Ships, towers, and submarines

This week's GNN nearly didn't happen, which I believe (I cannot fully recall) would have been a first since the inception of the blog. With the Eastonites busy with nappies and sleep deprivation, Joe unable to host and Andrew poorly, it took a plaintive email from Katy to stir the collective consciousness to life.

I was supposed to be off out on a beer-laden jolly at work, but I decided I was too tired to face two hours of drinking before tea even started, so stepped in to host at the last minute.

Come 7.30 Katy, Ian and Andy appeared at the door, and I forced them to play Riff Raff. This game (see previous post for description) is a lot of fun, unless you're Andy, who announced near the end he didn't like balancing games at all. This began a trio of disdainful verdicts that ran through the evening, with Ian next to bring judgement.

 Riff Raff

But before that happened, Katy won her inaugural seagoing adventure with Riff Raff drawing to a close tight at the top, but with Andy rolling around in the hold, being sick on himself:

Katy 0
Sam 1
Ian 2
Andy 18

We stepped into the front room to admire my shelving pick the next game. I got a bit excited when I realised Andy knew the rules to Firenze, and made an executive decision that he teach us. "It's not a long game!" I trilled, like a town planner in front of the media expecting a bus to sail around the corner on time. Oh, Sammy.

So in Firenze we're all trying to build the towers in the town and get points for doing so. That much was straightforward and easy to pick up. The vagaries of strategy and tactics come in the cards, of which you select one at the start of every turn. The problem was my set of Firenze is German, so there was an awful lot of checking the photocopied English rules, making sure we had the right card, and then attempting to remember what the card did. Andy had been playing online and felt comfortable, so much so that he did at one point get labelled "tower c**t".

Germ of an idea

Katy didn't seem to be that perplexed after some first round confusion. I remained slightly bamboozled throughout, only relaxing slightly when I focused on an obvious plan and ignored everything else (probably to my cost). Ian however had a gaming meltdown, going from semi-fluent in German and semi-lucid on the game to suddenly unable to compute anything - and fatalistically allowing Andy and Katy to take his last two turns for him while he sat and shook his head, like a broken man.

a building site in Florence

Andy, as we thought he might, walked away with it. Ian announced he didn't like the game, with a reasonable degree of conviction. I was disappointed but I don't really feel I've played it yet - I never truly got past asking for translations and wondering what the hell was going on.

Andy 61
Katy 41
Sam 38
Ian 27

It had taken what we in gaming circles call "fucking ages" to play, and we desperately needed some light relief. I was canvassing for Push It when Katy announced she had Deep Sea Adventure so we played that instead. We also played Pretense (non-leaderboard) which I won by getting Katy to change seats with me and dismissing her suspicions that I was about to win Pretense by saying how far-fetched the idea was.

That was mid-adventure, which Katy played with abandon, announcing she never wins whilst going to hair-raising depths of the ocean while the rest of us legged it back to the sub. Andy, despite trying to play safer, never got anywhere. I hedged my bets, mixing some safety play with one bit of luck-pushing.  Unlike my similar Incan Gold tactics, it proved a decent manoeuvre:

Sam 30
Ian 23
Katy 20
Andy 0

With 11 o'clock showing on the clock, we drew the curtain on an unusually quiet Tuesday that had a little bit of everything  - old favourites, new brain-burners, dexterity challenges and push-your-luck dice-rollers. Plus Katy dissing her own game at the end, making up the trio of unimpressed gamers.* But despite that, we had fun.

*she didn't diss the game, actually, just her record in it.