Rolling with Alan Moon

It was a busy night in Fishponds with Joe, Katy, Martin, Mel, Ben, Anja, Steve, Louie and me (Adam) in attendance. Louie had just finished school for the summer and so bed time had fortunately become somewhat negotiable.

We started off with the coloured-line-matching joy of Take it Easy (Joe had ten boards with him just in case) and Joe was elected caller. A few of the newbies (I think Louie and Ben hadn’t played before, perhaps Anja and Steve too?) missed calls which led to a human megaphone system to ensure the integrity of the game.

We thought about scaling up further and between the sets owned by Joe, Martin and Sam it sounds like we could get 30 players. Do we know 30 gamers?

Anyway, somehow Martin and I managed to play the exact same pattern, but inverted, for all except the last three tiles which meant we scored the same:

• Adam/Martin 173
• Joe 164
• Anja 157
• Mel 154
• Ben 145
• Steve 129
• Katy 121
• Louie 110
  

We then split into two with Katy, Ben, Martin Joe and I picking Oasis by Alan Moon (Ben wondered if the game required dice, and would we need to roll with it, and was then forced to repeat his joke for Martin’s benefit.) Anja, Steve, Mel and Louie went for Robot Quest Arena. I know little of this game except that Louie picked his favourite robot, the heavy-duty Crate, loaded it up with weapons (“I love Tesla Coils!”) and as usual battered his way to victory, clanking four kills along the way:

Metal action!

• Louie 28 
• Mel 21
• Steve 19
• Anja 17
  

Over in Mongolia Oasis consisted of a mostly-dusty map with a few bits of green sneaking in at the edges. Amazingly the 20-year-old game which Martin discovered in a charity shop had never been played and to everyone’s delight tiles needed to be punched out.

Can you tell which bits are camels?

To play the game each player would turn over 1, 2 or 3 cards from their stack of five (replenishing 2, 1 or 0 cards respectively) and then in turn order we got the opportunity to take someone else’s offering with the first taken becoming starting player next time.

The cards could feature grass, gravel or sand tiles (which we could add to the map to claim territory), camels (which claimed a different sort of territory - the roady-sandy bit in the middle), bonus multipliers and extra-card cards.

Martin claimed it wasn’t like Kingdomino, but it is a bit. Joe and Ben went for early camels, the rest of us going after tiles and trying to block each other in dastardly fashions. In the end Katy quietly built up a pile of ten gravel-multipliers, meaning her eight gravel tiles scored more than any other player in the game.

• Katy 124
• Martin 66
• Joe 58
• Adam 56
• Ben 46
  

While we waited for the robots to stop clanking into one another we got So Clover to the table. It would have been a perfect 30 except that we thought Meteorology was meant to be Storm/Rain when it was obviously Log/Rain. Sorry Martin.

• 28/30

Then everyone (except Louie, who finally had to go to bed) was back together for a slightly truncated Just One. The first two rounds featured bonus points aplenty as we had two duplicates in both. Martin was somewhat puzzled by Manure, but when Steve changed Brass to Ass it seemed to help. Throughout the game Lego Aragorn helped to balance the clues as we pushed the game to it’s limits.

Lego Aragorn. Helping.

We were on a winning roll until Joe was subjected to a field of obscurity – what would you guess for Quadrophenia, Ray, Ali, Redford, Entertainer?

What if we added in Tantric?

No?

Highlight this text to find out:

Sting

At that point we decided that was quite enough of that. I'm not sure what the final score was, but probably loads.

And with that we congregated outside for farewells and adieus until next week.