three. Joe Adam and Katy played Robot Tricks and Martin and Sam introduced me to Havalandi.

In this game a hot air balloon glides around the edge of the triangular playing area and the active player can put down a landing site (cardboard counter) somewhere along the balloon's line of view. You score points for groups of three or more (on the same terrain) and also for flipping tiles as long as they are contiguous and cross the central path.

It was nice. Gently puzzly and a bit screwish. I forgot about the end of game scoring and, despite being quite competitive in the first half of the game, Martin and Sam (almost literally) drifted off, far above me.

Martin 104

Sam 94

Andrew 82

With that, both Sam and I got ready for an early night. I watched a little bit of Robot Tricks to see if the game was going to end. It didn't, but I did see Katy pick up an ace which, apparently, was bad.

Hopefully we'll get a result in the comments although it's pretty likely that everyone has forgotten.

Thanks all! It was special.