Lexicon of Laughs

 Joe was this week’s host and I arrived at his place at 7.30 with Katy following shortly afterwards and Joe and Sam were already there, idly kicking around a game of League of the Lexicon. Adam T arrived soon after too. The game is like Trivial Pursuit but without the board and all the questions are about words. Maybe there are rules involved, but we just rolled a dice and tried to answer a question like “what’s the literal meaning of umbrella.”

Then Martin and Adam H came in, with Steve somewhere outside looking for a parking space. He’d get here after another ten minutes.

We kicked off the evening with Phantom Ink, the supernatural game of communing with the dead (in this case, Katy and Sam) and trying to deduce a word using obscure questions and unfinished answers. We split into teams. Katy was with Martin, Adam T and Steve while Sam was with Adam H, Joe and me.

We  asked questions like “What would happen if you ate it” and Sam wrote down “D” and said the letter outloud, as per the rules, but I think he said “D” with such finality that we were able to guess he was going to write “die” (which is was). The word in question was Mountain (which would certainly kill you if you ate it) which Adam H, Joe and I got on our second guess. The other team were leaning towards “Tent” - something to do with there being a tent in the film Brokeback Mountain.

Then we split into two groups of eight.

Adam T, Martin, Katy and Sam played Maskmen. As they went into the penultimate round, there was a possibility of everyone ending on 2 points, but instead the tie was between three people and Katy was left grasping at straws by asking if tied scores maybe cancelled each other out.

Adam T 3 (wins with most +2 tokens)

Martin 3

Sam 3

Katy -1

Then they played Accuse! which Adam T won and then Misfits with it’s by now gravity defying constructions astonishing everyone. And Adam T won that game as well.

During these three games, Adam H, Joe, Steve and myself had been playing Pass Pass, a trick-taking game that encourages loose informal alliances because players who came first and second in a hand get to pick up cards. Cards are points (and so are diamonds on those cards) but most importantly, if a player picks up at least one of each colour then that is a Pass Pass, and three Pass Passes means you instantly win.

Steve was distracted by phone calls from his son and also kept playing his cards on top of previously played cards, as if he were playing snap, and we had to keep separating them.

Joe was closest to getting his third pass pass but just fell short.

Andrew 34

Steve 32

Joe 28

Adam H 19

At the end of Pass Pass we watched the end of Misfits ...

... and then we all reorganised into new groups. Sam, Adam T, Joe and Steve played Robot Quest Arena while Adam H, Martin and I chose Havalandia. But first we squeezed in a game of Trio with Katy before she went off home for an early night. 

We played as teams and Adam H and I won. I forgot to take a photo until it was over…

Once Katy had gone, we three played Havalandia. I had the rare pleasure of blocking Martin so he couldn’t make his super high scoring launch, but honestly, it turned out that Martin was the least of my troubles. Mid-game, Martin said we should never let him have a corner to himself, and so it turned out to be.

Adam H 105

Andrew 83
Martin 81

RQA sounded like fun. Joe bought some advanced AI but then later he simply attacked Sam with a hammer. Adam T must have had a lot of power-ups because he apologised that his turns took twice as long as everyone else.

Sam 24

Adam T 20

Joe 19

Steve 18

Then Adams T and H and Steve left. Because I had the day off work tomorrow, I was able to stay until the end.

We tried Stinker. Always fun and offensive, but somehow not as much fun with fewer players.

Sam 3

Martin 2

Joe 1

Andrew 1

Finally we played So Clover twice. We scored 22/24, just falling short of perfection due to Joe’s clever clue being too clever. He wrote Gazpacho, which we struggled with. It was not helped with “diet” and “tomato” both being on cards but we should have been looking for “revenge”. Because, as Joe later explained, they are both best served cold.

In the second game we got a perfect score. Again, Joe’s was last to be served and he had another classic clue: he wrote “asswipe” for tail/soap. Poetic.

See you all next week.

Gettin’ chilli with it

Joe's at 7.30 was this week's destination for the first weekly meeting since the big games weekend. Sam was already there when I arrived and Martin wasn't too far behind.

At least I think so. I'm writing this on Friday, a full three days late so, just like AI rendered hands, things might be a little out of place.

First we played Rome In A Day, a game in which you have to build areas of tiles with matching buildings to score points and you get these tiles and buildings from your neighbour who has taken their allocation of tiles for that round and split them in two.

Sam played while still in his fluorescent orange jacket and (unconnected, I'm sure) we kept forgetting which neighbour we were supposed to be taking from.

At the end of the game, Joe was counting up the scores and added up one column to the total 47 and said “urgh” in disgust, thinking it was his. But it was Adam's. 

Sam 57

Joe 49

Adam 47

Andrew 46

Martin 37

Sam's winning strategy was to simply take which ever set had the most tiles. Can it really be that simple? It was entertaining enough 

Katy was expected later so we began another quick game: Too Many Cooks. It's a game about German cuisine in that you have to collect cards to make soup (Pea, Mushroom or Onion) while avoiding chillies because they ruin everything, apparently. Unless you're making chilli soup, of course. You collect these ingredients by playing cards to the table until the value adds up to 10 or more, then that player collects all of them.

We played all of round one before we remembered the rule about one of the zeroes actually being worth 10. And I had trouble recognising some of the mushroom cards since they had illustrations of butter on them. But I was fine in the end, taking a win without really knowing how.

Andrew 23

Joe 22

Adam 19

Martin 11

Sam 10

Katy arrived and we split into two groups of three. Joe Adam and Katy played Robot Tricks and Martin and Sam introduced me to Havalandi.

In this game a hot air balloon glides around the edge of the triangular playing area and the active player can put down a landing site (cardboard counter) somewhere along the balloon's line of view. You score points for groups of three or more (on the same terrain) and also for flipping tiles as long as they are contiguous and cross the central path.

It was nice. Gently puzzly and a bit screwish. I forgot about the end of game scoring and, despite being quite competitive in the first half of the game, Martin and Sam (almost literally) drifted off, far above me.

Martin 104

Sam 94

Andrew 82

With that, both Sam and I got ready for an early night. I watched a little bit of Robot Tricks to see if the game was going to end. It didn't, but I did see Katy pick up an ace which, apparently, was bad.

Hopefully we'll get a result in the comments although it's pretty likely that everyone has forgotten.

Thanks all! It was special.