I was Monty's double

Today saw a joining together of two games nights, a crossover worthy of DC/Marvel, a shift in the Venn diagram of board gaming groups in Bristol. Tuesday's GNN met up with Thursday's Monty games group. Actually, there's already quite an overlap, as GNN regulars Anja, Steve, Adam and Hannah are also members of the Thursday cohort, and Jon from the September weekend was there too.

Sam and I arrived just in time to catch dessert since, apparently, part of Thursday's group involves sitting up at a table, eating a meal and talking like adults. Crazy. The desserts were very nice, and put our usual cheezy wotsits to shame.

But soon we got down to business, and chose our games. Me, Adam, Hannah and Jon chose Tinners' Trail. Sam, Steve and Anja went for League of Six. I'll leave it to them to explain the raised voices as they moaned about their lack of guards but in the meantime, the scores ended.

Steve 60+guards
Sam 60
Anja 58

On our table, it was Jon's first time playing Tinners' Trail and Adam explained the rules to him. Then we started to take chunks out of Cornwall like it was a lovely cheesecake made by Anja. Copper was at a premium and Tin was at its lowest price, but Jon bought a tin-rich mine for little money, hoping the market would pick up. I went for short-term gain, buying only mines with copper in. Hannah kept her mines close together, and Adam hid in the corner, down by Land's End.

It was close game, and Jon seemed to get a hang of it before too long and his long term thinking did pay off, despite Tin remaining rock bottom for much of the game. Adam had a curious method of buying bonds at the end of each round. He'd start with the smallest denomination before moving on to the largest, like someone at a restaurant telling everyone they're on a diet and they just want a small salad before caving in and ordering the banana boat chocolate sundae as well.

In the end, it was one of the closest games of Tinners' Trail we've had. At least, from second to fourth it was close.

Hannah 126
Adam 115
John 113
Andrew 108

Since we were still up to our knees in Cornish mines and pasties when they'd finished League of Six, Steve, Anja and Sam played Biblios. This ever-enigmatic game of zen cardship punishes those who think logically and rewards people who stumble haphazardly through a haze of confusion.

Steve 9
Sam 7
Anja 0

And here the evening ended. We said our goodbyes and gently pushed Molly the cat off Adam's stinky rucksack before heading home.

Steve jumps to the top of the form table, with fellow Eastonites hot on his tail. And we welcome two new names to the form table to make us look a little more popular and sociable.

						Points
Steve	1	1	1	2	4	9
Adam	2	3	2	1	2	10
Anja	3	3	1	1	2	10
Sam	2	2	3	3	3	13
Joe	3	1	5	3	1	13
Andrew	4	3	3	4	1	15
Hannah	1	5	5	5	5	21
Jon	3	5	5	5	5	23

The League of Three

Tuesday night at Joe's was a minority affair, with Andrew off flexing his linguistic muscles and most of the Easton crew unavailable. Adam was there, of course, and he joined Joe and myself for what promised to be my inaugeral game of Brass.

However a promise was all it remained, as having been to Plymouth and back on a job-hunting mission, I was too tired to take on, let alone learn, a Wallace epic. So apologies to Joe and Adam for being a bit of a damp squib in that department. The saga continues... not a par with the Forsythes perhaps, or the Ross/Rachel odyssey of Friends, but I do what I can.

Nonetheless there was still drama to be had. Joe and Adam were interested in trying The League of Six, so that's what we started with. Joe's eagle eye for mechanics spotted that we'd played something slightly wrong last week - not a game-changer, but the player turn re-ordering is decided according to the amount of guards used, rather than horses gathered (the horses still determine turn order on delivering goods). Having been burnt by a multiplier-strategy last week, I was much more cautious in my choice of where to deliver goods. But after a crazy opening where three of the best tiles were flipped over on the towns of Lusatia, Joe remembered that he had several of the tiles in his bag as I'd somehow left them here last week. They were shuffled into the pack and the subsequent 5 rounds were much tighter.

Real tax collectors eat Pringles

I had played before, Joe had play-tested with me, and Adam picks up games quicker than any of us, so I didn't know how this one would end. But Joe gave us a salutary lesson in taxing Lusatian towns and delivering the goods to the best places, allying his in-game point-scoring with a decent collection of multipliers:

Joe  79
Sam 70
Adam 68

I once again enjoyed this game. It is fairly abstract, but it has lots of canny little things about bidding and player order that I like. Adam seemed less enamoured, saying he wasn't sure he understood it. Phew! Imagine if he had.

Next up was Airlines Europe, making it's second bow in Bristol after a debut some months ago now, so long back we needed a heavy rules refresher. For those unfamiliar with it, players buy shares in different airlines (in Europe) and spend money developing those airlines. Nobody runs any of the companies though, so there's an element of suspense as you often don't know if your shares in a particular airline are about to become the minority share, an action that led to a fair amount of cursing and name-calling on this occasion, though it was all allegedly in good heart.

You can't play it without doing this

It's a fun game, but as we noted last night, very different to it's perceived predecessor Ticket to Ride in terms of mechanic and scoring, despite other visual and card-managing similarities. Despite some little bursts of AP, it moved along fairly swiftly and turned out to be a game of fine margins. Adam's decision to keep pace with me on the Abacus Airlines turning out to be oh-so-Hillmannesque and decisive, as the four points he took for sharing first place in shares on them pushed him into first place over all. My four point 'loss' shunted me back behind Joe, who had regrets of his own about how he could have won.

Adam 87
Joe 83
Sam 82

It's a curious game, clever, and nice to look at, but a little dry and distant at the same time. I'm keen to play it again but I'm not sure it's going to be one of my favourites.

On the form table it's as you were positionally, though Adam tightens his grip on top spot. Joe remains in 5th, but he's poised to leap higher next week with a couple of half-decent results, as that irksome 5 will drop off the table (and potentially the 4 too). It's an interesting quirk of the form table that picking up a leaden 5 (as Joe, Anja and myself have all done early in the season) means you need a couple of weeks to shake it off. But having done so you can make a formidable leap upwards...

						Points
Adam	1	3	1	2	2	9
Sam	3	2	3	1	1	10
Andrew	2	4	2	3	1	12
Anja	5	1	1	3	2	12
Joe	2	1	4	5	1	13
Steve	3	3	4	4	4	18

Lots of fun, thanks chaps.

Railways designed in crayon and string

Tonight is a special night, as the Gravediggaz featuring Tricky once sang. And if they'd sung it today, they would've been right because it was Tuesday. In other words: Games Night!

Joe hosted, and Sam and I were early arrivals. Adam arrived just after the three of us had started playing High Society and, knowing Adam's aversion to Reiner Knizia's counter-intuitive game of chance, we stopped.

Instead we chose String Railway, in honour of my impending departure for a fortnight in Japan (since the designer is Japanese). This game involves a board made up entirely of lengths of string, draped carefully over strategically-placed point-scoring stations. Anja turned up just in time to hear the rules and so the five of us jumped right in.

Since it was a first for all of us, there was a certain amount of hesitancy in our play. Some cards were explained as they appeared and strategies often needed to be adjusted as players were reminded of rules. In the end, Joe suffered from the old Instructor's Curse, whereby the person explaining the rules ends up in last.

1. Sam 34
2. Adam 27
3= Andrew 24
3= Anja 24
4. Joe 22

Steve arrived during the game, and ate chips while we finished off. So, with six of us, there was the usual stalemate over what to play next. Sam's new purchase, League of Six, was put on the table and taken off about three times before it was decided that he, me, Steve and Anja would play it. Joe and Adam chose Eurorails, a shiny-surfaced game where players drew their train tracks onto a map in crayon. Luckily, we were able to fit both games on to Joe's kitchen table.

League of Six is, ostensibly, about tax collecting. Each player uses a certain number of guards for the priviledge of taxing a particular city. Each city will give a combination of goods (used for getting points and bonus cards) guards (used for choosing a city), horses (used for player order) and more bonus cards (used at the end of the game for scoring).

It's an interesting game, which relies a lot on understanding what goods your neighbours are going for, because it's possible to force them to use those goods to your benefit. As such, going last is a real disadvantage.

Steve went last a lot. At the end of the game, he and Sam had put a lot of faith in the bonus cards to get them up the score track. In the end, those bonus cards weren't as powerful as we'd thought and they didn't not change the order that we finished in, but they did make it all a lot closer.

Anja 74
Andrew 67
Sam 66
Steve 62

By now Joe and Adam could see no end to their Eurorailing and so, like suddenly homesick students in the middle of an unremarkable European town, they decided to cut their losses and call it a day. They counted up the value of the cards in their hand and the amount they had in their reserve.

Joe 208
Adam 161

Sam left at this point, but Anja wasn't to be stopped. She suggested another quick game, and so No Thanks was brought to the table. This game of bluffing and bidding is always a winner. Steve tried to distract us by dropping his tokens into his lap, in a seedy attempt at getting us to focus on his groin and forget our strategy. Apart from that, the two games played out in the same way that No Thanks usually does.

Anja 16
Adam 36
Steve 38
Andrew 40
Joe 55


Adam 31
Andrew 34
Steve 43
Joe 48
Anja 50

I head to foreign shores with Adam having deposed me from first. And then Sam deposed me from second, too, just for good measure.

						Points
Adam	1	2	2	2	3	10
Sam	3	1	1	5	1	11
Andrew	2	4	2	3	1	12
Anja	5	1	1	3	2	12
Joe	4	5	1	4	3	17
Steve	3	3	4	4	4	18