Once more unto the beach

 This week, six gamers arrived at Joe’s house in alphabetical order (Adam, Adam, Andrew, Ian, Martin, Sam) for another dose of gaming goodness. This was my first games night in a few weeks and immediately people started making jokey references to a game that I knew nothing about. How swiftly things move on without you.

We split into two groups. A quartet (Martin, Adam T, Adam H, Joe) played Challengers! Beach Party. Ian asked what new features this variant had and Adam ummed and ahhed a bit before saying “different cards”. Oh, and each player has their own special power and there’s some kind of change in the drafting method. Nothing to do with beaches, as far as I could tell.

The trio (myself, Ian and Sam) played World Wonders, a tile-placement tessellation game that allows players to build famous historical buildings with little concern for cultural or temporal fidelity. For example, Ian built Easter Island’s famous statues of Maoi near his Trojan Horse. It’s a nice game, nothing groundbreaking but fun. I build the pyramid complex at Giza for two points, even though it covered three natural resources, costing me a potential three points. A bad move, strategically, but it looked nice on my board. The scores were so close, they needed a recount.

Ian 37

Sam 36

Andrew 35

Challengers was still ongoing, so we set up Little Tavern. This is a silly, dickish game where a player picks a card at random and decides if they want to keep it at their table or place it at someone else’s. There are event cards, allowing characters to be swapped, removed or added to a table face down so that no one else knows what it is. If you get the right people sitting at your desk, then you can score big points. Ian cleverly got three romantics around his table which, instead of being the start of a menage a trois, actually got him 20+ points.

Ian 35

Sam 35

Andrew 30

Around this time, Challengers ended. Martin had won four out of the first five games, but it was Adam H v Joe in the final, with Adam coming out the winner.

After this, we reshuffled. This time the quartet (Ian, Sam, Adam and Adam) played Forest Shuffle, a game that looks lovely but I know little about. Halfway through Adam T said that he was enjoying it, but he wasn’t sure if anyone else was.

I was involved in a game of Faraway, an odd game with a wafer thin theme of going on a journey tacked onto a quite brain-burning card placement game. The idea is to put down cards that then score bonuses according to other cards in your tableau. However, in a normal game the cards would all be visible when you add up your scores, in this game that cards are revealed in reverse order and bonuses only score for whatever’s visible at the time. For example, you play a card that scores 15 points if you have three stone cards and then you have to make sure that you later play three stone cards otherwise that card is worthless when it gets turned over. There’s a certain amount of player interaction such as when Martin looked at Joe’s cards and said “What are you collecting…. Pineapples?” and I asked Joe when had Martin started calling him Pineapples.

We played twice. I managed to grab a fifth stone card right at the end which meant my 24pointer card was valid when it was revealed!

Joe 81

Martin 72

Andrew 48

Andrew 84

Joe 80

Martin 63

I had to go at this point. Any regrets I had about leaving Martin and Joe as a couple were dispelled when Martin said the next game worked better as a two-player.

I don’t know what that game was, but when Forest Shuffle ended the scores were (according to Sam’s memory)

Adam T 125

Sam 125

Adam H 116

Ian 96

Then five of them played So Clover and “did rather well”. Looking at the photo I have to tip my hat to the audacity of clueing “Water” when “river” was one of the words on a different side.

Rather well out of 30

Thanks all. See  you next week.