Dark Web Gogglebox

 7.30 Tuesday evening. Joe let me in and I walked down the stairs into his kitchen, noting Tom Waits on the speaker, finding a group of gamers sitting around Joe’s table: Ian, Katy, Sam, and Martin. Adam H had been expected at 8.15 but then he email to say he’d be here at 7.50. This left us with a quandary. Find something short to play or talk to each other for twenty minutes.

Happily, reason prevailed and we got out For Sale. Katy began with her usual insistence that she’s terrible at this game which, for once, is justified. Sam, too, never seemed to get going while Ian picked up a last round $15k cheque with only a 15-value house. Not enough to win, but very satisfying. For him.

Martin 54

Ian 53

Andrew 49

Joe 46

Sam 36

Katy 33

Adam arrived mid game and so we split into two. At one end Adam, Katy, Joe and Martin played one of the many games called Orbit. It’s so new that it’s listed as a 2025 game on Board Game Geek! Martin explained the rules and they set off in this dickish game of intergalactic high-jinks. How they laughed when Martin complained “I’m absolutely in the middle of fucking nowhere,” which is, I suppose, a valid criticism of most of outer space.

Ian, Sam and I played Around the World in 80 Days. There was a lot of detective work this time, as we kept trying to upset our opponents with not-so-chance encounters with the law. Ian tried to use a balloon - a transport that uses a dice instead of the value on a card to tell you how long a journey took. He rolled a 5 and stating that statistically he would probably get a lower number, he paid a coin and rolled again. A six. Of course.

Thanks to a lucky last-minute purchase of a card from the deck, I get back to London in double-quick time, arriving at the door of the Reform Club after only 69 days. Sam cursed his luck as, once again, he finished stuck in New York.

Andrew 69 days

Ian 78 days

Sam dnf

While we waited for Orbit to finish, we played Push. A simple card game, build up three columns of cards but no duplicates of numbers or colours. Then you take one column and your opponents take the others. Ian’s lack of luck with a die in Around the World was compensated as he dodged having to discard cards when rolling the dice in this game.

Ian 81

Sam 77

Andrew 72

Meanwhile Orbit ended with Martin’s green planet being moved out of his reach and then Katy swooping down towards her own home planet, clearly relieved that people hadn’t noticed that she was about to win. One of the first people to win at Orbit, she told herself.

Katy wins!

The others don’t.

They packed away, with Katy remarking that Martin’s player mat was covered in crisps, and as a septet again, it was time to change things up again.

At one end of the table Martin, Sam and Ian played Saer while Joe, myself, Katy and Adam played Sunrise Lane. Two rules explanation hummed around the room at the same time, and even seemed to synchronized/interfered with each other.

Martin: You have 3 cards.

Joe: You have 3 cards.

Martin: Face down.

Joe: Not face down, in your hand.

Martin: In your array.

I know nothing about Saer except that I thought I’d played it when I saw it. It didn’t have the most original visual aspect.

Martin 12

Sam 9

Ian 4

As for Sunrise Lane, I quickly got a long chain of buildings and then got tall buildings in both blue sectors. But I ignored the red quarters, which could’ve been my downfall.

Joe 87

Andrew 83

Katy 74

Adam 69

Again, we were all together. So Clover doesn’t play seven, so we dug out Hitster, that game of putting random songs in chronological order thanks to an app that links to Spotify.

Or, rather doesn’t link to Spotify. After only a few songs (one of which, You Can’t Hurry Love, was wrongly identified as The Jam by Katy and, in fairness, A Town Called Malice does have a very similar opening) the app gave up. Instead we changed to just singing the song for the other people to guess. 

Of course, this meant that most songs after 2005 were discarded because we didn’t know them. But otherwise it worked fine. For certain obscure definitions of “fine”. Imagine the scene where half of us are singing a hit from the late 20th century while the other half are arguing about it. “Like a Dark Web Gogglebox,” observed Sam, giving this blog post it’s title.

I had to leave just as our row of guesses stretched across the whole table, with only a few mistakes here and there. The rest of the blog is courtesy of a few messages from Sam.

After I left, they played So Clover twice: 24/30 and 26/30 (so someone else must have left too).

And Sam also told me that at the very start of the evening he and Joe played Landmarks, a word association game that involved getting across an island.

What an evening! See you all soon.

Does God Play Hab & Gut

Adam, Hannah and Arthur were our hosts last night as we belatedly marked Katy's birthday with cake (brought by Katy) and kicked off the evening with an injection of comestible caterpillar while Arthur loaded the table with potential games we could play. As an eight however - along with the hosts and Katy, there were Martin, Ian, Joe and myself - we settled on Codenames Pictures. I was clue-giver for the Hillmann-Morrison team and Joe clued for everyone else.

We got off to a good start with the team successfully reconciling my clues for mischief before Joe's team hit back, opening with a salvo of success and following it with such wild and wacky clues as 'Linux' (Martin remembered there was a Penguin, Katy spotted a penguin in the cards) and we stumbled on my clue of breakfast as I hadn't spotted a melting clock was actually dribbling out of a saucepan. These are the kind of sentences you don't write about original Codenames!

Joe/Ian/Katy/Martin: clues cracked!
Arthur/Adam/Hannah/Sam: clues crocked

In theory it was now Arthur's bedtime, so we separated into two groups for the evening's main dishes. Ian Adam and Katy ruminated on a Mad King Ludwig rematch before settling on World Wonders after Katy saw the bits. Martin took Joe and I into the other room and talked us through Dawn of Ulos, which he'd been sent to review. 

The game wears its influences on its sleeve, apparently, being a mash-up of Acquire in it's shareholding and takeovers and Tigris & Euphrates in how said takeovers are resolved: here, rather than investing in buildings we are backing various factions on the map. Each turn you must play a tile that will strengthen an existing faction or perhaps introduce (or re-introduce) a new one, which are triggered by available spaces their (plastic mini) leaders can sit on. Then you may either buy up to three cards in any faction, or sell one card for its sale value, in which case you also trigger its faction-specific ability. 

As tiles are added the factions grow in strength: each one gains 1 strength for the terrain types it likes to control (2 types per faction). But as they grow in strength they also become more expensive to buy, and tempting to sell. The catch being if you sell, you are sacrificing valuable cards for their sale value, whereas at the end of the game they'll be worth their higher strength value. 

So  there are already some chewy decisions, but that's before we get to the combat/takeover, where the Tigris comparison takes over: when any of these faction-controlled terrains join up, play is suspended until the battle to control all of the connected terrain is resolved. This is a comparison of current strength, plus any matching faction cards any or all players want to contribute to boost the strength of either (or both) sides. Another catch: you must sell at least half of any cards you put towards battle, and don't get to trigger the ability. 

Whew. While we were all at degrees of bamboozlement, the vibe in the kitchen was slightly less furrowed, as various wonders were built around the pleasing mini-conurbations. 

Back on Ulos, I had concerns over Martin's Ratfolk - not actually his, but I knew he had a lot of Ratfolk cards - and I invested a fair bit of time destabilising them by pillaging - placing cubes on the terrain they like to reduce their strength. 

Then I triggered a battle where, thanks to my surfeit of Goblins, I won. Martin rued his decision to not commit more of the furry little shits to the cause, but it was too late: the Ratfolk were off the board and needed re-establishing. Joe, meanwhile, fretted over the Sheki being either absent or seemingly under-powered, but his late-game push to embolden them - and a face-off with the Orcs that I foolishly supported myself - pushed the Sheki into a more rewarding spot, and Joe into a convincing debut win:

Joe 100
Martin 89
Sam 88

(Last night I was actually second, but a rules clarification this morning pushed me into third!). 

We were all intrigued, if not fully in love. If the idea of Gods being shareholders is a stretch, the fantasy theme kind of suits what's happening on the board. The rules aren't onerous, but the ramifications of each action are, which means not only calculations of current worth and future potential but, ideally, having an idea of what cards your opponents hold. It's kinda bananas, like Hab & Gut's shares crossed with Ethnos' area control crossed with something a bit more combative. 

Or, as others have said, Acquire with T&E. I just haven't played Acquire. 

In the kitchen they had finished as well, with Adam taking the win!

Both games had taken a surprisingly long time, with the hour now past ten. We regrouped together and played co-operative Hitster, the Timeline-style game of placing musical hits in chronological order. This was mostly notable for the weird song about sailors at the docks and all of us being appalled that Beyonce's Crazy in Love is now 21 years old. TWENTY ONE YEARS! That's older than the blog, which feels like it started when Simon & Garfunkel were in the pop charts. Here you can see our bewilderment. 

With the game not having an 'official' co-op iteration, we agreed to play until we failed ten times, and did reasonably well, almost running out of table. Joe's Steely Dan-era knowledge helped us in the 60's and 70's and Ian's ear for production values often clarified things later. I only turned thirty in 2000 but anything after 1990 seemed a mystery to me, and my guesses were usually wayward. Overall though, a more than decent stab and a fun way to end the evening!

So thank you to our hosts, many happy returns to Katy and kudos to Ulos for giving us an unusual experience. As we left, Martin remarked that someone born when Crazy in Love came out would now be graduating University, and it completely ruined the mood. Until next week!

A turnip for the books

Two o'clock on a drizzling afternoon between Christmas and New Year is not usually an occasion to celebrate but this Saturday saw the annual GNN Christmas do and I was there right at the start. Katy was the only other gamer at Sam's table and, after a brief chat, we began the day's gaming with Misfits. This is basically Bandu but we all share a single tower and we're all trying to make it impossible for other players to place pieces without collapsing.

Katy initially thought it was co-operative but Sam assured her to be dastardly. So she left it almost impossible for him to add anything, prompting him to say “That's dick dastardly.” Katy won the first round, having never picked up a single piece. 

Joe arrived and we began again and Katy began with a very mean upright circle. It didn't last long but soon our tower had one section, a narrow but usually flat-topped part of the tower, where we kept building up and it falling down. No one went for too long without picking up more pieces and Sam soon said that it was the longest game he'd seen “by about 150%.”

Katy won again after I thought I'd stopped her from placing her last piece with a clever use of an upright circle. But her cube perched happily on top.

Then we played Word On The Street, a sort of tug of war with letters. A card suggests a topic and you have to think of a word that fits. Then spell that word while dragging certain letters of the alphabet towards you if you use them. Drag them far enough and they're yours. First to have eight letters wins.

All of this must be done within the time set by a very strict hourglass, which made it all very stressful. Katy left the spelling to Joe, lacking confidence in her own abilities. She also demonstrated a strange habit of answering "crucifix!" to a number of questions.

Sam & Andrew 9

Joe & Katy 7

During this, Laura arrived with pizza and then Steve and Anja turned up with crisps and children. After some rearranging and making sure the children were happy with videogames, we split into two groups. 

Sam, Steve and I played Apiary, the thinly themed game of bee-based science fiction. Laura, Anja, Katy and Joe played Quest for Eldorado. The table hummed to the sound of simultaneous rules explanations. Just as things were beginning, Martin arrived. We'd known he was coming but somehow we expected to be further into our games than this. “If I'd known, I wouldn't have been in such a hurry to get here,” he said.

Despite his insistence that he was fine to relax and watch, Laura decided she could happily sit out Eldorado and join him in a two player game, so they took over the sofa, grabbed a stool as a table and played Romi Rami, a variant on rummy.

Eldorado was new to Anja but it was Katy who found it hard going, spending ages stuck behind “a wall of nonsense.” Joe won and Anja came second.

Apiary was slow moving. Steve found parts of it baffling but it didn't seem to hurt his strategy. I, for some reason, focused on the favour track (“That's one up the Queen's favour!”) and ignored the end of game scoring. A hopeless idea. Even if I'd maxed out the favour track, I still would've been last.

Steve 81

Sam 71

Andrew 46

In the time it took us to finish Apiary, two other games were completed.

Hitster was a Timeline-style game with QR codes on cards, read by an app that would then play a pop tune, anywhere from the 50s until today. Put the card in the correct place (once you've tried to identify it). Since I wasn't playing, I found it easy to guess the songs but me and Steve agreed that, should we actually play it, we'd find it impossible. Katy had trouble with song titles, having to sing Dancing in the Dark by Springsteen right up until the chorus until she was able to guess its name.

Joe won, and Laura must've come last based on her (good natured) refusal to ever play it again. At this point Joe had to leave, because he had friends visiting from London who, apparently, would think it strange if he wasn't there to greet them.

Adam and Hannah arrived (with Arthur, who swiftly disappeared in the front room). They all played Cross Clues, and scored 22 out of 25. Anja had the highlight of the game by cluing Red and Light with “district.”

Finally, with Apiary finished and back in its box, everyone was available again. The next game we played was Food, which is a resource management game concerning the pizzas that Laura brought from Lidl and Adam and Katy walking through the rain for chips, mushy peas and curry sauce. Just like Agricola, we had to also feed the children but unlike Agricola they weren't able to eat wood.

During the meal, we did the annual GNN quiz. With Sam as the quiz master we split into teams according to where we sat around the table. 

This lead to a slight imbalance in terms of regular attendees, with Martin, Adam, Laura and Katy on one side and Steve, Anja, Hannah (“I think I was at the start of one games night this year”) and me on the other side.

But we did okay. Steve got up to get a beer just as Sam asked a question that he would've known, which was irritating but equally he did help me get the answer to What was Joe's clue for Nail/Young in So Clover.

In the end, we did okay, but I think that if I'd just answered Joe every time, I would've scored 6.

Katy etc. 14/25

Andrew etc. 10/25

So, having been reminded that Joe kissed Kylie Minogue and finding out how much Katy loves Fields Of Arle (she had to stop playing it when she began dreaming about it) we began gaming again.

In a tussle for players, Martin lost Katy’s commitment to Big Top when Sam and Laura started to set up Raccoon Tycoon, leading to some falsetto claims/denials of betrayal between the two of them.

Adam, Steve and Anja set up Cascadia at the sensible end of the table, while Martin and I returned to the games cupboard to choose a game for us and Hannah. We plumped for Spots and we were just setting up when Laura got a call from home, asking for help with getting the kids to bed. She had to go, leaving Raccoon Tycoon not yet started. 

With this new development, Martin gallantly did not insist that's exactly what Katy deserved but instead we joined together for a five player game of Texas Showdown. We played with the New Rule, in which playing the highest card in a winning suit means that suit is cancelled and can't win, unless all the other suits are cancelled too. It makes the game much more uncertain as playing a suit that you're sure no one else has may still win the trick if everyone else plays a suit that is subsequently cancelled.

It was great fun. Sam's first round was appalling and maths genius Martin helpfully pointed out that he was already halfway to the losing score of twelve. But then he turned it around and by round three he was still last but level with me and Hannah and only three behind leader Katy. But he picked up four tricks in round four while Katy went clear for a comfortable win.

Katy 5

Martin 9

Hannah 11

Andrew 11

Sam 12

Cascadia had been bubbling along with occasional phrases drifting across the table. “Anja, always with the fish,” said Steve, sounding like a disappointed Jewish grandfather at Passover. “I've got no elk,” Anja realised late on while Adam wondered if it was “too late to get into bears.”

It looked like being a tie for first place, until Adam mentioned that pine cones also score points, a rule that newbie Steve hadn’t been told about.

Adam 94

Steve 92

Anja 87

Then there was a period of general kerfuffle while Adam & Hannah and Anja & Steve made arrangements to leave, taking their clans with them. Laura, meanwhile, returned from parenting duties. Despite it being 8 o'clock, I only had one game left in me, so we chose So Clover.

We played twice and during the first game, Martin got so agitated by our logic when doing his clover that we began to worry that he was genuinely annoyed.

“Look at all the words,” he hissed, unable to stay silent any longer. Sam said that was cheating but Martin insisted that he was merely telling us the rules. But thanks to this rules refresher, we noticed that Medusa went better with his clue of Snakeskin than whatever we had at the time.

24 out of 30

In the second attempt, we started well and Katy, Sam and Martin all created perfect-scoring clovers. Then Laura turned over her clover and we were intrigued to see that “Joe Berger” was one of her clues.

Our sense of intrigue changed to bemusement as nothing seemed to fit. Soon we saw Paintbrush which seemed good, but what to pair it with? Putting Foot/Envelop with her clue of “sock” seemed right but that gave us Turnip/Paintbrush for “Joe Berger” which seemed unnecessarily rude.

In the end we settled on Old/Paintbrush even though it didn't quite fit with the other clues. 

“I like old paintbrush,” Martin insisted.

“I like him too,” said Sam, “but…” 

In the end we went with it, but it was wrong. This left us with only one option: Old/Turnip. It was correct. We were baffled and unfortunately Laura was laughing too much to explain what she meant. 

We then thought about phoning Joe to tell him about this before he read the blog - a conversation that quickly digressed into a discussion about how posh his visiting friends might be. If Joe's ears were burning at this point, no one would've been surprised.

My final (and relatively boring) clover was solved, giving us a final score of 28 out of 30. Not quite a perfect score, but a game worth remembering for its own reasons.

But on that note I went out into the persistent rain. What a Christmas do. Thanks all. 

I'll hand over to Sam for coverage of the final stages...

*            *            *

After Andrew left we found ourselves an incongruously tiny four and debated what to play. We kicked off with Big Top, Martin's new auction game. This is quite bonkers but basically you score points by getting cards and everyone takes turn auctioning them. You can buy your own cards but, as Martin pointed out, it's not a great habit to get into. The cards themselves then need to be 'filled' by covering the numbers with coins, and you do that by bidding that number on subsequent cards (whether you win them or not). It's crazy. 

Being a little drunk possibly helped me. I think Laura was the most sober of us and subsequently the most confused. But we were all confused. I won this one with 71 points, with the others back in the 50s and 40s.

What next? Katy introduced her strawberry gin so that helped us decide, jettisoning Misfits in favour of Hitster. This was my first experience of it and we tried the co-op version, playing tracks and trying to align them in chronological order (much like Timeline) before revealing our triumphs/errors. It didn't take that long to make the five mistakes we needed to end the game, but it was enough time for Laura to display impressive audio prowess, correctly placing a track she didn't even know just going on the production style. 

I drunkenly demanded we followed that with Rankster, and the others allowed me my little fit of pique. With this little ditty, players are trying to match their rankings (one active player, then everyone else, Wavelength-style) of three historical characters in a given situation. EG Who'd make the best drummer in your rock band? Martin favoured Henry VIII over George Washington, and we agreed. We also agreed that Pele would eat more donuts than the Queen. 

This was incredibly funny even though Martin and I both managed to interpret King David as King Herod, which explained our slightly inebriated/jet-lagged mirth. We wrapped up Rankster scoring (I think) 5 out of 8. I drunkenly demanded more games but was this time ignored as three tired gamers went out into the abysmal weather to end a dramatic day in a dramatic way. A lot of fun, thanks everyone!