Windy Plops

Adam was our host last night as Katy, Joe, Ian and myself arrived at the magic hour of 7.30pm - well, actually, Katy was there earlier and had a strange tale about a mystical shadow that she told us out on the deck. However, it cannot be shared in full here, as we were sworn to secrecy on the details just in case any strangers read the blog. 

We stepped inside and began the evening with Ito, a kind of micro-Wavelength in that each round - and a game is a single round - has a spectrum from 1-100 (for example, Things You Might Do When You're Happy) and everyone is dealt a number card and must give a bespoke clue for their number. We discuss and arrange the cards face-down in what we hope is ascending order, before revealing, in the hope we are right. 

In four attempts, we were never right, often beginning well before falling away catastrophically. Our most confusing spectrum of the night was Popular Board Games, as our subjectivity needles were all over the shop. Everyone apart from Adam felt Snakes and Ladders was far more popular than Carcassonne. But Snakes and Ladders was his clue - we should have listened. In Things That Will Last Until the End of Time, I immediately regretted my clue of YouTube, but we successfully decoded that the video platform would be less durable than the Concept of Sausages (- Joe). Martin joined us for the last couple of games of Ito, which seems to have a high quotient of accusation in it for a co-op game, but then I guess a modicum of righteousness is not necessarily always a terrible thing. 

Martin pulled Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves from his bag and we set up, optimistic that the game would come into its own with 6 players rather than the trio of last week. Certainly there was more tabletalk, which was good, but the verdict after a couple of rounds was that maybe six was one or two too many. It was fun while it lasted though, and Katy took the mildly-asterisked win - as Martin took Explainer's Curse right in the face.

Katy 63
Ian 45
Joe 41
Adam 28
Sam 24
Martin 1

The reason we stopped a little early was that Steve, bereft of moustache but equipped of tooth, had arrived and it was time for the evening's main courses. There was some hopeful proffering of various titles before we eventually settled on the equally various win conditions of Living Forest for Adam, Katy and Steve...

And Ian was talked through the vagaries of Free Ride USA by Martin and Joe. The latter began his business in the east, Martin more westerly, whilst Ian and I - leery of being too isolated - started track-laying in the swing states. 

Martin's criticism of Free Ride was that it feels like it should take an hour but play is closer to 90 minutes, and I kind of get that. For me though turns are - usually - so quick that I can forgive the playtime because of the pace. Notably here Ian ran low on cash, I picked up long routes, and Joe seemed to be - to our dismay - the recipient of a lot of short routes that popped up just as his train chugged into a nearby station. Because of that, I at least was anticipating that he might be the man to beat. But I was very wrong. 

Martin 119
Sam 113
Ian 105
Joe 103

Another Explainer's curse? Joe had a lot of completed routes, but little cash. Living Forest was yet to reach its sudden-death finale, and the tension was palpable, if somewhat undermined by the regular invoking of the phrase 'windy plops' - so we busted out another newbie from Martin: Viking See-Saw. He doesn't make many dexterity games, but this is a Reiner Knizia title. 

We all begin with a bunch of stuff in front of us:

And on your turn you must add one of your stuff to whichever side of the viking boat is titled upwards - onto to deck proper: you cannot use the two central areas with the brown blocks (chests) in. The goal is to be rid of all your stuff first - an instant win - but if you cause the boat to tilt, you have to take anything that falls off it, plus a chest the from the middle. What adds an additional level of intrigue is the fact that the bits and pieces you add vary considerably in weight: the large plastic gem is considerably lighter than the bronze cubes, for example, which weigh quite a bit. 

Martin came a real cropper here as his very first turn caused the ship to flip over, and the same thing happened to him later. Joe and I also took a hit each, which meant the cantilever king, Ian, sailed to victory:

Ian: all stuff gone 
Sam and Joe: one thing each left
Martin: had loads of stuff left

By now Living Forest was over, and Katy - lamenting - and Steve - stoic silence - were both coming to terms with Adam's tree-based victory. I mean, they knew the risks when they sat down, but sometimes that just makes it worse, I suppose.

Adam - King of the Forest
Katy and Steve -  Jacks of all Trades.

Arthur materialised before us and wanted to play Wavelength, but the hour was such that Adam had to veto and take him upstairs to bed. While we waited on his (Adam's) return, we first played Wanted Wombats, new to Steve, Katy and Ian, but quick to teach and almost as quick to play. 

Katy and I managed to pull off a $10k draw, but I bust on each subsequent turn, whereas Katy didn't.

Katy $15k

Sam $10k

Ian and Steve $3k

Martin $1k

Joe $0

Steve then took his leave. Adam hadn't returned yet, and the word was that he wasn't imminent, so we cracked into So Clover. There was some moderate harrumphing over words but we got off to a good start with a couple of sixes and kept going in that vein. It was so exciting, I forgot to take pictures here but we came a cropper in the last clover - Joe's - through no fault of the clue-giver as we failed to combine circle/base with Joe's clue of Standee. A shame, as that would have given us a perfect 30/30, but no mind. Adam hadn't reappeared yet but as he had seemed tired earlier, we decided to vacate the premises and, hopefully, see him next week. Thanks all!

Suspect Log

A night of inclement drama begin innocuously enough, although in the early running we unfortunately lost both Andrew and Mel. I arrived at Joe's first, followed by Katy, Jo, and Adam H, and after a little conversation Joe broke open his custom deck of In Vino Morte, the reductionist elimination game reminiscent of the poison scene in The Princess Bride. Will you drink, or not? Adam won two games in a row before Katy finally triumphed in a face-off with Jo, who had declared themselves 'too nice' to poison anyone, and was mostly true to it. Katy won, and I realised I hadn't snapped any pics. 

Andy M had arrived during this fiesta of death, and so with 20 minutes before Martin's arrival, we filled the space with Belratti. 

It's been a while since this Visual Clover game has been seen so we needed a rules refresher. Most of the game was spent ridiculing my pairing of maracas with a donut, even though - as I pointed out - the donut had pink glaze and sprinkles. But the art world is a fierce critic. Despite this however we - abetted with Martin, who arrived just in time to harangue us all for not connecting hat and scarf - scored impressively. I don't recall the rulebook's judgement, but it rated us highly. 

Then we split into two groups. Jo, Katy and Adam joined Joe for Free Ride USA, whilst Andy, Martin and I played Reiner Knizia's seafood punch-up, Nyakuza. 

In Nyakuza, more seafood - the tiles - become available every round, and players bid for the right to claim ownership, using transparent control markers. If you connect certain tiles (salmon and tuna, octopus and squid or a pair of crabs), and also have connected plot on land, you can build a seafood shack. The first person to build seven shacks is the winner. 

Even by Knizian standards, it's a fairly dastardly undertaking, with 'fishblocking' making its GNN lexicon debut. Martin cut off my imminently-rewarding mini-networks, and I returned the favour, denying him the privilege of building two shacks in one turn. As we cursed each other out, Katy called over from the USA that our game sounded great. I'm afraid I missed the nuances of Free Ride. In our seafood-obsessed gangster world, Andy won just moments after declaring that winning was impossible. But then he saw the octopus. 

Free Ride had a little way to go, so we - joined briefly by Katy - popped the sprues on Martin's new luck-pushing Arabian Nights-themed game, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. Here we're in a race to 80 coins, and we collect them by flipping card to move a shared marker along a track, and gathering the coins we land on. There are two catches - you can't flip your own cards, and if we collectively go over eleven, the active player busts and loses ten coins. 

It's a game with a lot of luck, but we found it came to life once we'd - somewhat belatedly, in mine and Andy's cases - grasped the rules and began a bit of table-talk. As you can either flip from the deck or other player's cards, conversation/bullshit sprang up about what we all might be hiding. Each player's three cards are arranged in ascending order, but even here you can be harpooned by the special cards - which usually bust you. 

Sam 87

Andy 40

Martin 32

Free Ride continued, so we bashed out a game of Moonrollers, a luck-pushing dice-chucker with a side-order of engine-building. 

Basically this is a Yahtzee-style game of committing dice to cards for points, whilst also harvesting hazard tokens for extra points. Everyone can contribute to the same card, but whomever completes it - while we all score - gets the card itself. As each card has a special ability, there's an incremental element of additional options creeping in. As soon as someone has all five colours, or three of one, the game ends. Andy did the latter, but fell foul of the twist in the tale: the player with the most hazard symbols, a la High Society, does not score their tokens. 

Sam 31

Martin 29

Andy 25

While we were finishing, so was a tightly contested game of Free Ride. There was some clarifications in the count-up, in that Adam and Katy both scored extra for their empty trains (I think). But naturally, Adam had won either way!

Adam 99

Katy 94

Jo 86

Joe 83

Andy now had to go on family business, so after Adam had for reasons that escaped me went and sang a song in mandarin in the kitchen, the remaining six combined into one group for another crack at Joe's design, Change Up. I took one of my famously unflattering group photos here, which I will forego in favour of detail.

Joe's addition of the option to pay to change the exchange rate on doubles didn't entice many people in -  but it did pay off when he rolled two twos. However, even with six players we managed to roll precious few sevens, I think only rotating the exchange values around twice the entire game. So a lot of us got away with saved white chips, and Joe took a designer curse right around the chops when he lost a big stack of them. 

Sam 6 reds, 1 white

Katy 6 reds

Adam 5 reds, 2 whites

Martin 4 reds, 5 whites (bad exchange rate at the end!)

Jo 3 reds

Joe 2 reds, 1 white

Now Adam left too as we pivoted to perennial GNN closer, So Clover, playing twice. There was an unusual lack of lamenting our words at the opener, so maybe not surprising that we managed a perfect 30/30, Joe perhaps prophetically getting the words suspect/log as a combo. 

Dramas unfolded in our second attempt though, firstly when everyone instantly decided playing again was a mistake upon seeing their words. Then Martin said he could smell a doggy smell, then so could Jo, then me and Katy and Joe all picked it up too as the scent made its literal way around the table. Joe made a quick inspection and found Sybil had obviously looked at the rain outside and decided that turding behind Martin's chair was the better option. Joe's thought process had to be parked as he dealt with the matter, and then - having opened the back door to the fresh evening air - we went again. 

Despite our chagrin, this was so nearly triumphant. 

We hit four sixes in a row and only came a mild cropper on the final clover - Joe's, who not unreasonably said his thinking time had been compromised by canine shenanigans, and we couldn't quite put stale with subway/perfume at first. But I'd say 28/30 is not to be sniffed sneered at. And on those bombshells, we wrapped up as best we could and said goodbyes, stepping out into the rainy Bristol night.