First contact

 After a week dealing with Bengin Proxymal Positional Vertigo and then, after that, a cold, I was keen to get back into my weekly gaming habit.

When I arrived at Joe’s I found Adam T and Ian there ahead of me. We were expecting Adam H at some as yet undefined point in the future so we decided that, while we waited, we could play at least one hand of The Crew: Deep Space Mission. However, it is gaming lore that when a game is set up to fill a gap before another arrival, a knock on the door will herald said arrival the moment you’re about to begin. And so it proved to be, which Adam T was pleased about as he admitted he’d misdealt the cards.

As a five we chose a new game: A Message From The Stars. It’s a co-op game, where one player is an alien and you have to guess what words they’re trying to communicate. Nothing like that game where two players are ghosts and are trying to communicate words to the others, Joe assured us.

Both the alien and the rest (scientists) have messages containing three random words chosen by die from a card. We can only come up with four words to clue each other to the three mystery words, and not only that but the alien has six letters from the alphabet chosen at random hidden behind a screen that we have to guess.

How do we do that? Well, the alien gives every word (theirs and ours) a score, worked out accordingly: the six secret letters are grouped thus: three “trust” letters. If these appear in a word, then they score 1 point for each appearance. Then there’s a group of two letters (whose collective name escapes me) and they double the score each time they appear in a word. Finally one letter on it’s own – the suspicious letter and this converts the score into a negative number, no matter how often it appears in the word.

As such, we have to chose our words according to which letters we want to know more about. Not only that, but we often stared at the words, trying to work out which letters scored what, leading Adam T to remark that he’d been lead to believe this was a word game, but now he had to do maths!

It was fun, in a very brain-burny way. At one point we were interested in A, N and M so I suggested (in secret) Bananaman, since it had 4 As, 3 Ns and an M. It would have told us exactly what we needed, but wasn’t a great clue to the words in our message.

During this, Adam H commented on how much he was enjoying the mix of chocolates, beer and cashew nuts. Such decadence must have sparked a memory since he then told us that he used to melt twixes onto his chips.

As for the game, we finished with 11 out of 12. Joe correctly guessed our message and we gueesed the six hidden letters, but we were one word off on Joe’s message since his clue of “Pump” could’ve have meant water or air. Or fuel.

11 out of 12

Then I announced the next game would be my last, since it was only 8.30 but I was starting to feel tired. Mlem was brought out. We played with the extra tiles, which everyone agreed made getting to deep space much more likely. 

With this in mind, I started off by landing on the lower planets expecting them to be ignored. I looked to have misread the game when, early on, Joe and Ian got into deep space with their deep space doubling cats. But then everyone fell back into typical form and ship after ship exploded after I’d left. And once, memorably, after Joe had declared “I like these odds.”

In fact, by the time I was going to place my final cat, having got the two trophies for planet-landings, Ian had still only placed one cat. I successfully landed my cat, triggering the end of the game, leaving Ian with no choice but to get as high as he could. And what a stroke of luck as he landed his planet doubler on the biggest planet of all. With only two cats used, he came a very respectable third.

Andrew 39

Adam H 28

Ian 24

Joe 23

Adam T 18

I left at this point, sadly missing Adam T’s first ever game of Take It Easy. 

Joe 198

Adam T 148

Adam H 145

Ian 144

I didn’t hear about any other results so I suppose that was it for the night. Thanks everyone. See you all soon.