A Steak in the Ground

With a plethora of drop-outs, hosts Anja, Steve, and Louie only had a trio of hardy gamers turn up at their doors last night to keep the orange flag flying: myself (Sam), Katy and Martin. After some brief chat, we quickly split into two groups, conscious that both time and players (Louie had to go to bed in an hour, and I didn't want to stay too late) were in short supply. Louie began setting up Robot Quest Arena with his mum and Katy, whilst Steve sat down with Martin and I to play Pioneers. 

While the Robots began barging into each other and snaffling up new powers, I talked Steve and Martin through Pioneers, which seems satisfyingly simple - at first. Each turn has three phases: get income, buy stuff (roads or carriages) and then move the stagecoach, 'delivering' pioneers from said carriages to matching spots on the board. Each spot has a bonus of some kind, so short-term it's about emptying your carriages (for points) and grabbing the rewards.

Long-term though it's also about building a network of roads; as your network (of your own roads) with the most pioneers in (of your own colour) will score at the end of the game as well. We all had to stop ourselves moving pioneers placed on the board and remember to add them from our carriages, and I think Steve and I had about three do-overs with minor gaffes to correct. Meantime the robots were getting a little hot under the metal collar, as Anja was heard announcing she would rivet-gun Louie, and he repeatedly grapple-hooked - if that's a verb - his enemies to fling them around the board. 

In Pioneers, we approached the endgame. I was optimistic that my biggest network was going to move me far enough up the track that I could claim a debut GNN victory: although Steve's carriage-focused points haul was strong, his pioneers were disparate. The stack of carriages we never thought we'd get through was running perilously low, but I ended the game by placing my last road. 

Steve and Martin had one last turn, and Martin's final move got two Farmers down, and it was enough to snake him ahead of us both!

Martin 59
Sam 57
Steve 55

While we were indulging in a post-mortem on the excellent mechanics and possibly not the most thoughtful theming, Robot Quest Arena came to a conclusion, with yet another win for Louie!

Louie 32

Anja 24

Katy 23

He went off to bed with the glow of victory whilst we played Wanted Wombats. What can be said about this strategically-rich game of wombat gangsters that hasn't been already? Well, Katy could have won when she predicted the $10k card and then banked it. She offhandedly said the next card would be a $5k though, and it was! So instead of Katy winning, I did. 

We played again and this time Steve took the victory. He was very pleased. 

After Steve's little dance we broke out Ito, the Wavelength-in-a-card-deck game of civilised discussion and occasional ranting. Our first spectrum was Important Things In Life, and we failed in the opaque space of subjectivity and pictorial representation as we discovered that we valued doilies more than slugs, but less than Eurovision. "Nobody is listening to me" Anja lamented, after her preferences were overruled by more shouty and obstinate folk at the table (me and Martin). 

We went again Things You Might Find Under a Rock, and were confident that Anja's steak - medium-rare, with pepper sauce - would be the most unlikely of our confections, only to discover it was only 55. To be fair though, at least a steak fits under a rock, and would be less surprising than finding, say, Andrew. Anja might have put a steak there. (And she did propose moving it lower, but we didn't listen). 

Our last salvo was Things That Are Hard To Do Alone, which went a disappointedly smutty direction. Anja's clue of synchronised swimming could not possibly be done with anyone else. An excellent high-number clue! But can sexual intercourse be done alone? Martin, resident latin scholar, pointed out the prefix 'inter' was a telling one. We flipped the cards to discover after successfully getting masturbation, singing and tree-hugging in ascending order (insert great weekend joke here) we'd placed these overtly plurality-based activities the wrong way around in our field of dreams... they were numbers 98 and 99! 

Great fun though, and a lovely way to end the evening. Thanks to all, especially our hosts, and particularly Steve for sacrificing his beloved Turkish Delight. After Katy and I both said we hated Turkish Delight, we ate five of them.