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.

Rome burned, onions wept

Seven gamers and Joe's kitchen table came together this week in a resounding crash of bonhomie and rivalry. Joe, Sam, Martin, Ian, Adam T, Katy and me were all seated by 7.30 and we began with all of us collaborating in a game of Belratti.

This Dixit-ish game of detecting conscious choices from random chance is a firm favourite but are we getting to good? Since discussing our choices is not allowed, Sam hit upon a method of giving his cards a percentage according to how good a match they were for one of the two targets. This was quickly adopted by all of us except Katy who refused to reduce her art to a mere number.

We did well but, also, we got lucky. We linked wasp to a clapperboard because they had stripes, only for Adam to tell us that the real link was B-Movie. Too smart for us. And despite a lengthy discussion as to what was better matched to mouth: bread or cigarette, we got it wrong. Bread should have gone with the other topic - tiger. Tiger bread, you see. Well done, Martin. Sorry we didn't get it.

Us 21
Belratti 6

Then we split into two groups. The Was Sticht gang (Joe, Ian, Adam and me) regrouped for another attempt at the wily trick taker while Katy, Martin and Sam sat around the card table for a feisty game of Senators.

Was Sticht started hesitantly, with Ian having to have two attempts at explaining who won which trick during the opening matrix stage. Then the game was remarkable for a large number of no trumps, and for round three when I dealt out no green cards at all in the first half of the matrix.

The game was much smoother this time, with Joe cleverly choosing his cards according to one of the criteria ("no tricks", "no green cards," etc) he needed to complete.

But I won again! Is this the game for me? It was close, though.

Andrew 3 plus 16 on the tiebreaker
Joe 3 plus 13
Ian 2
Adam 1

While we finished that, the card table gang finished Senators and two other games too. From what I can gather, Martin was in the lead and then saw a sudden collapse in support, followed by the third war ending the game in dramatic fashion.

Katy 11
Sam 10
Martin 9

They followed this up with Heul Doch Mau Mau. I don't know what variant they were playing but when Martin said "balls!" in frustration, Katy replied "hairy or shaved?" I didn't note Martin's answer but judging by the final score, his frustration can't have lasted long.

Martin 114
Katy 85
Sam 83

They also managed to squeeze in one round of the word game Handsome. Sam won.

Sam 3
Katy 1
Martin 1

Then there was a period of reshuffling, with four crossword wizards (Sam, Adam, Joe and Martin) going head to head over a game of Montage. Although Sam did apologize beforehand that anyone paired with him would lose.

I tried to listen in to make notes but the only clue I heard was "Donkey" and its answer was "Ass". But I'm sure the rest of the clues were brilliant.

Joe and Martin won!
Sam and Adam didn't.

The rest of us played Downfall of Pompeii, which needed a little rule refresher but was otherwise smooth sailing. We were a little surprised when the rules told us that the owner of the game should set everything up but, since Joe was already playing Montage, we struggled on without him.

It was a memorable game Katy who got one Omen card after another, allowing her to throw her opponents into the volcano. She ended with no meeples left to put on the board when, luckily, Vesuvius erupted. I wonder if I got the Relative Rule wrong but it was wrong for all of us, so never mind.

It was enormous fun pushing lava into the path of our opponents so they died a fiery death. Kathy's early advantage lead to her victor.

Katy 7
Ian 6
Andrew 5

Around this time Adam left and the remaining three bashed out a quick game of Eggs Of Ostrich to fill the time until Pompeii was covered in lava.

Martin 11
Joe 6
Sam 3

Then the six of us played Stinker. Winning entries that I managed to write down were...

Why is a good man hard to find? Polio Death (Ian)
What's under the Pope's hat? Courgettes (Joe)
The name of a fairy tale? Alana and the Bum (Martin)
How to tell someone they have bad breath? Smell toilet to compare. (Katy)

Don't recall the category for this one.

Martin 32
Joe 27
Katy 25
Sam 24
Andrew 11
Ian 9

Then Sam and Ian left, while the final four played on past the eleventh hour with a rousing game of Krass Kariert, the card game of no winners, just losers. We all lost one life in the four rounds that we played and so we called it a draw and went home rejoicing in our shared non-defeat.

Gods and Monsters

The planets were not so much aligned as divided Chukka Umunna style as the latest Tuesday-becomes-Thursday lost players at a rate of knots: no Katy or Joe, and Andrew and Adam T lost late in the day to fatigue and - a first for GNN - annual haircut.

So when 7.30 rolled around it was Martin, Ian, Stanley and myself sat at the table. First out of the blocks was LAMA: familiar to all but Stan. The newbie started badly when he lost the opening round, but with Martin and I also taking heavy losses, Stan recovered ground and went out in round four to return a chip and claim a narrow win:

Stan 12

Ian 14

Sam 30

Martin 41

We then took on the collaborative effort of foiling Belratti (Andrew explained the game here ) but, perhaps suffering from that lack of alignment, found ourselves repeatedly letting the forger through the door and it didn't take long for him to win:

Belratti : 6

Us: 9 (needed 15 to win)

With the lighter fare out of the way Stan went upstairs to read as Martin talked us through the rules of Gheos, the game that Andrew hated. Ian didn't hate it, but had said he'd play it again. So now he could! It was entirely new to me, and it's one of those rules-light decisions-heavy bamboozlers where almost everything you do has the potential to screw someone over, but doing so makes it more likely that they'll behave in kind. Players are Gods, placing tiles on an ever-growing landscape of islands and continents, and 'investing' in the tribes of these lands as they expand, encounter each other, and fail to get on. Everyone has three opportunities to score and Ian took his early, as the yellow tribe offered decent returns with a large continent that Martin and I were blocked out of.

After that, though, he fretted that he'd peaked too early. I fretted that I wouldn't peak at all, as Ian was now on 20-plus points, Martin 7 and I was stuck on zero. It's a hard game to get your head around the multitude of opportunities and each one's knock-on effects, and my habit to play conservatively in luck-pushing games (see: Incan Gold) meant I ended up with an almost identical set of followers to Martin, unable to catch him as a result because if either of us scored, we both scored the same amount. I needed to sabotage him somehow but I couldn't work out how.

Martin meanwhile, was busy sabotaging Ian, and Ian sabotaged right back as the largest continent kept rupturing and repairing itself. As it turned out, Ian had peaked too early, and I'd peaked too late:

Martin 91

Sam 77

Ian 66

"I'd play it again" said Ian, in the manner of someone imagining themselves imprisoned and not allowed in the exercise yard.

Next was Eggs of Ostrich. I confess I don't remember a huge amount about it because at this point - I blame Gheos - I was a bit drunk. I know none of my bags went bust, but none of them got filled either.

Martin 9 

Ian 7 

Sam 5

Ian went home at this point and Martin and I went to choose a game. To my surprise Martin suggested Brave Little Belgium, which I've played a lot recently solo: a 1-2 player endeavour of WWI where the Germans try to cross Belgium to reach France, and the Allies (the Entente) must stop them. We looked at the time, considered my familiarity with it, and dove in. However as we set up I realised how drunk I was as I started trying to explain the rules and couldn't remember any of them.

Luckily Martin's capacity to listen, read, and play all at the same time clarified things as I forgot to mention a couple of crucial points. Mostly though it is rather simple: chits are pulled from a bowl to see which army activates; choosing to sit pat or move. If it encounters an enemy, combat is automatically initiated, and either side can use previously-pulled Event chits that empower or hamper as appropriate: the Germans (me) can use Big Bertha to damage Belgian forts, and Zeppelins to aid in combat. The Entente can sabotage German movement. Either side can Force March troops to get them further down a particular path.

It's unsurprisingly combative from the get-go, with different armies having different strengths, and for the Entente very attritional: the Germans begin strongly and before the first round was over, the fort at Liege (one of three German objectives) was wiped out. The other German objectives are the turn the fort at Namur to dust, and get an infantry unit over the victory line and into France.

At one stage it looked like I might achieve neither, as Martin force-marched the French army of De Cary north to defend Namur, and managed to get in my way enough to prevent me reaching the victory line. I sent wave after wave of men to Namur and eventually beseiged it and overthrew the defenders in a bloody battle. But I still needed to reach the victory line and at this point the British had arrived and were getting in my shit. I headed north to avoid them and looked to be on the verge of victory with an assault on Ghent - only for the Entente to hold out against the odds. They did finally fall - but by this time it was the final round, by which time reaching my three objectives only represents a draw - just like real war, there's no winners.

Fun to revisit, if only to have the unfamiliar sensation of having Martin ask me advice. Feeling unqualified to give it was pretty familiar though. And that rounded off an unusually scarce, but enjoyable GNN night for another week.

Handsome beyond words

With mass absences ruling out Tuesday's gaming, we gathered together on a Thursday for our weekly fix. There were five of us around Joe's freshly cleaned kitchen table: Joe himself, Sam, Ian, Martin and me. Martin was itching to get started, having not played any games for ages and we began with some light hearted luck pushing with Push.

Deal yourself some cards, avoiding duplicates of colour or number, making up to three columns to help you avoid going bust. You choose which column to keep but, and here's the twist, your neighbours get the other two columns. Added to this is the little matter of the die which, when rolled, requires you to discard all of your cards of the colour showing on the die.

It's a fun game, where a lot of the fun is watching other people struggle with bad luck. Especially if the person in question is Martin. "Random nonsense!" he declared as the die sliced away another high scoring set of cards from his collection while leaving the rest of us relatively unscathed. He couldn't even take solace in his beer since his regular subscription ales were nasty sweet tasting novelty flavours.

Ian and I both banked cards to keep them safe and when Ian did suffer at the hands of the die, he was able to shrug off losing twelve points with a unconcerned "I can live with that." But it turned out to be pivotal.

Andrew 64
Ian 56
Joe 41
Sam 38
Martin 29

After this we played the Dixit / Face Cards type game of Belratti. We only had the rules in German, so Martin searched for the English version online.

In this, we are artists and collectors. We all have a hand of nine cards with pictures of objects and then two more picture cards are revealed, indicating the topics that the collectors want in their art works. But in among these hand picked cards are four randomly drawn pictures by Belratti, the famous painter of forgeries. Picking his cards instead of ours is a minus point and six of them will end the game in defeat.

We began optimistically by declaring that Sam and Ian (our two painters) could successfully chose six paintings to sell to me, Martin and Joe. To cut a long story short, they couldn't. Belratti snuck three of his paintings into the deal. He was already halfway to beating us and we never recovered. We had only nine pictures successfully identified when Belratti hit six which, according to the score sheet, is "a picture of misery."

Next up, we needed something more meaty to go with the just-opened crisps. Northern Pacific was introduced to me as a simple but mean train game set in the US. Put your cubes in the city where the train is going to be sometime in the future, but all the other players are doing the same. In doing so, alliances are forged and rivalries are cemented.

It was a difficult game to judge and we all struggled with the problem of trying to make a move that doesn't immediately make people move the train elsewhere. Joe stoutly defended himself against any accusations that he was taking a "Joe turn" pointing out we'd all had moments of excess pondering. It was a bit mean of us since he was in last at the time and needed a decent round to get back into contention, which he got.

In fact it ended very close. After leading for rounds one and two, Martin found himself caught by Sam right at the end, despite his great joke about dropping a big one in Butte.

Sam 21
Martin 20 (fewer wasted cubes)
Andrew 20 (more wasted cubes)
Joe 19
Ian 18

With the news that England were winning 3-0 against Norway in the Women's World Cup ringing in our ears, we played L. A. M. A. The fun game of picking up or putting down cards. So simple yet so amusing. I adopted the role of cock blocker for this game. I suggested that Martin should start and then, having checked his cards, he immediately had to pick up. Then I kept ruining Sam's plans with a sequence of moves that kept increasing the value of the cards past the one he wanted.

Joe played a clear round and got to put back a ten. He also went to the toilet and while he was away we complained about how long he was taking over his turn. Hilarious. But he had the last laugh with a decisive win.

Joe 11
Martin 32
Andrew 34
Ian 39
Sam 46

At this point, Ian set off home but we were still very much in the zone. We tried Kami, a very pretty Japanese themed game from France (I think) which was simple, although with a frustratingly opaque rule sheet that spent more time telling us the characters’ back story than how to play the game.

The basic jist is that one player plays an attack card and the next player has to play the same card (or an empress) to counter it and then they can play an attack card of their own. Winning team (you play in pairs) is decided by the first person to play all eight cards in their hand. It seemed simple and a bit random. The winning total is supposed to be fifteen but when Joe and I ran into a 9-0 lead after two rounds, the game was ended.

After this we played Handsome, An Elegant Word Game. This game comes in a tiny pack and it concerns making words from the five communal cards in the middle (one supplied by each player and one drawn randomly at the start) and the two cards in each players’ hand. Only consonants are supplied, so you have to come up with the longest word using whatever vowels you choose. In the “party variant” consonants can be repeated. These people party hard.

Sam was in his element, winning on QUASHED. I just checked and we owe Joe an apology since HELIXES is a valid plural of HELIX, which would have got him an extra point for longest word that round. Martin was all musical, starting with VOGUED and JIVE while I was channeling my inner fisherman with WHELKS and an underwhelming (and non-scoring) BOX.

Sam 11
Joe 8
Martin 7
Andrew 4

Finally, we had another go at Belratti. This time we stuck to low numbers of paintings to match to our topics, and we made sure to use those useful special action cards. With this, we did far better. I clearly thought that either familiarity or a smaller player count had improved matters but what I said was “This is so much better without Ian!” Then they insisted I blog that, so here I am. Sorry, Ian. Didn’t mean it.

Joe, Sam, Andrew and Martin 16
Belratti 3

A marvelous way to end the evening and set off into the hot June night. See you all soon, I hope.