This One Goes Up to 12

On Friday Andrew and I recruited Joe to teach him our current favourite 'long' game - Scythe. Joe was willing, in fact he was openly keen, but first he had to go through the warm-up games with Stanley and Little Joe: we bashed out a quick game of PitchCar (Big Joe won after my third lap collapse) followed by FUSE (which we all won) before the little folk were packed off to bed, and Scythe set up.

Scythe is like Eclipse - only on land, not in the future, and faster-moving. And different in other ways too. In fact I'm not sure why I keep equating the two in my head, other than the fact that I'm happy to break my no-long-games rule for both. Also! - Scythe isn't actually that long, although thematically it feels broad in scope. There's worker-placement, but also worker movement. There's engine-building, but also luck. There's combat, but the winner can potentially be the most placid (...although you'd have to wonder what on earth the other players were up to if that happened).

Joe took to the game much as Adam had done a couple of weeks previously. Like Adam, he focused on production, whilst Andrew and I mobilized and traveled the board. Andrew's special ability - workers can swim! - was one I'd previously pooh-poohed as rather prosaic, not to say silly, but he showed quickly the benefits of spreading the net wide, claiming territory as well as resource rewards.  Mine and Joe's workers baulked at the sight of water. Joe bunched his workers together for what I assumed to be reasons of cosiness, whilst I delayed building my mechs until they were really cheap.

But by that point the game was approaching its final chapter - both Andrew and Joe had reached the factory and had a decent spread of territories, whereas I was slightly hemmed in on the western side of the board.

Joe's mechs look rural

Andrew triggered the end of the game, but he wasn't as popular as Joe or I - popularity deciding exactly what your monetary rewards will be for objectives/territory/resources. Despite his strong presence on the board, might he have moved too soon? It's all very well completing objectives, but do you have enough respect from the people, man? As it turned out, he did:

Andrew 60 - wins on tie-breaker!
Sam 60
Joe 49

A strong showing from Joe on his first play, and I'm glad to say he liked Scythe. Hopefully we'll play again soon.

Joe enjoying himself, despite paparazzi

Thanks to Scythe's aforementioned brevity, it was still early. So we played Joe's new purchase Junk Art, which I'd missed out on at the last GNN meet. Each round has a new rule that players must obey, so it's like a scrambled Bandu: no currency to avoid blocks, just various rules to implement them. It was a lot of fun, and I think Joe won this.

Because Scythe doesn't take that long - have I mentioned that? - we still had time for another game!

We introduced Joe to Cosmic Run, our current favourite short game. Roll dice, race to planets - before they blow up. Possibly the most fatalistically-themed game out there, where you are essentially on a protracted suicide mission. I had a good run of results going on with this game, but -whether it was the hand of fate or the wine - Joe handed our arses to us despite insisting he didn't have a clue what was going on. The old Steve Dale manoeuvre! Works every time.

By now we were rather merry. I do recall Joe playing a recording he'd made in his studio: whilst a somber and plaintive piano track played, someone in the studio next door was tuning an oboe to combined comic effect. How we laughed! Although I must confess I misunderstood Joe's explanation at the time and thought we were merely listening to an odd and badly-recorded bit of jazz improv.

After the last planet had imploded cosmically, it was nearing midnight, so we called an end to proceedings, safe in the knowledge that the next day nobody would be waking us up at 6am mistakenly claiming the goldfish was dying*.

Also: chipsticks give you ulcers.

*not necessarily true for me

Micro Wave

The last night of my marathon three-and-half weeks of gaming almost-every-night began with Stanley, Joe and I playing Micro Robots. This is a spin-off (I think) of Ricochet Robots, which I've never played (or wanted to) but it sounded like a fun thing to do with the boys.



The board is laid out randomly and dice are rolled to determine a starting position (certain colour, certain number) and end position (likewise). If you play the game properly (we just worked as a team), then everyone works out in their head how to get the 'robot' from one to the other - you can move orthogonally to a matching colour, or a matching number. If you can do it you announce how many moves you can do it in, and then - theoretically - prove it.

Both boys liked it and Joe - who often insists on playing in a 'team' with me - really came into his own, figuring things out quicker than Stan or I a couple of times.

So come 7.45 I introduced the game to Andrew, who also seemed enamored. It's more puzzle than game, really - the game aspect is the race to work out the puzzle - but rather sweet nonetheless.

Moments later Adam walked in, and with very little discussion, we set up Scythe. It was new to Adam but having taught it to a few people recently, we sped through the introduction and began the game. As ever, there is no combat in the early stages, but as the first to get my mechs out beyond my own territory, Andrew and Adam started talking as if there would be.

My special power was being able to take the same actions as many times in a row as I liked (usually, you have to change action on every turn) and it did come in handy. I ran away from Adam in order to complete my goal card, and travelled far and wide claiming the Encounter tokens. But my success was partly down to Adam's lack of familiarity with Scythe - he forgot his special power of stealing combat cards before a fight. Had he remembered, our two vital face-offs could have ended differently. As it was, I stole all his lumber and then successfully fought him off late-game having hinted I wasn't going to bother.

As a result I'm not sure how much Adam enjoyed it, but hopefully he's intrigued enough to try it again before too long. I do like this game.

Sam 62
Adam 38
Andrew 32

Andrew would have finished second except, not realizing the game was about to end, he vacated the Factory hex and let me steal in at the death.

Because of Scythe's delightful brevity it was not yet 10pm, so we broke out Take It Easy. We also broke out the cheese and biscuits too, and discovered Adam's dislike of olives (not at all) and indifference to grapes (I think he ate about three). Andrew and I stuffed our faces like the gannets we are.

Then Andrew launched into round one of Take it Easy, calling Beatles songs. There was nary a pause from his encyclopedic memory, but he did cry "this is terrible" very early on: on his fifth tile. That has to be a record. My efforts at calling words ending with 'ology' only lasted as far as cosmology, theology and biology before I sidestepped into psychiatry, trigonometry etc, before eventually saying anything that ended with an 'ee' sound: easy, doozy, floozy, etc.

Pathetic! But at least I won.



Finally we tried our hand at FUSE. I'm not sure if I dealt out too many cards again, but it felt nigh-on impossible. We ran out of time with five cards still in the stack - although four of them were Fuse cards. I would have been up for another stab at it, but time was a-pressing, so our evening came to an explosive close.

Thank you for your time, gentlemen!

Appetite for Construction

The last few days - and evenings - of Sally's prolonged absence are now upon me, and I decided to see them out in much the same way I started them - by playing games to what to most people would be an obsessively unhealthy degree. But I'm not most people, and neither is Chris.

We sat down last night having set up Caverna, braced for the long haul. But of course, Caverna is only a long haul with four (or three, if Ian or Steve play) and we zipped through it nippily enough. Chris needed a couple of rule-reminders, but overall didn't seem too rusty. Three-quarters of the way through the game I saw that whilst my mountain was nearly dug, his was still the Dwarf equivalent of a embryonic maisonette. But any confidence I had evaporated as his plans seemed to coalesce over the last couple of rounds to facilitate some hectic building.

stuff

I held on for the win, but it was closer than I'd suspected it would be.

Sam 70
Chris 56

It was only half nine, so we had the option of taking on another Euro-y game. But Chris suggested Cosmic Run, and I'm never going to turn that down. Not after just playing Caverna, anyway.

matter

I decided to pick up cards if I could, rather than ignore them, and did pay notional heed to that intent. But it's hard to ignore those tracks when the dice-rolling is good... whilst Chris seemed to pick up cards at every given opportunity, I only ended up with three in the fastest game of Cosmic Run I've yet played:

Sam 69
Chris 62

It was 10pm now and I was pretty tired, but agreed to one more game: FUSE, the game of co-operative bomb defusal. If anyone hasn't played this, it's a high-pressure hoot; the game lasts ten minutes exactly (unless you win, in which case it might be less) during which time you're trying to 'defuse' cards by placing dice on them of a certain colour, number, or combination thereof. We didn't realise I'd dealt too many bomb cards in the first game and exploded like amateurs snipping wires randomly. But the game had woken me up, so we went again, this time with the correct amount of cards... we dallied with doing the easier 'training' mission, before going for the standard one - and we did it! With literally ten seconds to spare. 

No peers for Peer

With some regulars and semi-regulars missing there were, at 7.30, five of us congregated around the my table: Ian, Ben, Martin, Chris, and myself (Sam). With Joe expected at 8, we had the perfect amount of time to try Martin's new trick-taking game, Filipino Fruit Market. If the name sounds weird, wait til you see the box art, which takes Castle Dice's throw-three-designers-in-a-room technique and replaces two of them with automated clip-artists.

The game itself was similarly odd, with hard-to-distinguish fruit suits haunted by a ghostly pineapple, and a donkey and cart meeple trundling around a central area changing the trump cards. If you lead, you can move the donkey. If you lead the first card, everyone must follow suit, if they can. Unless of course they fling a barrel on one of the central cards, which bring you points through majority-scoring when someone runs out of cards. I got rid of my cards quickly, but it wasn't the greatest strategy:

Ian/Chris 11
Martin 10
Sam/Ben 9

just like being there

We'd already agreed it was non-leaderboard as Joe walked in as we began the first (and only) round, but the rules do specify that in the event of a tie, the game designer wins. So well done Peer Sylvester, who - apart from Wir Sind Das Volk! - I don't think has been seen at GNN towers since the slightly-underwhelming appearance of Singapore, three years back. Surely there's a better photo of Peer than the one someone has seemingly photocopied into the rule book?

With Joe now chomping at the bit, we stuck to leaderboard-free fare with a quick game of Push It.

Sam/Chris 11
Ian/Martin 5
Ben/Joe 4

...before breaking into groups of three for the main event. Joe only had to mention Lords of Vegas for Ian and Ben to jump in; Martin and I roped Chris in for a game of Mexica. I'd traded for this some time ago after being very enamoured of it at Steve and Anja's place. But we all - Chris especially, seeing as he'd never played it - needed appraising of the rules before cracking into it. The game is about area control but in a more reactive way than the likes of El Grande - you're moving your Mexica around the board, building temples and basically being a sneaky shit. Martin rhapsodized about the potential for "being a dick" so much, in fact, that it became my default position.

Chris in charge 

I didn't know what to do at the start, but when Martin left a space for me to take advantage I didn't hesitate, and a serial swearathon began with most of the cursing coming from Martin's corner. The game is all about establishing areas (score points) and building temples there to control them (score points) which is all facilitated through your mexica, who trundles slowly across land but hurtles like a jet-skier through water. Despite Martin's intermittent apoplexy, he still finished second:

Sam 100
Martin 93
Chris 88

The others were just finishing up Lords of Vegas, which gave the three of us time to play FUSE, the  ten minute game of bomb defusal. We went for the standard setting, which was perhaps overly ambitious seeing how we regularly fail the training missions. Things started badly when Chris spotted the timer wasn't running, then we hit a mid-game patch of rolling several dice two of us couldn't use... we failed eventually, though not without a surge toward the end. On the other side of the table, Ian brought home a substantial victory in Lords of Vegas:

Ian 40
Ben 29
Joe 23

Las Vegas Das Eng

I'll leave the details to the comments, as all I heard was the occasional plaintive wail of a failed gamble. With the six of us back in a group we repeated our team Pairs game, with the individuals shuffling around to mix things up. Martin and I ran out reasonably convincing winners:

Martin/Sam 11
Chris/Joe 5
Ben/Ian 3

But kudos must go to Joe for his almost metronomic insistence on following every appalling shot with a brilliant one, and vice versa. It was almost eerie. Chris went for a kind of bludgeoning approach, scattering opponents - usually Martin - far and wide.

real good

We finished off our sextet with Pairs, as Ben had to exit pretty soon. Chris and I were both on 17 points (Joe was too, but he'd bust) and needed to win the round to win the game with everyone else bust already. We pushed and pushed, twisting like Chubby Checker, but someone had to eventually succumb to fate. It was me:

Chris 22
Sam /Joe 17
Martin 14
Ian 4

Ben headed off and we rounded off the evening with Timeline. There was a flurry of pretty bad guessing if I'm honest, with none worse than my own. Hardly anyone seemed to know anything. We were piling up the redundant cards far quicker than extending the timeline, but Martin quietly depleted his own cards until he had the appearance of homo sapiens to get rid of...

Martin 0
Ian 1 card left
Chris 2 cards left
Joe and Sam 3 cards left

human endeavour

Finally finally, as the regular GNNers left, Sally and our friend Katie returned from the pub, and we bashed out yet another game of Push It! Sally thought it should be leaderboard, but I'm not so sure. Besides, she said that before I won:

Sam 11
Sally 6
Katie 4

It was now midnight, and another stitch in the GNN tapestry was complete.

All the way up to eleven

Today I was bothered by a slight cold but couldn’t bear to miss a second Tuesday in a row so I arrived at Joe’s, slightly croaky, ready for some gaming glory. I was last to arrive, since I’d forgotten all the short cuts I usually take to Joe’s, and I found we were six in total that night: me, Joe, Katy, Martin, Ian, and Sam.

They were discussing potential six-player games for the night but, instead of walking into the next room and looking at Joe’s collection, Joe was looking on his phone for six-player suggestions on his and Sam’s own website. I can’t tell if this is extremely lazy or the perfect use of the internet.

Martin suggested we try his new acquisition: Deadwood. It was an old Cheapass Games game, and he found it on a wall! He said it looked good and, if it wasn't, he can just leave it on another wall.

How odd, then, that we should begin with a five-player game: Fuse. This bomb-busting dice game was introduced by Sam and he acted as the compare: explaining the rules and dealing out cards as the game progressed.

We began slowly, all too polite to take the die we needed (“No, really. I’m happy with anything.”) but we got up to speed and were able to defuse the bombs with 49 seconds of the 10 minutes remaining. This gave us a high score of 74 points!

After this, another team game: Codenames. We played one round in which cryptic crossword experts Joe and Sam as spymasters. But having experts on one side is only good if you have experts on the other. As it was, Katy and I could only get two of Joe’s audacious “Camelot, 5” clue. Sam struggled, beginning his game with a clue for only one card, just so he could get it out of the way.

The game was remarkable in that out of all the many wrong answers, none benefited the other team.

Joe, Katy, Andrew 8 (all clues cleared)
Sam, Ian, Martin 8

Finally, we did the decent thing and split into two groups of three. Sam, Ian and I returned to the vineyards for another bash at Viticulture, while Joe, Katy and Martin chose Castle Crush.

In Castle Crush, as far as I can tell, each player builds a little town to protect two little meeples, which then are subjected to the whims of a toppling battering ram. Martin noted that the table held two of the most opposite games it could possibly host. Thinky Eurogamer worker-placement next to tactile physical bludgeoning.

Us wine-growers set up swiftly, and were off to a flier. Ian and I went for early cheap deliveries just to get some money coming in. I pretty much ignored cards, though, which Sam and Ian profited heavily from.

It was a close battle, with the three of us leap-frogging each other up the score track. Halfway through, Katy looked over from her half of the table and remarked to Sam how well he was doing. “But look at all the wine Ian’s got,” Sam replied, as he poured himself a real glass of the stuff for himself.

A close battle

Castle Crush ended soonest, with Martin coming out a clear winner.

Martin 85
Katy 69
Joe 64

And they followed this by the card game 99, which Martin also won.

Martin 77
Katy 76
Joe 51

By this time, Viticulture had ended and, once again, Ian took top spot.

Ian 25
Sam 22
Andrew 20

Next up was another team game, Push It. By combining Sam’s and Martin’s sets, we were able to have a three two-player team battle around Joe’s circular table: perfect for the game.

Ian & Katy got an early lead, but then became stuck on four points while the rest of us caught up. Then Sam & Martin put together some good moves while Joe & me sort of made up the numbers.

At first we thought we should just play until seven points, but we were enjoying it so much that it was extended to the usual eleven (hence the blog title). Sam & Martin crashed through the winning line with a neat two-pointer.

Sam & Martin 12
Ian & Katy 7
Joe & Andrew 5

And we finished the evening with Skull and Roses, the simple bluff game. It was quite a short game, since Joe’s ability to read the table was second to none. He was only wrong once, and that was when he tried to bluff, but no one followed and he had to reveal his own card: a skull. He made up for that immediately afterwards by guessing seven roses out of eight. Ian managed to also get a correct call in. After that, it was just a case of who had the most cards left.

1. Joe
2. Ian
3. Martin
4= Katy
4= Andrew
5. Sam

And with that, we were done. We set off with Martin saying he’d thoroughly enjoyed every game he’d played that evening.

A glimpse at the division will only increase that contentment.

Grapes of Wrath

Wine. It's one of those things that couldn't have had an immediately intuitive value upon its discovery. When the wheel was invented you can picture someone saying "I'm onto something here" The first woozy head, sick stomach and all-day hangover, less so. Nonetheless wine remains very popular and weirdly there are several boardgames about it. Having discovered a friend got 30% off at Forbidden Planet, I leapt in and bought Viticulture, the most highly-thought of one on BGG.

We - myself (Sam), Ian, Chris, Andrew - hadn't planned to play it, or anything come to that. After failing to win at FUSE, Andrew, Ian and I had a better three-player stab at Codenames, where we won 9-3. As Spymaster I was particularly proud, but when Chris arrived I undid all Ian's good spy mastering by inadvertently clueing the assassin, and Andrew and Chris obliterated our first-round lead as a result.  Sorry Ian!

fun

We debated what to do next and with Chris keen and me amenable, there was enough goodwill in the room to break out the newbie - Viticulture it was. It felt very old-school to me: very Euro-y, very fire-fighting. Not as much as In The Year of the Dragon, say, but similar to something like Concordia where you have plenty of plans but never quite enough wiggle room to do them all. 

But maybe my personal experience of it was down to my own struggles. The others got going quicker than I did. The game is a race to 20 points and takes place over a number of years: spring is a bid for turn order, summer is worker placement to get your grape-growing shit together. Autumn is getting a card or two and winter is trying to turn your grape-growing shit into wine/points. Then there's some bobbins going on at the end of the year too.

I sold my field! Don't worry, I'm going to buy it back later

Player order - like Fresco - is important, but - like Tinner's Trail - you can pull some good moves going last too. Basically you're planting vines gathering grapes, then jumping up and down on them to turn them into wine, then (that's one too many thens I fear) completing orders for them.

early summer

Mixed into this chicanery is a load of visitors to your vineyard who do all kinds of nonsense. Chris  never managed to complete an order - in fact his whole approach was all about maximising his visitors, like a lazy-ass vintner who prefers showing people around to rolling his trouser sleeves up and jumping in the press. Ian, despite his fatigue, won convincingly before I could complete a big order.  Or even a small order. Like Chris, I did nothing in the wine market. Unlike Chris, I did nothing anywhere else either. I did have loads of lovely wine though - both in my cellar, and my tummy. Mmmmm.

Ian 22

Andrew 16

Chris 15

Sam 6

Andrew's vineyard

Despite my diabolical score I look forward to trying this again. The alleged 45-90 minutes felt like it had been play-tested by Roy Castle by the time we wound up, but it was a first attempt. Andrew and Ian headed home, but Chris and I stayed up to try a couple more attempts at FUSE. We failed miserably both times.

I awoke with a heavy head. Maybe it was the Viticulture. Or possibly, the viticulture.

Friday Night Bunfight

More Eclipse rules played wrong:

III tiles should be limited by number of players

Discovery tiles must be assigned immediately (i.e. not 'cashed in' later)

Plasma cannons missiles are one-use-only!!!

Hexes may be discarded if you don't like the look of them - though your Explore action is over. 

This latter one is, as Andrew and I noted, kind of weird - "I'll come back later, when that planet has gone".

These anomalies came to light after Chris trounced us at Eclipse last night. I was hoping we'd be playing The Voyages of Marco Polo, but it didn't arrive. Instead we sallied forth into the firmament, built ships and fired missiles. Not for the first time, I felt that the game ended too soon: we'd only just started interacting. But that's more about how we choose to play rather than the game itself. I'm thinking next time I might go aggressive earlier, just to see how that pans out. My worry with three is whoever isn't involved in the fighting will end up winning...

Anyway we all built some mighty fine ships, Chris' were the mighty finest and in resplendent yellow, they marched unstoppably to the central hex. Both Andrew and I offered token resistance, but as we all know, you don't get victory points for tokens in Eclipse. 

My dice-rolling was awful again - I did roll a double 6, but that was on behalf of The Ancients - and my dreadnoughts collapsed like papier mache umbrellas in a typhoon, their seeming impregnability undone by time. Andrew's nest of wasps strategy (lots of tiny spaceships) turned out to be sturdier, but not sturdy enough:

Chris 36

Andrew 25

Sam 25

With that beast out of the way, it was only just gone 10pm. On a Friday! I brought out a selection of short games, and we ended up playing all of them!

First up was Raj. I won the first round, Chris the second. At that point Andrew - courtesy of some brutal ties - was left in the dust score wise, lagging back on zero points with Chris and I at 41 v 45. But Andrew staged a comeback in round three with an impressive 31 points. I snagged the win, despite wasting my 15 bids twice:

Sam 57

Chris 44

Andrew 31 

Then we played FUSE. This is a co-operative dice game of defusing bombs, against the clock. You only have ten minutes and must quickly assign rolled dice to cards. Renegade Games supply a timer which clicks away in the background. There's an annoying voice you can thankfully switch off. We played two training missions (i.e. the easiest level) and lost the first one, but won the second with a minute to spare. It's fun; there's a definite sense of pressure. 

After that we had a couple of games of Push It. By this time Andrew's saki was doing its work and I'd broken the whisky out. Chris had a coffee, but it didn't do him any favours:

Sam 11

Chris 9

Andrew 8

The next game was even tenser, with Andrew and I paired on ten points as Chris attempted to surge back from four points behind us:

Sam 11

Andrew 10

Chris 9 

Finally we played Take It Easy, this time all three of us choosing the same call: boardgames! Very meta. It was interesting how we interpreted our experiences of game-playing into a narrative of three numbers: 9-4-2 starts well, fades away. 1-7-6: never ask to play it, enjoy when we do. Andrew's 1-2-3 was Quartermaster General.

Andrew 541

Sam 525

Chris 432

So the evening ended with the Bristolians exacting some small measure of revenge on Chris, sailing in here with his dastardly Chippenham ways. See you on Tuesday guys.