For Goodness' Saké

Like a rare planetary alignment, every year or so four increasingly aging board gamers meet to catch up and share news, ancient in-jokes and some dubious double-entendres.

I arrived at about 1.30, and Sam told me that Chris and Paul were running late, still picking their way through Bristol’s bank holiday traffic. We drank coffee and chatted while I idly looked at the packaging for Tokkuri Taking, a game that would be our first once we were all here.

The packaging promises a bacchanial party of sake with dinosaurs. In practice, we were playing cards to either represent a clay bottle full of sake (the tokkuri) or the amount of sake each player will drink.

You have to play cards which will empty a (or many) tokkuri(s) exactly. If you achieve this, you flip the tokkuri card, action any text that you may see and keep it as a point. Unless it is a Dummy card, in which case the card is removed from the game and everyone else chuckles at your bad luck.

In fact, the revelation of a dummy card remained funny until the end of the game. It was a nice little game but, as Chris pointed out, where were the dinosaurs?

Sam 20

Chris 13

Paul 4

Andrew 0

After this game, to commemorate the day, Chris took a selfie of the four of us and unfortunately demonstrated how age turns technology into a mystery. We all posed and smiled and, instead of taking a photo, Chris promptly turned his phone off.

Never mind, we got there in the end.

Then we chose our next game. At least, me, Sam and Paul did. Chris stayed at the kitchen table, declaring himself too tired to make a decision. And so we played Tower Up, in which we were rampant civil engineers/town planners, intent on placing our roofs across city skyscrapers. Each of us had a player board with four scoring tracks in white, black, brown and grey which gave us the first childish sniggers as we spoke about “one up the brown” or a lack of “brown movement.”

Sam did impress mid-game with one move that got him three bonuses at once, but Chris’ slew of prominent yellow domes across the city pushed him into first place.

Chris 53

Andrew 50

Sam 46

Paul 40

Next up was Azul. I explained the rules to Paul and we were off. Sam kept picking up the first player token for minus points, insisting that he liked going first. Paul started slowly, with disparate tiles on his board, but managed to weave them all together with a final round that scored over 20 points by itself.

Paul 76

Sam 72

Andrew 70

Chris 66

We discussed food and, since Sam’s son Joe was going to get pizza for him and his friends, it made sense for him to get some pizza for us at the same time. That plan didn’t go down well and not even the promise of a side salad could persuade Joe.

Then we played Scout. A sort of trick taking game with a really light Circus theme. Not as tenuous as dinosaurs drinking sake, but still very tangential. I tried to bring the circus motif into play: when I put down a pair of tens I introduced it as “Lisa and Rebecca with their two cannons” but it didn’t really catch on.

Chris 38

Paul 34

Andrew 27

Sam 18

Next up was Misfits. Chris started with a cylinder placed upright. Then he sat back and smirked. We carefully placed piece after impossible piece until the entire edifice collapsed, leading Sam to declare “every c*nting piece!” as he ruefully swept the debris into his reserve.

We played twice and Chris won both times. After Chris’ second win, we kept playing Speed Misfits for second place, with Chris counting down the time limit in a vague German accent. I placed second.

After this we played Ito - the pocket version of Wavelength where everyone gets to make a guess. We didn’t do too well, with some pretty close calls. 

“Places to have a secret lair” did okay, with some nice distance between our guesses but in the category Imaginary Worlds to Visit we failed to differentiate the two-point gap between The Planet of Stale Farts and Pubic Hair World.

Following this we gave up on pizza and decide to get curry delivered. After that was ordered, we played Pina Coladice. Yahtzee mixed with Noughts And Crosses. Each square of a 4x4 grid has a target to achieve with five dice rolled three times. Place your meeple (if there’s still room) and four in a row will instantly win the game.

It was okay. I felt a bit like I was watching myself play, but there’s a certain amount of strategy as first Paul then Sam found their paths to glory blocked by other players taking the spaces they needed. But in the end, Chris won with four in a row.

With the curry imminent we played a couple of quick games of Toy Battle. A very simple war game with basic mechanics but a nicely balanced range of soldiers at your disposal. Sam beat Paul on a tie-breaker and Chris beat me outright, having successfully stormed my HQ.

Next we broke for food and then I chose the next game - my last of the day.

It was Quest for El Dorado. Paul’s first game, and he got a rules explanation from, as I recall, most of us at one point or another. It was pretty close throughout, apart from the usual early stages of one playing hanging back for tokens (Sam) while another sped off into the jungle (Chris). But Chris was no amatuer just pegging it and hoping for the best. He neatly balanced his deck and picked up tokens as he went. An purchase of the Captain just as he reached the watery fifth hex was probably pivotal.

I tried to think like Adam by buying a Travel Log (or Travelodge, as Paul called it) to whittle away the flab from my hand, but when I appeared I really didn’t know what to do with it. Nevertheless I actually thought I had a chance until quite late on. False hope.

Chris 1st to arrive, wins tie breaker

Sam, arrived same turn

Paul, only a few spaces short

Andrew, at least I reached the final hex.

*                *                *

mysterious change of narrator

*                *                *

Sam here. The hour was around 9pm, I think, when Andrew left us, and we had a couple more hours of ludological frolics ahead of us. We began them with Rebirth, the game of cathedral and castle construction in post-apocalyptic Scotland. I can't help thinking that if all the efforts going into these rebuilding games went into avoiding an apocalypse in the first place, maybe these great designer minds could come up with something. But anyway. This was new to the ever-patient Paul, so I went through the fortuitously-simple rules and away we went, brick by brick. 

Whilst I set about cathedralling like some kind of Ken Follet enthusiast and Paul remarked that he kept pulling the same type of tile, Chris sped off into a chunky lead, passing 100 points way before we did and enjoying saying the word 'dirigible' in celebration. But his momentum slowed in the final act, and my haul of highland castles and completed objectives got me a vanishingly rare win - by a single point! Chris threw his cards on the table in disgust. 

Sam - can't remember

Chris - can't remember -1

Paul - a few points further back

We celebrated/drowned our sorrows in the Milk Tray chocolates Chris had brought with him. There was no flavour reference so I tried one at random, which turned out to be a hazelnut whirl. I enjoyed it so much I had another, before discovering they were everyone's favourite, including Jacquie, who wasn't even here, but added to the chocolatey shame. Apologies all. 

We played Fantasy Realms next, and any crowing I might have been tempted to do in my Rebirth triumph stuck in my throat as I proved abysmally bad at realming fantasies. 

The game is super-simple: you have a hand of cards that score in different ways, and on your turn you pick up a new card and discard one to the table. You can pick up either from the table, or the top of the deck, but the catch is top-decking hastens the end of the game, which happens when a tenth card is added to the communal cards. Chris more than doubled my score, I think it was something like

Chris 190?

Paul 140?

Sam 80

I poured myself another gin as Paul asked me if I was getting tired. "He's got to wait up for his kids!" Chris pointed out, as if we needed an excuse to keep gaming. Little Tavern was next. 

Chris started and immediately parked an elf at his table. I advised him this was maybe not the best move, because elves in this game are racists and only like sitting with other elves. Chris nodded that he understood and immediately picked up three more elves to score 16 points in the first round. In the second I gave him a face-down romantic and he paired it with another face-up to win! Stupid game. 

We finished off with So Clover, of course, but whether it was the marathon games, the gin, the chocolate, the red herrings or the late hour, did appallingly badly with a 3-2-4 haul giving us 9 points from a possible 18! 

By this time, Joe and his pals were home and Stan was on his way back too. It had been ten hours of gaming and with midnight not too far off, we elected to end it there. Thanks all! Sorry about my foul-mouthed breakdown in Misfits. 

A Steak in the Ground

With a plethora of drop-outs, hosts Anja, Steve, and Louie only had a trio of hardy gamers turn up at their doors last night to keep the orange flag flying: myself (Sam), Katy and Martin. After some brief chat, we quickly split into two groups, conscious that both time and players (Louie had to go to bed in an hour, and I didn't want to stay too late) were in short supply. Louie began setting up Robot Quest Arena with his mum and Katy, whilst Steve sat down with Martin and I to play Pioneers. 

While the Robots began barging into each other and snaffling up new powers, I talked Steve and Martin through Pioneers, which seems satisfyingly simple - at first. Each turn has three phases: get income, buy stuff (roads or carriages) and then move the stagecoach, 'delivering' pioneers from said carriages to matching spots on the board. Each spot has a bonus of some kind, so short-term it's about emptying your carriages (for points) and grabbing the rewards.

Long-term though it's also about building a network of roads; as your network (of your own roads) with the most pioneers in (of your own colour) will score at the end of the game as well. We all had to stop ourselves moving pioneers placed on the board and remember to add them from our carriages, and I think Steve and I had about three do-overs with minor gaffes to correct. Meantime the robots were getting a little hot under the metal collar, as Anja was heard announcing she would rivet-gun Louie, and he repeatedly grapple-hooked - if that's a verb - his enemies to fling them around the board. 

In Pioneers, we approached the endgame. I was optimistic that my biggest network was going to move me far enough up the track that I could claim a debut GNN victory: although Steve's carriage-focused points haul was strong, his pioneers were disparate. The stack of carriages we never thought we'd get through was running perilously low, but I ended the game by placing my last road. 

Steve and Martin had one last turn, and Martin's final move got two Farmers down, and it was enough to snake him ahead of us both!

Martin 59
Sam 57
Steve 55

While we were indulging in a post-mortem on the excellent mechanics and possibly not the most thoughtful theming, Robot Quest Arena came to a conclusion, with yet another win for Louie!

Louie 32

Anja 24

Katy 23

He went off to bed with the glow of victory whilst we played Wanted Wombats. What can be said about this strategically-rich game of wombat gangsters that hasn't been already? Well, Katy could have won when she predicted the $10k card and then banked it. She offhandedly said the next card would be a $5k though, and it was! So instead of Katy winning, I did. 

We played again and this time Steve took the victory. He was very pleased. 

After Steve's little dance we broke out Ito, the Wavelength-in-a-card-deck game of civilised discussion and occasional ranting. Our first spectrum was Important Things In Life, and we failed in the opaque space of subjectivity and pictorial representation as we discovered that we valued doilies more than slugs, but less than Eurovision. "Nobody is listening to me" Anja lamented, after her preferences were overruled by more shouty and obstinate folk at the table (me and Martin). 

We went again Things You Might Find Under a Rock, and were confident that Anja's steak - medium-rare, with pepper sauce - would be the most unlikely of our confections, only to discover it was only 55. To be fair though, at least a steak fits under a rock, and would be less surprising than finding, say, Andrew. Anja might have put a steak there. (And she did propose moving it lower, but we didn't listen). 

Our last salvo was Things That Are Hard To Do Alone, which went a disappointedly smutty direction. Anja's clue of synchronised swimming could not possibly be done with anyone else. An excellent high-number clue! But can sexual intercourse be done alone? Martin, resident latin scholar, pointed out the prefix 'inter' was a telling one. We flipped the cards to discover after successfully getting masturbation, singing and tree-hugging in ascending order (insert great weekend joke here) we'd placed these overtly plurality-based activities the wrong way around in our field of dreams... they were numbers 98 and 99! 

Great fun though, and a lovely way to end the evening. Thanks to all, especially our hosts, and particularly Steve for sacrificing his beloved Turkish Delight. After Katy and I both said we hated Turkish Delight, we ate five of them. 

Windy Plops

Adam was our host last night as Katy, Joe, Ian and myself arrived at the magic hour of 7.30pm - well, actually, Katy was there earlier and had a strange tale about a mystical shadow that she told us out on the deck. However, it cannot be shared in full here, as we were sworn to secrecy on the details just in case any strangers read the blog. 

We stepped inside and began the evening with Ito, a kind of micro-Wavelength in that each round - and a game is a single round - has a spectrum from 1-100 (for example, Things You Might Do When You're Happy) and everyone is dealt a number card and must give a bespoke clue for their number. We discuss and arrange the cards face-down in what we hope is ascending order, before revealing, in the hope we are right. 

In four attempts, we were never right, often beginning well before falling away catastrophically. Our most confusing spectrum of the night was Popular Board Games, as our subjectivity needles were all over the shop. Everyone apart from Adam felt Snakes and Ladders was far more popular than Carcassonne. But Snakes and Ladders was his clue - we should have listened. In Things That Will Last Until the End of Time, I immediately regretted my clue of YouTube, but we successfully decoded that the video platform would be less durable than the Concept of Sausages (- Joe). Martin joined us for the last couple of games of Ito, which seems to have a high quotient of accusation in it for a co-op game, but then I guess a modicum of righteousness is not necessarily always a terrible thing. 

Martin pulled Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves from his bag and we set up, optimistic that the game would come into its own with 6 players rather than the trio of last week. Certainly there was more tabletalk, which was good, but the verdict after a couple of rounds was that maybe six was one or two too many. It was fun while it lasted though, and Katy took the mildly-asterisked win - as Martin took Explainer's Curse right in the face.

Katy 63
Ian 45
Joe 41
Adam 28
Sam 24
Martin 1

The reason we stopped a little early was that Steve, bereft of moustache but equipped of tooth, had arrived and it was time for the evening's main courses. There was some hopeful proffering of various titles before we eventually settled on the equally various win conditions of Living Forest for Adam, Katy and Steve...

And Ian was talked through the vagaries of Free Ride USA by Martin and Joe. The latter began his business in the east, Martin more westerly, whilst Ian and I - leery of being too isolated - started track-laying in the swing states. 

Martin's criticism of Free Ride was that it feels like it should take an hour but play is closer to 90 minutes, and I kind of get that. For me though turns are - usually - so quick that I can forgive the playtime because of the pace. Notably here Ian ran low on cash, I picked up long routes, and Joe seemed to be - to our dismay - the recipient of a lot of short routes that popped up just as his train chugged into a nearby station. Because of that, I at least was anticipating that he might be the man to beat. But I was very wrong. 

Martin 119
Sam 113
Ian 105
Joe 103

Another Explainer's curse? Joe had a lot of completed routes, but little cash. Living Forest was yet to reach its sudden-death finale, and the tension was palpable, if somewhat undermined by the regular invoking of the phrase 'windy plops' - so we busted out another newbie from Martin: Viking See-Saw. He doesn't make many dexterity games, but this is a Reiner Knizia title. 

We all begin with a bunch of stuff in front of us:

And on your turn you must add one of your stuff to whichever side of the viking boat is titled upwards - onto to deck proper: you cannot use the two central areas with the brown blocks (chests) in. The goal is to be rid of all your stuff first - an instant win - but if you cause the boat to tilt, you have to take anything that falls off it, plus a chest the from the middle. What adds an additional level of intrigue is the fact that the bits and pieces you add vary considerably in weight: the large plastic gem is considerably lighter than the bronze cubes, for example, which weigh quite a bit. 

Martin came a real cropper here as his very first turn caused the ship to flip over, and the same thing happened to him later. Joe and I also took a hit each, which meant the cantilever king, Ian, sailed to victory:

Ian: all stuff gone 
Sam and Joe: one thing each left
Martin: had loads of stuff left

By now Living Forest was over, and Katy - lamenting - and Steve - stoic silence - were both coming to terms with Adam's tree-based victory. I mean, they knew the risks when they sat down, but sometimes that just makes it worse, I suppose.

Adam - King of the Forest
Katy and Steve -  Jacks of all Trades.

Arthur materialised before us and wanted to play Wavelength, but the hour was such that Adam had to veto and take him upstairs to bed. While we waited on his (Adam's) return, we first played Wanted Wombats, new to Steve, Katy and Ian, but quick to teach and almost as quick to play. 

Katy and I managed to pull off a $10k draw, but I bust on each subsequent turn, whereas Katy didn't.

Katy $15k

Sam $10k

Ian and Steve $3k

Martin $1k

Joe $0

Steve then took his leave. Adam hadn't returned yet, and the word was that he wasn't imminent, so we cracked into So Clover. There was some moderate harrumphing over words but we got off to a good start with a couple of sixes and kept going in that vein. It was so exciting, I forgot to take pictures here but we came a cropper in the last clover - Joe's - through no fault of the clue-giver as we failed to combine circle/base with Joe's clue of Standee. A shame, as that would have given us a perfect 30/30, but no mind. Adam hadn't reappeared yet but as he had seemed tired earlier, we decided to vacate the premises and, hopefully, see him next week. Thanks all!