Thursday Night of the Living Dead

We really need some kind of moniker for the Thursday night gang - usually myself (Sam), Ian and Andrew. But with Stanley and Little Joe now joining us regularly, maybe Thursday Night News or something equally TNN-y? Or maybe it's just enough to play games with no attendant lingo. Certainly that was the case tonight - though Andrew couldn't make it, Ian and I bashed out five games in the four hours we had.

the boys keep a vigil for Ian

We began at 7pm with Hugo. There was some debate before Ian arrived, with Trans America being mooted, but we elected to get the tubby ghost on his skates again, this time with three guests each to try and get to safety.

two farmers

Joe - perhaps emboldened by a smaller crowd than Tuesday - elected to join us as a player this time. The game commenced with Hugo pretty much snoozing down in the cellar as we strolled around with a permanent sense of early-party-anxiety. But with a rush of blood - or ectoplasm - there he was, suddenly up and about! Ian started well, hit for only five points while the rest of us took between 8 and 15 of them. On the next round though, it was all change, as Joe went from last place into first, a position he held onto until the end of the game:

Joe
Ian
Sam
Stanley

I don't have the points recorded but Stan was a distant fourth and rather less enamoured of the game than on Tuesday. However if he can curb his desire to sail so close to the wind Hugo-wise, I think he'll be back again.

While I took the kids to bed Ian chose the next game, plumping for Reiner Knizia's obese backside Colossal Arena. This has only been played once before but Ian was keen - in his own inimitable fashion - to try it again. And as I was not moved to veto, we dove in. It's a game of trying to back your own monster to win, so having placed your bets you're egging it on from the sidelines, occasionally throwing on a ref or a berserk spectator.

phwoar

We both felt, however, that the theme didn't really emerge on this occasion - probably it's better with more players. We spent a lot of time realising we had forgotten to replenish our cards, and looking at the rules and sometimes forgetting them... if we were recording ourselves as a podcast, it would have scored minimal thumbs on BGG.

As it was, I eliminated Ian's backed creatures and ran out a winner:

Sam 10
Ian 0

We moved on to Ian's other choice, Bullfrogs. This was last seen as a chaotic multi-player but it's really best for two, as you can plan ahead to an extent as the ever-changing board is changing at a far slower rate. My previous experience told as I got off to a decent start and established a crowd of frogs on the Log card, getting me my second win of the night.

Sam 65
Ian 48

We moved on to Old Faithful - 7 Wonders. I chose the B side of Halicarnassus, which allowed me - assuming I built all three parts of my wonder - to build up to three free cards per round. This meant in the early part of the game I was kind of farting about, adding cards to a wonder that scored pretty much zip and building cards for free that also didn't do a great deal. By the time the third round came, however, the world was my oyster and I built both palace and pantheon whilst chaining sciences from round two. It was kind of beautiful.

aaaaaaaahhhhhh

It was also kind of crap, as my non-scoring opening round and middling second round undermined this fantastical progress. Ian cleaned up with military and blue buildings:

Ian 54
Sam 43
Dirk 39

We still had some beer in our glasses, so I introduced Ian to the Viking Game. This is a genuinely ancient tafl-style game (there are several variants) supposedly played over 1500 years ago. On a reindeer pelt (or cotton, in my copy) there is a grid with two opposing armies on it. One begins on the four sides, and the other army - which has a King to defend - in the centre. The army with the King needs to get the King to one of the four corners in order to win. The other army has to surround the King on four sides.  All pieces move the same way - like a rook in chess - and non-king pieces are taken by being sandwiched - having an opponent on both sides of it - though you can legally move into this position and not be taken.

as battles go, it's kind of passive-aggressive

Our short online investigation told us that the King's side has a slight - possibly not-so-slight - built-in advantage that can be negated - or balanced - by bidding on the part of both players - how many turns you think you can win in, with the lowest bidder getting the King.

We didn't do the bidding, but we played twice and both times the player with the King won. It's a neat game, but quite a heavy one to end the night on... nonetheless. Good enough for the Vikings, good enough for TNN.

It’s the hope that hurts the most

First Tuesday of the season, and seven hungry gamers were hunched around Joe’s kitchen table, keen for gaming sustenance. Apart from the host, Joe, it was an all-male affair with Martin, Andy, Sam, Ian, Matt and myself making up the numbers.

While waiting for Andy, we began with Go Stop (or Ghost Op, as some of us thought Martin said when he suggested it, perhaps expecting a Tom Clancy style strategy Black Ops game with a supernatural theme).

This card game resists any attempt at working out how to put it on the leaderboard. Adding up the scores doesn’t make any sense because this is a game where winning with a one (as Matt did) is far more impressive than winning with a high card. We will have to leave it as non-leaderboard.

Any way, we played three rounds, and we scored (winning scores in bold):

Sam 0, 0, 0
Ian 3,0, 0
Martin 9, 7, 0
Joe 0,0, 0
Matt 0, 5, 1
Andrew 5,0,0

Sam's tactic of going Dirk in rounds two and three badly went wrong as both times he shuffled his cards, played them without looking at them, only to discover his only scoring Stop card still in his hand when the bets had been placed.

Then Andy arrived and we split into a group of four (playing Africa) and a group of three (playing Darjeeling). Africa is a new game to GNN, and Joe explained the rules to me, Martin and Ian while Sam explained Darjeeling to Matt and Andy.

Africa is all about exploration. You might find animals, jewels, nomads or monuments. Each one can be used in a different way to score points either when you find them, or later in the game if you find yourself next to them and can move them to a more suitable place on the board. With all of Africa to explore, you’d imagine it would be quite a solitary game, but in fact we spent most of the game in a group, moving from one area of the board to another like herding animals. How apt.

As you’d expect from a Knizia, it’s a bit thinky and strategic, but it also seems a lot more luck based than usual. It got a rather guarded appraisal of “I’d play it again” from us. Maybe we were missing something.

Joe 69
Martin 65
Ian 56
Andrew 52

Over in India (confusingly, set up on the table to the east of Africa) I noticed that new boy Matt had a huge lead halfway through the game, and he did enough to hang on despite a late push up the score chart.

Matt 96
Sam 94
Andy83

However, at this point we got stuck in a bit of rut of games that never seemed to end at the same time. Sam, Andy and Matt played Koryo, a card game. I know nothing about it.

Andy19
Sam 15
Matt 14

We played Die Dolmengötter, a game with a singularly uninteresting board. I noticed that the borders had a bit of grass on it, showing that they had made an effort to make it look nice. Joe said it looked like pubic hair. I’ll let the reader decide.

First impressions were not helped by some very ordinary game pieces. But once we got going, it had a certain charm. Place your stones by moving your men around stone circles. If you have a majority, you can place a scoring tile of your choice (face down) on top of the stack. If you draw then you can put a tile at the bottom of the stack. The further up a tile is in the stack, the more its value is multiplied for points.

Four stages of indecision

Quite clever and cunning. Joe clocked up his second win of the evening.

Joe 70
Andrew 60
Martin 58
Ian 55

On the other half of the table, Sam was teaching Matt and Andy the joys of Bullfrogs. It ended:

Sam 57
Andy 52
Matt 46

While those frogs battled it out, we played a couple of games of Qwixx: a dice game which showed Das Exclusive off to its fullest potential. Finally, a game where its stadium-like dimensions are a bonus, not a hindrance.

We scored:

Martin 78
Andrew 69
Ian 56
Joe 49

And then...

Ian 64
Andrew 60
Martin 57
Joe 54

By now we had all ended at the same time, so we decided to finish with the closest thing to Ghost Op that we had: Midnight Party! Or Fuck Off, Hugo as Martin dubbed it after some bad luck with the die. It was a very close game. Clearly, we’re all getting the hang of it. Still, it gave us enough anguish as we Self-Hugoed our own pieces and Martin uttered the line (immortalised in this blog post) to describe the very special cruelty that this game demonstrates.

Sam -18
Andy -22
Ian -24
Joe -25
Martin -25
Andrew -28
Matt -28

And that was that. We set out into the warm summer rain, invigorated and alive.

The Division currently looks like this:

Teabags of Fun

Saturday night rolled around like a fateful set of dice. With Sally out at a Germaine Greer talk, somebody had to play the role of the fools - that was me, Andrew and Ian.

First up was Darjeeling, the game of sitting-in-Sam's-cupboard for a year, unplayed. Upon opening it up we discovered it resembles tea-picking in the same way sandwiches resemble a radiator. It's a strange game of moving tea-pickers around a geometric country (ours allegedly resembled Sri Lanka), selling at a time when barrels were suitably arranged on a ramp, and piling up your crates of tea on boats so they continue to pay points until enough other people have shipped crates to denote your tea as 'old'.

I struggled to get into it but in the main that was down to the boys rolling back the years with a succession of sorties downstairs or shouting from upstairs with various accusations about each others' behaviour. So mainly I was travelling around the house, vacillating between threats or moral reasoning. Neither really worked.

 You lose points if you turn around!

Darjeeling meanwhile was a race - it's first to a hundred points and when that happens the game ends instantly, and any unshipped stuff behind your screens counts against you. Andrew found himself deliberately scoring minus points in order to avoid this - a strategy I perceived as dubious at the time, but only minutes later it paid off, with some aplomb:

Andrew 104
Sam 84
Ian 80

Tea shipped, boys settled and the evening rolling, we moved swiftly on to Quantum, choosing a layout that encouraged early interaction. As with my games v Ian recently, I was smiled on by fate when I rolled a decent set of starting dice, and even Ian destroying one of my ships before my first turn didn't stop me getting off to a flier.

fun x 3

Of course, they came back into it. Andrew managed to get his Dominance up to five but then chose to hold onto his ace in the hole, perhaps put off by my ability to win ties as defender (and destroy attackers!). It was closer than it looks but I managed a win:

Sam: all cubes down
Ian: 2 cubes left
Andrew 3 cubes left

Next up was Bullfrogs. Andrew and I have played it (and I've since played both Stanley and Sally) but this was its debut as a three-player. As anticipated, it did slow down and become rather thinky. I think the sheer amount of permutations with three meant planning your turn was fairly pointless and there was a not-ideal amount of AP. That said, we did enjoy it.

Sam 59
Ian 53
Andrew 43

Warning: Pond is deep

It was gone half ten so we went for a quick game of Love Letter to finish off. However, Ian finished us off so quickly that there was time for another game afterwards. I never even made it to the end of a round, being successfully identified twice and forced to compare cards by having two Shitty Barons in the other round!

Ian - 3 cubes
Andrew - 0 cubes
Sam - 0 cubes

We ended with Biblios. I opened with an uninspiring meal of shit for myself whilst handing out decent cards to my opponents. It was that sort of game - we all did a reasonable amount of cursing and at least two of us - myself and Andrew - swore we were on to a loser. Accurately, as it turned out:

Ian - 6 (Mr Biblios)
Sam - 5
Andrew - 3

Five games played and it was not even midnight! Thanks chaps, a good night!

Night of the Long Axes

Friday. I thought I'd be up to the the gills in family, but Sally was out and her folks retired early, so Andrew made his way to Ashley Down to join me. We weren't sure what to play at first, but a glimpse of Letters From Whitechapel stirred our latent homicidal/righteous detective tendencies and we were away.

This had a flurry of plays on arrival at GNN but because - despite it's claims to the contrary - it really functions best as a two-player, it hasn't seen the table much since. Which is a shame because it has genuine tension and mystery to dispel it's somewhat bleak theme.

Andrew was Jack The Ripper first and I the detectives on his tail. Andrew played a high-risk game of sauntering through my detectives and allowing me to know his potential location. Twice I attempted arrests and failed - but the third time proved lucky, and Jack was caught before he could wreck further havoc upon London.

We quickly swapped over and my hitherto morally sound compass went awol as I played as Jack, making it successfully through the first and second nights by employing a doubling-back strategy that Andrew cottoned onto but couldn't quite negate. However on the third night I made two elementary mistakes - firstly I gave away my position early on (on the third night Jack has two possible starting positions) and then I didn't realise how close I was to one of Andrew's detectives - who made an arrest on a hunch and ended up the toast of the department:

Andrew - wins as detectives
Sam - wins as detectives

After that nail-biting bloodiness I thought it'd be nice to go for something light, so we tried my recent purchase of Bullfrogs. Would it be a little gem, or Kickstarter Crap (©Martin)?

We think the former. Whilst not a two-player classic in the vein of, say, Manouevre or Battle Line, Bullfrogs had a pleasing amount of tactical depth. On the table the Lily cards build a playing area, and having added a card, on your turn you can either add frogs (in columns or rows adjacent to the card you've just played) or sabotage: by moving an opponent's frog - also following the same columns-or-rows rule. Lily cards only have space for so many frogs, and as soon as they are full they 'sink' and the player with the most frogs on the card nabs that lily card for themselves - along with the victory points.

They also 'empty' the card of frogs by moving them (up to four, anyway - staring with the losers' frogs) to adjacent cards, and potentially sinking further cards. Mix into this each player having a couple of feisty axe-wielding bullfrogs (worth two normal frogs), extra points for claiming your own lily cards (as opposed to your opponents) and a central card - the log - that cannot be sunk, and you have a little bit to think about.

thanks to nad24, who couldn't have known I would lose my iPhone lead

It's quite neat, and though I can imagine it would be trickier with three - and simply chaotic with four - for two players I rate it. Having said that, I did win though:

Sam 58
Andrew 52

There was just time for one more game, and Andrew chose Extreme Biblios. And all the shit he made me eat in the gift phase came back to haunt him, as I had just enough of it to outbid him for the crucial brown card that ended up as the decider:

Sam 10
Andrew 5

...I am Mr Biblios!

Cinderella was still at the ball and we were yet to see in 11 o'clock, but it was the end of a long week, so we called it a night.