Putting on the Rats

 Another week, another trip over the M32 for our gaming fix. Adam and Hannah were hosting Martin, Ian, Joe and me. We began with Arthur too, for a quick Just One. We did surprisingly well. We never had more than one couple eliminated due to duplication. Arthur was never in danger of having his clues duplicated. For “belt” he wrote “knife” (because that's where you keep a knife) and for “Sahara” he wrote “deasert” and when Hannah rubbed out the erroneous A, Arthur carefully wrote it back in. And for “Godfather” he just drew a turd. “Obviously a reference to the third film,” I quipped.

With our variant of an extra point for guessing any duplicates, we actually got over 100%.

14 points in 13 rounds 

Then Arthur and Hannah left, after Hannah reminded me that eleven years ago I made her a dish with Kimchi. I was worried that she disliked it so much that she couldn't forget the date, but instead she told me that she now makes her own!

But now we were a five piece band of gamers so we got out Show Manager. This game has artwork ranging from the perfunctory to the ghastly. “Why does he have black lips?” asked Joe after picking up one potential star of his show.

The game involves buying actors for various productions. The better the stars, the higher up the score track it will go. But the twist is that no player has enough money so you have to exchange some of those points for cash which will inevitably send them back down the score track.

I started well, with two early box office smashes but that was before Adam got going and by the time we ended, he had three shows at the top of their score tracks.

Adam 55

Martin 41

Ian 36

Joe 32

Andrew 28

Next up was Mlem. 

This time we added in an expansion, and not just the dice arena - this expansion placed random bonuses (score points, gain an extra die or a satisfyingly old school “go forward X places”) if you land on certain values. And, remarkably, we got to Deep Space. Joe assured us that it had happened plenty of times when he’d played with his family (because, he explained, his wife and daughter “don’t know when to stop rolling”) and it happened to us. In abundance!

Not to me. I took the foolish option of really making sure of first place on the most distant planet with three cats, even if no one else was really bothered about it.

Joe played an interesting game, picking up a ton of points from the expansion. At one point he argued persuasively that a “+1 die” bonus means that you can go from your last die up to two die even though, technically, you use your last die and the +1 die should, strictly speaking, just get you back up to one. Then, having done that, he immediately left the mission with his saboteur cat, taking the extra dice he’d just gained us.

Joe 50

Martin 40

Ian 36

Adam 34

Andrew 24

Martin was appalled that he’d lost, despite getting to Deep Space twice. I rued my planet-only strategy.

It was late so we ended with So Clover. And what a classic. 

Despite the curious sight of Adam leaving his clover on the table while he thought about it, it was replete with great clues, especially Joe’s clue of “Sweating” for “Ammo/Thermometer” but maybe only I think it’s a classic because I got the “sweating bullets” link.

In the end, we got them all right, even squeezing through Ian’s difficult one right at the end.

30 out of 30!

And so we left. Thanks all. It was a beauty.