Reach for the Skyscrapers

Thursday! It's not Tuesday, but one is still allowed to game in the right circumstances, and those circumstances arrived at 8.30pm for myself (Sam) Andrew and Steve. Steve was unfashionably early, so the quick two-player game of Just One Andrew and I settled on quickly became a three.

It's tough with three. For the guesser in particular, although Andrew and I did manage to duplicate our clues for Powder by both writing Talcum; Steve guessed we'd both written gun. A reasonable assumption - but the game as a whole didn’t  reach the heights of success that Tuesday's did. Nonetheless Just One is always fun. 

The meat of the evening, even if it's more thin-sliced ham than gammon steak, was New York 1901. It's New York - I forget the year - and we're all building, building for the skies in the days when the gherkin would have been frowned on as not nearly square enough. Turns are simple - grab a lot, place a worker on the lot. Build there now, or hope to grab an adjacent lot later, in order to build bigger and better buildings. 

But because you only have four workers at your disposal, there is a kind of economy to things. There's also rewards for having the most buildings on particular streets, and the possibility to demolish previously-built buildings in order to build better ones. Sadly, you can only demolish your own... 

Steve and Andrew were off the marks quickly and before I knew what was happening, they were dominating Broadway and Cedar Street. I focused my energy on building, building, building, and was the first to claim a legendary skyscraper in order to leap ahead on the scoretrack. But you can only build one of these in the entire game, so in the parlance of architects, I'd basically run out of scaffolding. 

As the lots ran out it was clearly a two-way battle between Steve and Andrew: I claimed nothing from the most-buildings-on-streets rewards and they surged past me. Steve getting two was key to his victory:

Steve 70

Andrew 67

Sam 63

With the time now nearing ten, Andrew headed for home, but Steve and I still had some games left in us, and we kicked off a delightful hour of 2-player silliness with Karambolage. This is a 25-year-vintage Haba game where a play area defined by string contains a number of coloured discs. Dice are rolled showing matching colours, and your job is to flick one colour into another, as Steve demonstrates deftly here:

The wooden block can be placed wherever you like before you make your shot. As deft as we - Steve especially - were, we were also regularly catastrophically over or under-flicking. Often the dice are unkind and the colours rolled are blocked from a direct shot, so you have to attempt a rebound. 

I never managed it at all, but Steve did a couple of times. There's a Can't Stop style point-scoring system where you can bank what you have or choose to roll again and push your luck, and we regularly fell foul of our own insatiable greed for points as well. If you roll doubles on the dice, you roll again and keep rolling until you get two colours, but every doubles roll increases the points value of your next shot. We had a lot of fun with this, and I managed to conquer Steve over three games despite getting the Uncontrollable Yips when on the verge of victory in game three. 

Sam 2

Steve 1

It was nearing eleven but our gaming tank still had fuel in it, so I introduced Steve to Kariba, the game of waterhole dominance, and overcame a terrible start in order to gain a second win - at least in part to a slight rules misunderstanding.

Sam 28

Steve 22

There was just enough time for me to try and drunkenly explain the rules to Outfoxed (I think I might have called it Fox in the Forest, which is, er, different...) to Steve before we called it a night. As always, splendid fun, thanks gentlemen!

Somebody's Poisoned the Waterhole!

Thursday! Adam's suggestion of A Feast for Odin gained short shrift, as both Andrew and I wanted to play a game we had a chance of winning. He tried little one-two by proposing Caverna instead, but we were too smart for that.

But would we be smart enough to beat him at Africana? It's been many moons since Michael Schacht's game of colonial exploitation has seen the table, and - theme to one side - it was nice to revisit it.

It was new to Adam and Stanley, however, so we needed a rules run-through. For the uninitiated, Africana sees you as one of the European powers dashing around the continent in the great carve-up, going on expeditions and adventures. Your options are almost Ticket to Ride-simple: pick up cards, play cards (to move your guy) or go to 'the book' and start an adventure. The books are in the north and south hemisphere, and whichever one you go to, completing the adventure requires some travelling to the opposite hemisphere. As Adam said, it's the game with the "world's largest carbon footprint". Expeditions get you points (and money). Use money to start Adventures, which also get points, but also also combine in set-scorey ways for Extra Points.

You always have the smiling Assistant who helps you move, and you can get more assistants - from the book - to help you move even more, but the more Assistants you have, the more points it costs you; maybe in the game's token nod to the idea that ultimately, you're being judged by God, or History, or maybe Twitter.

It's a game like Ticket to Ride in that many turns are spent picking up cards, before completing a killer turn - Stan, Adam and Andrew (in particular!) all pulled these off. I didn't and could feel my exploitative adventurer guy almost festering in Leopold, as Expedition cards were swooped up around his ears. Adam was convinced it was going to be Stanley's day as his multiple assistants saw him hardly ever picking up cards at all, but instead scurrying around Africa like a boy intent on victory. But his Adventure cards didn't combine in the most alluring ways, leaving Andrew able to return to France the most exploitative player of all!

Andrew 44
Adam 40
Sam 30 / Stanley 30

Stan now retired to bed and we debated our next move before settling on Take It Easy. Sticking to GNN's long tradition of 'calling' the tiles with a theme, I settled on board game designers. Andrew did Japanese words, and Adam computer games. But all three rounds had diabolical aspects to the tiles themselves, as Andrew and I both flipped lots of '1' tiles and with Adam's final draw, almost any other tile would have helped us more than what he turned over. Adam and I scored pretty miserably, whereas Andrew claimed his second win of the night:

Andrew 476
Sam 409
Adam 385

We finished the evening with Kariba, Knizia's waterhole-themed frolic of animal fright: scare animals away to claim them as points. Rather than suggest three rounds for a game, Kariba's rules propose 'three games, and then compare points' which I rather like from a commitment perspective. But we followed that suggestion anyway.

Andrew led after the first game, but in the second Adam swooped in with three mice to scare off all 8 elephants and from that moment it was trying to figure out a way to catch him. I'm not totally ashamed to say we combined to prevent him doing the same thing in the third game, as I played one mouse and shouted "go on, Andrew!" - which he did.

But it was in vain:

Adam 54
Sam 47
Andrew 46

"I like this game!" said Adam. It is a sneaky little thing. Somewhat like Adam. But the hour was fairly late by now, so we all snuck off to bed...*

*don't be silly

New gamer passing through

This week, six of us pitched up around Sam's kitchen table for yet another bout of gaming goodness. Sam, Martin, Ian, Katy and I were joined by Katy's friend Reevesie. He was lucky enough to be in town on a Tuesday evening and so Katy brought him along.

Our first game was Just One or, as it soon to be called, Find The Working Pen. We started well, with Pig being the opening word and "shit" being Katy's opening clue. We rattled off the correct guesses until one clue, Vacation, stymied us. We later discovered that four of us were considering "Lampoon" and Sam even wrote it down before changing his mind. In the end, none of us wrote it and Ian couldn't get the word from our sadly generic hints.

I stretched the rules a bit. When faced with "Fitzgerald" my mind went blank. I couldn't think of anything to do with that name so I wrote "nope" indicating that I'd bowed out of this round. Luckily that's how Reevesie interpreted it and he didn't spend ages agonising over how "Ella" and "Gadsby" relate to "nope". Lastly, Katy requested that we should go low-brow in her clues. Alas, her word was "Gothic" and she ended up with "Poe,'" "Shelley," and "Cathedral. " Sorry, Katy.

We got nine correct, but didn't bother checking our rank on the patronising score sheet.

Then we split into two groups. Martin and Katy introduced Reevesie to the joys of Azul. Sam, Ian and I chose Letter Tycoon. A choice that I was all in favour of until Sam leapt into an early lead by playing three seven letter words in his first three rounds. Amazing to watch but also quite galling. He had the decency to apologise after the third. Ian kept in the running with a patent that allowed him to play two words in one turn. I made a revival with the longest word of the game (Ablution) but it wasn't enough. It was a dead heat between Sam and Ian, with Sam winning on a tie breaker.

Sam 53 (34 in patents)
Ian 53 (32)
Andrew 47

Down the other end of the table, Azul ended with Martin remarking that if he'd known Reevesie would be such a threat, he might have been meaner sooner.

Reevesie 93
Martin 76
Katy 60

After this was a pause as we debated our next game while eating crisps standing up. Next, Ian, Katy and Sam played Menara, the fun game of tower building according to an ever shifting set of criteria.

Martin, Reevesie and I went for the hot craze of the year, Senators. After a rules walkthrough from Martin, Reevesie was transported back in time to ancient Rome. We connived and cajoled, extorted and auctioned. I got an early lead thanks to a cheap senator in the game's first war and then I cashed in a set of cards (30 talents, very nice) and bought two more.

There was a lovely moment of synchronicity during our respective games. Martin, annoyed at Reevesie's strategy, muttered "You son of a..." and then Sam accidentally finished his sentence while reacting to the reveal of a new card by saying "Shit."

Reevesie came back into it and drew level with me while Martin seemed to be languishing. Albeit languishing with some very high value cards in front of him. There was a decent amount of extortion and Martin refused to let any go. Then, on the eve of the third war, he cashed in two sets for a handsome 44 talents and he bought three senators, bounding over us and into first place . Would we have a chance to catch him? Nope, the fourth war came out next and victory was assured.

Martin 9
Reevesie 7
Andrew 7

Sadly, I was unable to exploit the fact that I was the only one not distracted by checking their phone every minute to see if Liverpool had beaten Barcelona.

While we were finishing off, Sam, Ian and Katy successfully completed their tower. They admired it for a second or two before trying to build higher, using cards as impromptu floors. It didn't last long.

Then they played a one-round game of Kariba, another new flavour of the season.

Sam 19
Ian 18
Katy 12

At this point Ian left and the five of us launched into a game of Raj. "Do I hate this game?" asked Katy, her memory of certain board games addled by a year abroad. I couldn't believe anyone would hate Raj and I assured her that she didn't. I was wrong.

Raj served up its usual range of crazy injustices. Katy cruelly picked up a -5 tile despite playing a fifteen (10, 10, 13, 13, 15) and when something similar happened to me, she insisted that I write it down too. So here it is: I got the -5 with 11, 11, 11, 11, 14. An amazing and wonderful sight... for four of us, at least. Sam got lucky in the last round (or is it skill?) getting a nine tile with 15, 15, 6, 6, 4. This helped him leap from fourth to first in the final round while I fell from first to third.

Sam 41
Martin 37
Andrew 30
Reevesie 23
Katy 7

And now Katy and Reevesie left. This meant that there was one more game left for the remaining trio. We chose The Mind. Round one and two were tough. I think the first card to be played in round one was 68, and then we lost a life in round two.

But then we got into a groove. By round six we still had two lives and, despite round nine throwing an abundance of cards in the nineties at us, we got to the Dark Mind with two lives intact. We didn't last long, however, since we were dead by the end of round two but even so we'd defied luck enough times to make it feel like an achievement.

And then we were done. Thanks to Sam for hosting, and thanks to all for attending, especially Reevesie. Hope to see you again sometime. We're here every Tuesday!

The Old Ones are the Worst

Last night Andrew and I set out on a great adventure that turned into a horrific nightmare - a tale of lives given, sanity lost, farms blighted and kangaroos mown down in a hail of panic-stricken gunfire.

It was AuZtralia. After being something of a hit at last year's Novocon when Joe's peaceful farming tactic (leaving the battles to the rest of us!) saw him emerge victorious this mash-up of trains, agriculture and Cthulu has lain fallow since, and we felt it was time to return to Oz.

After a quick refresher of some of the rules we began, and beginning in AuZtralia is all about seeding the board with good stuff (iron, coal, gold, phosphorus) and bad (the Old Ones). We were pretty fortunate in how the tiles fell, giving us a landscape of some fairly bad guys, a few pretty bad guys, but almost bereft of really bad guys. As a result, the early moves were all about exploration - build some track here, throw up a farm there, build an airship... and so on. Andrew was first to awaken the Old Ones when his train track bumped into a pyramid.

Combat in AuZtralia borders on funny - there's a luck-pushing mechanism where cards are flipped and you see if you hurt the Old One in question, or they hurt you, or both, or neither. You can retreat, but you can also double-down and, as a result, have all your military units go insane. That happened to me. Mid-game, all the Old Ones started to awaken regardless of whatever noise we were/weren't making, and Zombies staggered over Andrew's farms, blighting them before he retaliated and wiped them out. I seemed comparatively safe for a while, until suddenly a seemingly-indestructible Loyalist nearly made it all the way to my port before expiring.

That near-miss aside though, the Old Ones were never really in with a shout of victory as we tooled up and took them apart. Despite doing most of the dirty work though, Andrew lost out to me courtesy of my train tracks leading me to phosphorus, which are worth 3 points each at the end of the game. An arbitrary and somewhat bizarre decider, really, but in a way appropriate for a game as silly as AuZtralia is.

Sam 26
Andrew 22

It is a bizarre game but replete with adventure and, though at odds with the theme, moments of comedy. Also pretty fast with two...

One can never take photos of Push It because the game moves much too fast, but I beat Andrew something like 21-12 before he then got his own back on his debut of Kariba:

Andrew 27
Sam 21

I should never have scared away the mice.

Senator, you are spoiling us

Missing GNN planetoids Andrew and Katy as well as several orbiting satellites, at one stage it looked like just Ian, Martin and myself. Would Martin be persuaded to play Underwater Cities? Fortunately for him, Adam T and Joe swooped in to save the day, abetted by Stanley.

Joe was running late and Stan was in the garden attacking his brother with a space-hopper, so we started the evening with a quick play of Kariba, a very Knizian game by, unsurprisingly, Knizia.

Animals (numbered 1-8) come to the waterhole to drink, but three or more animals of a higher number will scare away the next-lowest numbered animal - and these scattering prey become your points if you played the card that did the scaring. The lowly mice (number 1) aren't completely hopeless - they're the only animal that can scare away the otherwise-indomitable elephants (number 8).

Sam 15
Ian 14
Martin 12
Adam 7

By the time Kariba wrapped up (it only took ten minutes) Joe had arrived and enticed Stanley into a try out of Shards of Infinity. I played with Joe at the weekend so can give a quick precis: it's a battle between players to be last one standing: each player begins with 50 health and then damage is done via the medium of cardplay and deck-building. The neat twist with Shards of Infinity is that you have a Mastery score that, when improved to certain points (5/10/20) empowers some of your cards: get your Mastery to 30 and it's possible to destroy your opponent outright when you pull the Infinity Shard into your hand.

While that epic played out at one end of the table, we were busy with Martin's latest sentient-vegetable game, this time another old Knizia in Too Many Cooks. This is a trick-taker of sorts where each player announces what kind of soup they intend to make at the start of each round, with the cards themselves the ingredients. If you're making onion soup, you want to win a trick with lots of onions in - and no chilli. If you're making a chilli soup, you don't want bouillion. Because the trick is only complete when the collective score of all the cards reaches ten points - and some cards reset the score to zero - it's more than likely that someone will throw some chilli in your lovely pot of onions, or even pick them up themselves. The 'wrong' ingredient doesn't necessarily do any damage, as long as it's not really wrong.

But as well as that reasonably-simple premise, there are cards that score zero when led but a whopping ten when played in a 'live' trick, complicating things somewhat. Additional complications arrive in the form of these cards being erroneously labelled zero instead if ten, and one recipe being 'no soup' - don't win any cards at all. The fact that previously played recipes can't be played again muddies things further, as the last couple of rounds you are more at the mercy of fate, depending on what cards you get.

Ian began badly and announced he didn't like the game. He surged back into contention and seemed briefly more enamoured. Then he fell away again. I stagnated too, but Adam made hay in the penultimate round, establishing a lead that was too strong for Martin to catch him:

Adam 20
Martin 16
Sam 14
Ian 12

Martin and Adam liked it. I was somewhere between their enthusiasm and Ian's chagrin. The main take-away for me was to have the song from Too Many Cooks going around in my head all night.  Just after we finished, Joe vanquished Stanley in a nail-biting finish to Shards: with them both at death's door it was Joe's turn to attack and Stanley didn't draw the shield he needed.

Joe: wins
Stan: off to bed

Which left us as a five. Martin was keen to play Senators so after brief speculative mentions of Battle for Rokugan (one day...) and Northern Pacific, we embarked on our weekly bunfight for the senate.

forgot to take any more pictures at this point, here's Senators being played at Martin's house

It was brutal. Adam in particular suffered from a dearth of money and fortune, as he constantly found himself penniless and senatorially bereft. Martin kept trying to extort money from me and being appalled when I sold things to him. Ian kept up a cash-supply with impressive consistency, especially in a game as barmy as Senators is. He at one point pulled off a spectacular 4-senator cash-in to take the lead, only to have Adam exact some minor pleasure from the game by immediately taking a senator off him.

Martin gambled on events that didn't arrive, and I paid nine sestertii for a Senator when everyone else bid zero. But despite that lavish spending, I pushed ahead of Ian and Joe to claim the seat of power:

Sam 12
Ian 11
Joe 10
Martin / Adam: 5

Adam, exhausted from Senators work, now took his leave and we were a four again. We ended the evening in proper GNN style, with some short silly games.

pic courtesy kalchio, BGG

In Tomatomato you pronounce increasingly long variations on the word tomato: get it wrong and your opponents get to - possibly - claim points; by spelling out the word 'tomato' obviously. Martin's speed at this game was so spectacular that neither Joe, Ian or I could keep up with him and had to trust his word that he wasn't just making random tomato-related noises up. Ian and I stumbled the most, but Joe and Martin tried to claim the same reward - cancelling it out - and I snuck the win:

Sam 3
Joe 2 (wins tie-breaker by owning a potato)
Martin / Ian 2

Then we split into teams to play Push It. Ian teamed up with Joe and I with Martin, as we sat diagonally across from each other. In the past we've played Team Push It pretty much to the same structure as solo Push It, but Martin spotted the team variant in the rules suggests that whichever team is furthest from the puck is currently active. This changed the dynamic of the game considerably, as it escalates the need to be close to the puck: remain furthest away, and you can swiftly run out of discs to fire at it, leaving your opponents with 2 or 3 free shots. Martin and I capitalised on the rule as we raced to a surprisingly one-sided victory:

Martin + Sam 21
Ian + Joe 2

Their only points came from me accidentally hitting the puck off the table. So astonished were we by this lopsided result that we played again. Joe was sure that going first was key to success, and his theory looked like it might hold water when he and Ian quickly established a 5-1 lead. But then it imploded as we raced past them again to another victory:

Martin + Sam 21
Ian + Joe 5

Despite their lack of success both Ian and Joe liked this team rule - we all did, as though it didn't make for the dramatic finales you often get when playing rigidly clockwise, it does enable some big results - and potentially big comebacks as well.

It was reasonably early for a Tuesday, but Ian especially had an early morning to look forward to and the evening came to a natural conclusion. Thanks all!