The Dirty Pipe Slapstick Squadron

 I arrived at Sam’s at 7.40 and, once I’d recovered from the surprise of seeing Andy B for the first time in a year (?) we all sat down (me, Andy, Sam, Martin, and Joe) for a quick game of Rapido. It’s such a simple game that Martin explained the rules to Andy while we were playing so that when it came to his turn, he would have no excuse for doing badly. Except for bad luck, of course.

At first, the main recipient of bad luck was Martin who was the last one to score any points at all. Then, mid-game, a run of misfortune meant we all started moving backwards. But eventually it was between me and Sam for the win. Sam edged forward onto space 18 and then rolled a double three to take the win.

Sam, then Andrew, Joe, Martin, Andy

During this game, Katy and Laura arrived. We checked if Laura and Andy had actually met, and they had. We still think of Laura as a newbie even though, as she pointed out: she’s been coming to games nights for years – some of us found this hard to believe.

Andy had to leave in about fifty minutes, so we began to think about what to play. Time pressures didn’t make things easier and before long, Andy had to leave in forty-five minutes and we still hadn’t chosen. Finally, we decided on Diamant. Laura hadn’t played so she got a rules explanation and we set off into five temples.

Since there were seven of us, a lot of jewels got left behind on cards such that Martin, Sam and Laura all left early and got three jewels each. That seemed like a good move until an artefact came out. Katy nabbed that one which also looked like a good move until Andy stayed in til the end and got a 17-jewel card all to himself.

The rest of the game followed suit: paying out generously. Sam went out early saying "I've got a feeling" and then the rest of us died in a fire. Laura picked up 17 jewels in artefacts and then Katy got 20 jewels. Martin, however, had to keep pushing his luck as he fell further behind. We had to explain to Laura that it wasn’t usually like this. There was one temple that behaved as expected: giving us three traps and then a single jewel.

We finished in good time so that Andy wasn’t late for his appointment although I suspect he could’ve left halfway through the game and still won.

Andy 44

Katy 40

Laura 28

Andrew 24

Joe 21

Sam 20

Martin 3

Then we split into two groups of three. Sam, Laura and I played Quantum. I asked Laura if she was okay with something a bit fighty and she said it was fine since she was from Yorkshire. Andy stuck around to watch Martin, Joe and Katy play the first few rounds of Mille Fiori to see if he could work out the rules. Katy must’ve felt nervous as they set up because she seemed unable to finish her sentences (“I think I might need a quick…”)

As for Quantum (or Yorkshire In Space, as it will now be called) Sam explained the rules to Laura and then, sheepishly, made her first move for her. Then it was gloves off. Sam and I were both down to one die at one point or another and Laura managed to win the game when she won two battles to put her aggression up to six and place her last cube.

Laura 0 cubes left

Sam 1

Andrew 2

As for Mille Fiori, it ended

Joe 215

Martin 180

Katy 166

Laura left after this (high on victory, no doubt) and the rest of us played High Society. I bought two cards early on but then I lost track of what other people had paid. I put to 20,000 francs for a late x2 card thinking that my 31,000 in my hand would be enough to avoid elimination. It wasn’t and I was out, finishing behind Katy and Martin who both had a x2 each and nothing to multiply with it.

My multiplier had a picture of a woman laughing at her drink

Sam 9

Joe 8

Martin 0

Katy 0

Andrew OUT!

We finished with So Clover. Katy was first to complete while Joe fretted long enough for their to be a toilet break. Alas, Katy’s intuitive approach to clue-giving came undone as we struggled him “humbug”. Thinking it might be a reference to A Christmas Carol we went with “Candy/grave” when it should’ve been “candy/mud”. The other clovers were all cleared, I think, with some great clues. Martin's four clues were Dirty, Pipe, Slapstick and Squadron which at least saved me the bother of thinking of a blog title. I loved Sam’s clue of “candle” for the words “cake/dynamite” and Joe’s “sideboards” for “moustache/travel” because if a moustache could travel, it would become… 

Joe seemed touched that we got his clover correct on our first attempt. As if he’d finally found people who understood him. 

27 out of 30

Crazy times. Thanks all. See you next week.

In space, no-one can hear you eating too many chipsticks

Long-mooted and anticipated, yesterday at the early hour of 3pm Ian, Chris and I sat down to play Xia: Embers of a Drift System (unofficial tagline: it rhymes with higher). Ian was new to it, so we spent about ten minutes going through the basics, before embarking on an odyssean journey through space, time, and shitloads of dice. 

In this sandbox game, everyone starts out as 'unknown' but, like needy D-list celebrities, have a yearning for notoriety, and seek it through a variety of ways: exploring, trading, completing missions, mining for relics, blowing stuff up, upgrading their ship, helping others, buying their fame, or even just being lucky: a roll of 20 on a d20 instantly pushes you up the Fame track. Whenever the points leader hits certain junctures on said track, events or titles are triggered: the former as you might imagine (things happen/parameters change) and the latter offer faming opportunities for whosoever completes the criteria: first to do three blind jumps (exploring without looking) on a single turn, say. 

Everyone's ship has room for outfits (engines/weapons/shields/etc)  and any un-outfitted ship sections are basically room for carrying cargo. The ships are varied, and each come with special powers options: Chris, for instance, could never be stopped by planetary shields (although he could take damage from them, as he was repeatedly reminded by fate) 

I thought I was off to a good start in my Puddle Jumper ship until I blind-jumped into a star at the end of my first turn and died. Chris and Ian began with more caution, and were rewarded with life. But Ian's Numerator ship attempted to mine and failed, taking on a huge amount of damage. Xia does not ease you in lightly...

It also doesn't offer enormous amounts of luck mitigation. Over a long game, it balances out to some degree - or one would expect it to - but Chris' ability to repeatedly roll low numbers for everything he attempted was something to behold. Even when he rolled high, Xia laughed in his face: 

"I get a fame point if I roll a 20?" he clarified.

"Yes" I said, before he rolled a 19. 

That said, Chris was first to upgrade his ship (The Krembler, which Ian referred to as the crème brûlée) and Ian swiftly followed with his new Skimmer. Whilst they pimped up their rides, I was taking a more opportunistic approach, zipping around the outskirts of space, picking up points for exploring and doing the occasional but of mining on the side. I was managing to keep a slender lead on Ian in the Fame stakes while Chris, aided by his relentlessly bad rolling, was still dawdling back at the start points-wise. 

After an hour of pootling around picking up the odd point, players (and the three non-player characters: trader, outlaw and law enforcement dude) start to get a bit busy. Titles are available to claim, Missions are being completed, and people feel confident enough to kill each other (and claim both points and bounty for doing so). 

I nurdled my way to the 15point winning condition, but we were all enjoying ourselves so much we agreed to play on to 20, which was when things got really political. Ian killed Chris. Chris respawned and killed Ian. He upgraded his engine and killed the trader by ramming into it at high speed. I ran away, and by exploring and being the first player to do X (eg use the space-jumping gates) pushed myself within reach of the win. But Ian and now Chris were both hot on my tail, and when I failed to successfully mine for victory Ian nearly grabbed the win by looking for Signs of Life on a dead world, but he didn't find it. I saw there was a way to triumph, but I needed to grab the final two exploration tokens on the board, and thanks to some fortuitous rolling, I grabbed the 20th point and victory with it!

But stop-press because as I write there's a stewards' enquiry: I realised last night (at 2am obviously) that I might have (literally) cheated death on my penultimate turn when a comet moved handily out of my way. I'll have to clarify that on the rules, but either way a rematch feels most welcome. 

Plus, it was extremely early in GNN time, so we had the evening stretching before us to dispose of, and dispose of it we did. Whilst I read a story to Joe, Ian thrashed Chris at Pickonimo:

Ian 15 / Chris 4

Not as shaming as my historic 18-0 drubbing at the hands of my brother-in-law, but clearly Chris' rolling hadn't improved on land. Then we played a new Ticket to Ride-style game of spies: Spy Connection. 

In Spy Connection you're completing missions by getting your spy (big meeple) to visit them. But your spy can only visit them if they're on your network, which is established by your agents (little discs). It's easy rules-wise: you either take another mission from the available four, or expand your network: when you expand you can move your spy before and after doing so. The catch is your only have fifteen agents, and they have to do a lot of work: as well as making your connections (which can cost two agents per connection if another player is already there) they also keep tabs on where your spy has been on your mission cards, and might also be needed to pay for taking a mission card in the first place.

Fortunately, you can drag as many agents back off the board as you need at any time on your turn. Unfortunately, doing so breaks up your network, arrgh! It's quite a nice combo of simple-rules and head-scratchy decisions that doesn't take too long. Ian completed the game-ending 7 mission target before anyone else, and Chris and I couldn't catch him with our last turns:

Ian 32 / Chris 29 / Sam 24

It was about 9pm now so we felt, with Andrew due at the unseasonable hour of 10.20, we had time to squeeze in a game of Quantum. We put together a tight, claustrophic board and were very quickly in each other's ways and faces.

 Ian was roaming around beating people up and pushing up his dominance. I established and early lead, and became Furious enough to hold off several Hickman-driven attacks. Chris seemed to be in neutral, but suddenly got a fourth ship out and a power than gave him four actions if any two of his ships had the same number. He powered past Ian and I for a win so fast we were packing away about 27 minutes after we'd started!

Chris - wins / Sam 2 cubes left / Ian 3 cubes left

With time on the clock we broke out (to my mind, the underrated) Menara, a co-operative tower-builder where you place columns to add levels and try not to make the whole thing collapse. Unfortunately, the levels were coming out at us in fairly unhelpful order, with a series of little ones followed by a series of big ones: it was like trying to construct an inverted pyramid, and we should have taken the option of expanding our base (if I'd thought to suggest it). Things were looking sort of navigable, if not easily-so, when I caused the entire thing to collapse right after Chris said "That should be fine". 

Everyone loses. 

We had a fairly average (15 points) crack at Cross Clues, and then Andrew arrived! Straight from work, I offered him a cup of tea but he said he would prefer whisky. Ian and I joined him as we played Cross Clues again, this time with an assemblage of words that seemed more fluid and the mind of Endersby to pitch in, strutting our stuff with an almost-entirely non-cheating 25!!!

Although Andrew had only just arrived, he was already making noises about going home, but we squeezed two more games out of him and ourselves. I managed a win at a fairly low-scoring NMBR9:

Sam 66 / Andrew 47 / Chris and Ian 42 each

Before we wrapped up an epic session with High Society. Chris came back from the dead here having spent the vast majority of the game with the "Minus one card" card in front of him. I was points-leader but spend too much. Ian compiled a decent score but then took the minus 5. Andrew sailed to victory through a stormy sea:

Andrew 18 / Chris 8 / Ian 5 / Sam BUST

And eight hours after we started, we were done!

Active Pile On

 Just like that, we're back in the room. After what seems like at least a decade, the Olde London mob of GNN assembled at Chris' house last night - along with the host there was Paul and myself (Sam) with Andrew coming later. There was a slight hesitancy as one might expect, particularly as I had brought the boys along. Suddenly we were all in a situation we weren't used to - a crowd. 

Luckily Chris' house is enormous and the children scampered off to do God knows what after we'd all hugged and kissed and eaten pizza. 

Chris and Paul had already been gaming with Ashton, trying out Paul's charity shop find of the day before, Space Lines. I think they played twice and Ashton won both times. But now with three of us, we had the luxury of starting an epic six-hour gaming session, and we did so with Project L. 

The rules have already been explained but suffice to say that Chris won it convincingly, and then Paul won our second game convincingly (I was third both times), and if there's a gigantic void of theme and the merest smidgen of Hey I Wanted That interaction, it's also enormously satisfying just putting all these bits into place. Especially when you do one of those delicious Master Actions and pull off a zinger of a move. Or you can just build a tetronomic totem like Chris did. 

We then played 7 Wonders. Without the computer to move cards around for you and tell you what everything does, it wasn't quite the super-breezy ten minutes the online implementation is, but it was still pretty speedy and nice to be in the room. Paul suggested we could slide the tablecloth back and forth if we wanted to relive the BGA version, but we ended up focusing our energies on the game in the end, and I picked up a rare win.

Then Andrew arrived! We were now pushing the legal limits and feeling marginally bandity about it all, and felt like something silly, plumping for Cubitos, with it's seemingly simple dice-rolling system that still tied us all in knots - me especially, as I'd explained the rules wrong previously, had a correction from Joe, reread the rules, but still got confused, and ended with the worse case of rules sweats I've had in a while as I fretted over draw piles, active piles, discard piles and roll piles. I mean, that's at least one pile too many isn't it? 

Basically you roll shitloads of dice though: it's a deckbuilder in cube form. We all played cautiously except Paul, who kept going bust and was miles behind the rest of us, only to suddenly spring forward like a geometric hunting dog. As before, the sedate opening changes and before you know it everyone suddenly speeds up - my previous experiences and the fact I got a Rollosaurus meant I was first over the line.

Sam wins.

Others: DNF

Chris was keen to try out The Secret Adventures of the Old Hellfire Club and I was certainly amenable, although it meant a brief rules-read, we were off!

This is a Very Silly game. Mechanically-speaking, all you're doing is playing cards of suits on your turn and hoping nobody plays a lower card of the same suit - pushing your luck or banking them after a minimum of two. You get coins for high cards and coins for having the most of a suit at the end. But heaped on top of this basic-math, risk-reward thing is the story you're telling. Players are drunken patrons of the titular Victorian-age club and are retelling the great adventure they undertook to (for example, as we did) save the world from a scourge of invading aliens. The cards represent story elements, such as Person, Place, Weapon, Insult, Motive, and as you play the cards you integrate them into your retelling. But the higher cards are more fabulously boastful, exaggerating things, and the lower ones rather more run of the mill. At one point I recalled how we set our man o' war with all hands against the invaders, only for Paul to play a lower card, reminding me it was actually an Amazonian blowpipe. In that instance, my turn's over and Paul banks his card instead, and the turn moves on. 

I can imagine sitting next to us as we played this could be very irritating if you were, say, reading a book, or engaged in everyday conversation. Particularly with Chris and I releasing long-dormant acting aspirations, but I found it enormous fun and probably the highlight of the evening. It's perhaps the most group-dependent game I've ever encountered but there were some golden moments in it, like when we encountered Karl Marx outside Whitechapel and charged the aliens with art fraud. Discovering Andrew  was a Fart-catcher (5 Insult) will always stay with me. 

Although as he pointed out, isn't Disillusionment with Life (8 Peril) more of an everyday occurrence than an 8?

Andrew had time for one more game and it was High Society. This is still my (second) favourite Knizia, a miniature work of genius. Everyone was in with a shout right up until the end - except for Chris, who wasn't. My skin was saved though when Andrew took the last card...

Sam 15

Paul/Andrew 13 each

Chris - BUST

We tried to tempt Andrew to stay by setting up Raj, but he was resolute and returned to whence he had came (the A350) while Chris took us to the fackin' cleaners in Raj world: with no Martin to bid high against me on the mid-range stuff, I kept overpaying for everything and my last-round recovery wasn't enough to catch him. 

Chris 64

Sam 54

Paul 20

The witching hour was approaching so we blasted through Mountain Goats: a dice-chucking, point-collecting, goat-removing evening-ender!

....but it didn't actually end the evening because Paul was eager to play Project L again, so we did! This time I fared a bit better. You gotta take those Master Actions!

Marvellous stuff, well worth the trip while the place is open!

Ten of the Best

On Saturday night, Chris, Jacquie and I convened over their kitchen table for what would turn out to be something of an epic night of short games. After tea - which also involved a discussion of tactical voting with the kids - the three (relative) grown-ups kicked things off with Azul. Chris mentioned that Jacquie was evil in Azul, and I noticed with some alarm that I was sitting to her left. As it happened though, Chris got the worst of the broken tiles in a fairly close-run battle:

Jacquie 82
Sam 80
Chris 69

Before we moved on to slightly sillier fare with Letter Jam. For the uninitiated, Letter Jam is a co-op where everyone is trying to help everyone else figure out what letters they have - like Just One, your own cards face away from you - in order to figure out their word. It's surprisingly easy to go wrong, even for seasoned Scrabble players like Jacquie. We tried again - Ashton joining us for the second attempt - but once again failed. A clever game though.

one I took earlier

By now it was approaching nine so we kicked the kids into bed and re-introduced Jacquie to the murky world of High Society. Despite our warnings, she spent too much money in our first game and ended destitute. I won with something like ten points, whereas Chris had both the x2 cards but with no points at all, it was double nothing. In the second I grabbed to early high cards but undid my good work - I bid to force up the prices of two subsequent cards and both times Chris and Jacquie deviously passed on me, leaving me points-rich but cash-poor. Chris won this one.

Jacquie then retired to bed and Chris introduced me to Jaipur, the game of trading for two in India. It has been around for years but I'd never actually played it, and I can see why it has a good reputation: the basic idea is collecting cards and cashing them in for chips (chips being points) but the way it works allows for safety-first or luck-pushing and spoiling tactics galore as you see what your opponent is picking up and play accordingly.

We liked it so much we played it twice, although in between them we also had a double-crack at Blitzkrieg!

This is another two-player, but rather than trading you are trying to kill each other in a "20 minute" reenactment of WWII. One player is the Axis, the other the Allies, and you are drawing chits from a bag and deciding where to lay them in five theatres of war across the globe, each subdivided into two or three campaigns. Adding a chit swings momentum your way on a battle track, and when a campaign is finished whoever is in the lead on the battle track claims the points. Most places on a campaign also give rewards as well, so although the mechanics are very simple, the decisions are extremely meaningful. I really like this and Chris seemed enamoured of it too, despite me claiming a win just as he was one turn from a 7point swing in his favour...

After our second play of Jaipur we realised it was rather late however, so we finished up with NMBR9, deciding halfway through to go through the deck twice and build some epic, high-scoring constructions. As always moments of delight and confidence were outweighed by our castigating fate, God, kismet and anything else you could mention as the pieces refused to align meaningfully. Kind of like life, one might say.

Ten games in one night - and very excellent games too. Thanks again!

Harbour Master Blaster

The recent tradition of gamers just passing through continued this week at GNN. Today's arrival was Garry, a writing chum of Sam. Along with these two were Joe (the host), Dan, Martin, Katy, Adam (the new one) and me.

Early on: crisps and... conversation?!

We begun in glorious co-op mode with Just One. Early on, Joe chose his usual path of obscure cultural references and when he didn't, he kept syncing with Adam. Although, truth be told, there were very few duplicates. Katy had the worst luck when she had to guess "sand" with only three clues. But she did it! Dan’s use of “band” as a clue for “tool” worked wonders when Katy used “Tool” as a clue for “Music” when he was guessing. And we went on to get eleven out of twelve, finally impressing the usually snide score track, which read "Awesome! That's a score worth celebrating!"

And celebrate we did. With more games. Joe and Katy were introduced to Sol by Sam and Martin. Dan and Garry were introduced to Potato Man by Adam and I.

Potato Man was fun, with a couple of evil potatoes being vanquished by Super Potato Man. I, however, felt awkward about referring to the green suit as Sexy Potato Lady in front of three people I didn't know so well. Meanwhile, I had a good couple of early rounds while Adam was stung by Explainer's Curse.

Andrew 25
Dan 19
Garry 17
Adam 10

After that, with the sun on the other side of the table still looking pretty stable, I suggested Manila. This fun game of betting and luck-based piracy was new to our newcomers, so I talked them through the rules. Was I hit by Explainer's Curse? Or was it more of a case of Adam finding a winning formula and milking it for all it was worth. His (almost) monopolizing of Harbour Master, who then invested in blue cloth which sent the share price rocketing up and brought the game to an end sooner than I was expecting.

My attempts at piracy to try and thwart Adam's relentless victory came to nothing, but luckily Brown stuff (coffee?) also hit the highest level which bailed me out.

Adam 168
Andrew 105
Dan 70
Garry 64

It lacked the usual swings of outrageous fortune that Manila is so good at, but I think the two newbies liked it.

But what of Sol? They played the 'vestigial structure' variant, allowing them to build in the outer three rings of the board. It's the same variant that I'd played before but I had no idea it had such a grand name.

Katy began slowly, and was still on two points while the other three had moved into the low teens. Martin hardly built anything but he did build two gates in a row, at the end of which Joe built one of those energy transmission thingies in a kindly gesture of "hey, come on in!'

Katy clawed her way out of last while Sam managed to resist the urge to hurl his ships into the sun and it seemed to work for him.

Sam 26
Martin 19
Katy 17
Joe 13

We were still out of sync at this point. I brought out High Society, hoping to time its ending with the finale of Sol but I misjudged it. The game, new to Garry, was mean as ever. Garry picked up an early "1/2" card, meaning he was rich enough to pick up the 10 card. But he was in the strange situation of always bidding against players who thought that the cards were worth twice as much as he did. As such, despite picking up a "x2" card later on, he lost due to lack of funds. It ended with both he and Dan on one card left in their hands, but Dan's was the $25 million card.

Dan 12
Andrew 6
Adam 6
Garry Out! (But scored 11)

Sol had ended and they banged out a quick Kribbeln. And what a game it was. I only caught the end, but even in those few rolls, drama ensued.

Sam was poised to win, needing to beat 29 with his six dice, rolled 6, 6, 6, 4, 4, 2. So close. He picked up the 2 and rolled it... a one! How cruel.

Then Joe, also needing to beat 29, rolled 6, 6, 5, 5, 4, 3. But instead of just picking up the three to roll again, he picked up the three and four. Audacious! And he rolled a 6-6! Amazing. It put him in joint first with Martin and won the game on the tie-breaker.

Joe 22 (plus highest Krib)
Martin 22
Sam 20
Katy 15

Then it was time for Adam to leave. I suggested he could join in by phone if we played Incan Gold, and the mention of this triggered a sudden desire in Joe, wiping aside the previous suggestions of 6nimmt or Tomate Karate. We played Diamant, the new version of Incan Gold, where flimsy paper tents are replaced by sturdy cardboard chests and Zombie Ladies are sadly gone, with rolling logs of spikes in their place.

Katy stayed in longest in round one and got a 17 card all to herself! After that, it was all a matter of trying to catch her. Martin decided the only way to win was to stay in longer than she did. Sam went in the opposite direction, getting out early as soon is it seemed profitable (picking up a rare artifact in round three). And it could’ve worked if the more adventurous among us had had a little more bad luck. Instead, it was a high scoring game.

Katy 54
Andrew 33
Martin 31
Sam 31
Joe 29
Garry 27
Dan 21

And despite coming last, Dan made a note of the game on his phone, declaring that he was going to buy it. A convert!

And then Katy and I departed, with the clock just passing eleven. The rest carried on with Kakerlaken Poker. Thanks to some notes from Sam, I can tell you that “Dan began haemorrhaging stink bugs” was as a remarkably evocative description of the game as you could wish for. Garry, professing uselessness at the real poker, began badly. And just as Martin hit two of something, he passed a card to Dan, saying it was a stink bug. Dan didn’t believe him, but Martin spoke the truth.

Dan loses
Everyone else wins.

Thanks to Sam for the late night results, and thanks to all for joining in for a fun evening. I wonder who our travelling visitor will be next week.

Gravel in the Bag

At one point this week's GNN threatened to people no less than seven, but Andrew was lost to fatigue and Ian's mysterious friend Paul remained, for now at least, mysterious. Instead we began as a four: our host Joe, Martin, Matt, and myself (Sam). As we pondered over whether a fifth person would arrive shortly, we played Gold Fever: possibly one of the silliest games to somersault through the GNN door: each player has a bag of five gold pieces, and the first to draw four of them wins the game. But - you also have twelve gravel pieces (four each of white, grey and black) and if you draw two of the same type of gravel, you're bust, and must chuck everything back in your bag.

What adds a soupçon of strategy is the option to stick: instead of continuing to draw, keep any gold you drew and chuck your gravel in someone else's bag instead. It's not the sort of game where you can pause and take photos, as if anyone draws a ruby, it becomes a simultaneous race to pull out a gold piece. The result is a very swingy, silly, Take-That affair, which I now can't remember who won. Not me though. And not Martin either, who declared the game "stupid" - but in a fairly complimentary way.

With Mysterious Paul's absence now established, we realised we had an hour as a four to play with. And so we set up Oregon.

The board is a grid of sorts where you can play a combo of landscape cards to add a cowperson (or a 'guy' as we referred to them) to a square, or you can play a single landscape card and a building card to add a building. Both score when placed: guys score any building they're adjacent to, buildings trigger adjacent guys. I think. I found the very simple mechanic weirdly hard to get my head around, despite playing the game before. Matt surged off into an early lead as Joe struggled to get going. Martin gathered his guys together in a huddle (points!) and made sure he was adjacent to a lot of mines. I kept pace for a bit but started to lag when my hand was full of bird cards.

It got crowded.

It also got extremely thinky, and we were all mid-pause when Ian arrived and had to be patient as we lurched towards the end. It's not the sort of game you'll get a kick out of watching as it's mostly like wandering around a library and hearing someone murmur 'shit' under their breath every now and then.

Joe's late-game performance was such that he actually surged into the lead at one point, but come the final count-up, Martin's collection of coal and gold saw him crowned most convincing cowperson:

Martin 93
Sam 80
Joe 75
Matt 65

Matt realised his lack of coal and gold counted against him. Martin confessed to cockblocking Joe. The game met with lots of approving murmurs, if not the outright excitement of our next conquest: Decrypto. Martin and I teamed up again to see if our losing run would continue, whilst Ian joined with Joe and Matt. We - Martin and I - felt pretty confident early on, when we'd deciphered two of the other team's words pretty quickly. But our confidence evaporated when they successfully intercepted us. We intercepted right back, but then - disaster! - Martin's clue of 'end' for Bell was identified by Joe, and we'd need to intercept again successfully to even have the chance of a draw. It came down to the single word of 'Horn' which could go with word 4, which we'd already identified as Boat. But was it a bluff, designed to make us guess 4? We'd wagered it was a bluff, and put our money on the enigmatic second word - and we were right!

So it came down to the decider - which team could identify the most words? Thanks to Matt's horn  Martin realised that the second word (magical/horn) could be unicorn, and he was right. In the narrowest of wins, we identified all four words to their three:

Martin and Sam - win! (finally)
Ian, Joe, Matt - don't win

The hour was still early, and we had no less than four more games in us. First up was High Society, which I said might be my favourite Knizia. This got the room rustling like a Jose Mourinho press conference, what with the likes of Ra and Tigris and Euphrates out there. But I love the simplicity and silliness of High Society, where every card flip can be a mini-drama.

And this proved to be a particularly dramatic night: I began the spending with a x2 card the first to flip, but before too long there were three x2 cards on the table and Joe in particular seemed to have spent a lot of money. Martin was convinced he (- Joe) was nailed on for last place (so was I), but there was to be a twist in the tail. Joe made us all spend cash to pick up the -5 card, and Ian spent big on the 2. Then the fourth red flipped over and the game instantly ended. Contrary to expectations, Matt had somehow spent the most and was bust. Martin and I had 2x zero, and the convincing winner was Joe!

Joe 12
Ian 6
Martin/Sam 0
Matt - BUST!

Martin still reckoned Joe should have lost, despite the evidence. Another GNN story to tell our grandchildren.

Next up was Perudo, as canvassed for by Ian and seconded by me. It was the usual Perudo story of deception and brutality, as we hedge-betted and lied our way around the table. Matt was first out after he went into a semi-death-spiral and lost dice on subsequent turns. Ian followed him shortly afterwards. With three of us and Martin palafico, he bet on three fives. I had none, and he was out. Joe and I faced off with Joe palafico and me with three. He paused for so long I started convincing myself he was reading my mind, but fortunately whatever he discovered there was as unreliable as I've ever found it:

1 Sam
2 Joe
3 Martin
4 Ian
5 Matt

We then busted out another game of Gold Fever, notable mostly for Joe passing gravel to Martin when both Matt and Ian had gold in front of them. "I've got no fucking gold!" he protested.
"But you're Martin" said Joe.
Martin promised bitter revenge but we all got sidetracked by trying to shaft Ian first, whose bag was filling up with everyone else's gravel. I think Joe won, but oddly I can't remember. Games of Gold Fever are a bit like an Intercity 125 zipping through a station of steam trains.

Last game of the night, then, with Joe setting up Botswana AKA Wildlife Safari AKA They Must Have Had Loads of Plastic Animals They Didn't Know What To Do With (Martin).

This is another neat Knizia where you play an animal card, and take an animal (a plastic animal). You can take any animal you like, but you must take one. The cards have values between 0 and 6, though, and when the sixth card is played on any row, the game ends and the last card played in each row defines the value of your animals.

My lions were looking pretty valuable too, until Martin played the zero on them. But fortune smiled on Joe as the game ended before he had to play his last card on the zebras: the zero. Joe had a lot of zebras:

Joe 23
Martin 16
Ian 11
Sam 10
Matt 5

And that was that! A lot of foul-mouthed fun was had in an evening of short games. "They're all short games!" Martin said when I mentioned as much. We'd forgotten about Oregon.

Ribbon Factory

After struggling through a hot humid day, I almost backed out of this week's games night due to fatigue, but couldn't face another missed opportunity to match wits with some of the greatest gamers the world has ever seen.

We began as a five (Joe, Martin, Ian, Matt and me), and had every reason to assume we'd stay that way, with an outside chance of a late arrival in the shape of Andy M.

So we began with High Society, a simple card game that perfectly captures the anguish of the massively wealthy. Joe began by bidding high, picking up a 5 for $12m. Terrible business, we thought, but then Matt got a 3 for $8m, so maybe not. Ian got the 10 for top dollar, but then he used that advantage to soak up the effects of two bad cards while we all spent a fortune to avoid them. It was nearly the end of the game and Martin had spent a great deal of money with only a lonely x2 card to show for it. His tactic seemed to have worked when a six came out and he picked it up. It put him in first, points wise, but it proved to be the last straw for his bank balance.

Matt 11
Joe 10
Andrew 9
Ian 7
Martin out (but had 12)

As an interesting aside, Matt spent less than any of us. A moral in there somewhere, I think.

Martin made the sage observation that you have no chance of winning High Society unless you were in the top two. We looked a bit blank and kind of agreed with him. He elaborated that he meant you only felt you had a chance of winning. This is fair enough. He continued to sigh about High Society for the rest of the evening.

Then we played Powerships, the racing game in space. Martin set it out, flipped bits of the board over, rotated them and eventually got a play area without any gaps in the middle.

It was my first game, but it's not exactly drowning in rules so I felt quietly comfortable as I rounded the first buoy in hot pursuit of Ian and Martin.

Then Matt stormed back into contention with a move that saw him use four dice to move nine spaces for two turns in a row. Similarly, Joe went from distant last to a fairly local last with a similar move.

It was all looking very close around buoy three, but then Ian got trapped behind some space dust allowing Martin and Matt to steal past him in the home straight.

1. Martin
2. Matt
3. Ian
4. Andrew
5 (DNF) Joe

Martin then struggled to put the game away again, with it requiring a few aborted attempts at fitting the modular board back into its box.

Now we began the game we'd been promising ourselves all evening: Texas Showdown. Perhaps at its imperious best with five, we cracked through two rounds. Ian had a clear first round and a cagey second one to take first place.

I, meanwhile, experienced a weird aural illusion during the game. I was pouring my drink into my shot glass at the same time that Joe was pouring his drink into a wine glass. The sound of liquid in a barely empty glass somehow convinced me to keep pouring and it wasn't until my glass was overflowing that I came to my senses and I stopped. How odd.

Ian (0) 2
Andrew (3) 3
Martin (3) 5
Joe (3) 7
Matt (3) 7

During this game, Andy M arrived, keen to dispel the lingering aftereffects of a day of meetings with the medicinal qualities of board games. He was introduced to the world of Texas Showdown for a one round special since Sam had texted and was expected to be here in ten minutes. The second game of Texas Showdown ended

Andrew 0
Ian 1
Martin 1
Matt 2
Andy M 2
Joe 4

Sam arrived and, in stark contrast to our initial expectations, we were now a group of seven. We split into two groups. Joe, Matt, Ian and Andy went outside for a dusky game of Movable Type. Martin, Sam and I stayed inside to give Pikoko another try.

Pikoko was much the same as before. I found myself bamboozled by a couple of calls by my opponents and, in round two, I was confused enough to play the No Confidence card, much to Martin's disgust.

I enjoyed it, but I fear that Martin may already be too much of an expert by now.

Martin (8) (17) 26
Andrew (2) (7) 15
Sam (3) (11) 14

As Movable Type was still continuing under the light from someone's mobile phone, the three of us tried The Mind. "Speed Mind" we called it, given the strict time limit we assumed we were under.

And, indeed, we did play quicker than usual. We made some audacious decisions about when to play what and, mostly, it worked fine. We got past 45-50-100 in round one and 38-41-42 during round three. We cleverly shurikened 50-51-73 in round four but then lost three lives in round six. We cleared round seven, despite it ending 95-96 and shurikened 13-14-15 in round eight. Surely luck was on our side! Nope. We followed that up by losing our final lives before the round was over.

Amazing fun, though.

Movable Type had by now ended and well done to the four of them for ending with final words which all had slightly inappropriate connotations.

Joe 17 (final word: Sleazy)
Matt 16 (Petting)
Ian 14 (Knobs)
Andy 10 (Pillars)

Good work, chaps.

Now, as a group of seven, we chose Word Slam as our last game. It was me, Ian, Matt and Sam against Andy, Martin and Joe. The game was a ding dong battle, with the Joe team streaking into an early lead.

The clues were as clever as they were absurd. Joe got "board game" once he saw the word "play". "Grey Historic Big Old Long" was the Great Wall Of China. I got "Marilyn Monroe" from the clues of "Dead" and "woman". Obvious, really. And "prison" was drawn from the clues of "do" and "time".

Then things started getting really obtuse. The clue "object material woman two" somehow lead someone to "Bra". "Soft material left right up down on many" was Sam's successful attempt at defining the word "wallpaper". Meanwhile, was Joe's guess of "ribbon factory" a genuine attempt or a way to throw his opponents off the track?

Sam's team came back into it. By guessing "Batman" (man night movie) we drew level. The decider was drawn from the black deck, the hardest deck of all. But as it happened, I got lucky. The clue was "poodle" and when Joe guessed "Dog" I pointed at my previous clue of "white animal" and we got it. An amazing comeback. A glorious win. An ideal finale.

A lovely evening. I'm very glad I made the effort to spend time with you all. Same time next week!