Mothers of Incension

Just the four of us last night in the end: Joe, Ian, Martin and myself (Sam). Martin was justly cheery about his fresh new best-in-world ELO rating at online Tigris and Euphrates and when I said it's better than being number 1 shithead, he said "Well, I am that as well". He had a bag of new goodies with him and after some heavy sprue-popping, we began with Die Patin, the game of the raccoon mafia. 

 

yellow (Joe) green (Martin) red (Ian) and blue (me) start feeling the heat

Die Patin translates as The Godmother, but this is a Mario Puzo reference rather than any benevolent fairy. Over five rounds, we send our four raccoons out onto the board, either to patrol our own territory, setting up illegal card-playing 'back rooms' and extort loot - or to extend our turf across town, whereupon we start bumping into each other and having the gangster equivalent of a squabble. 

my fledgling hood

As well as the card games and protection rackets, the raccoons can also add to their presence on the street corners/manhole covers of the city - or remove an opponents' - and it's these 'rats', along with the presence of a raccoon, who determine who controls each area. At the end of each round players can add score markers to the board if they dominate in one of the ongoing objectives (biggest territory, most loot etc) and achieving them later is better than earlier: in round 1, they're only worth a point, but when round 5 comes around they're each worth 5 points (though you can only claim one per round). 

crazily, nobody currently occupies the city centre!

It was a game of punch and counter-punch. We more or less divided the board into two wars - Ian and I came to serial blows in the north whilst elsewhere Martin and Joe wrangled with each other so regularly that by the end of the game they'd basically swapped territories. Martin grabbed the loot objective and then cock-blocked it for the next few rounds, until I nabbed it in the finale. Both Ian and I suffered for our expansionist tendencies, as late-game Joe and Martin both made inroads into our territories - there's not much sense on holding on to what you have here, other than to stymie: the game, just like a capitalism-loving gangster boss, demands expansion. We ended bloodied but unbowed. Well, Martin was unbowed anyway. 

Martin 22
Sam 19
Joe 18
Ian 15

Joe and I felt it was maybe a little too brutal for the 90 minutes it took - a slugfest of underhanded moves and overhanded face slaps. But Ian and Martin disagreed. It's certainly an interesting game though, if you're up for a bruising brawl. 

Joe felt we needed some remedial ludic loving and so we decided to defuse some bombs. 

In our first mission we had to cut certain wires in sequential order, and we succeeded easily - although Joe (and in fairness, all of us) forgot about the specificities of the number 11. It was such a tiny (reversed) mistake though, I think you really need to peer close to see the asterisk. The game was still out on the table, so we thought Why Not defuse some more explosives. The next mission was interesting: Joe was new recruit Rhett Herring, and the standard game now had the additional challenge of Rhett always lying (with his number signifiers) about what numbers he had. For example if someone asked him if he had a six, Rhett will tell the truth about whether he does or not, but if he doesn't then he'll lie about what number wire it really was. 

Rhett's problem with the bomb disposal department is never made totally clear, but we accidentally cheated again and then lost anyway. 

It was already Clover o'Clock, so we set up for our standard evening-closer. "What is Fun Facts doing on the table??" Martin said, as though it was an actual steaming turd. All was forgiven when I explained we just needed the pens. 

Our first attempt was not a classic. There were some lovely clues in there (I enjoyed Joe's inferior for short/lake and my own Model T for garage/bone) but we were dealt some bastard Rhett Herrings and scored something pretty average. 

So, employing Bomb Busters logic, we went again. But as with Bomb Busters mark II, we couldn't pull off a success. Ian's Vogon for grate/poetry was a highlight (after I was reminded who the Vogons were) and both he and Joe harvested sixers, but Martin and I couldn't match them. This one was 19/24 - not awful, but not championship form either. 

And that was another GNN wrapped up and sent on its way. Hope to see you all next week.