99% Perspiration

It was a hot and sweaty night. Although thunder distantly rumbled, the vice-like warmth didn't break, and five of us sat in the kitchen grateful for the occasional blessings of an oscillating fan. With the darkness came a slight relief - but not much. It was like an African evening in a sweltering, conspiratorial Graham Greene novel - only with less espionage and more German post. 

But I get ahead of myself. Joe was early and so with 20 minutes at our disposal, we disposed of them with a crack at Letterpress. I'd recently had a harrowing game against Adam, scoring only 8 points (-bad for round one, let alone the deciding round five finale) and the early showings weren't good as Joe won rounds one and two and picked up a couple of challenge cards: he had six letters to my two at this point. But I rallied somewhat, and though Joe's final word was more stylish - VARSITIES - I picked up a redemptive (narrow) win with SCRAGGING. 

As we compared hands, Pete and Adam arrived, followed shortly by Ian. I suggested we start the evening proper with a frippery, and everyone was amenable to 1AM Jailbreak. This is a Saashi card-shedder where we are allegedly trying to escape all our prisoners (our hand of cards) out of jail and into the tunnel (the table). Despite playing it as recently as last week I was hazy on a couple of rules - I blame the heat - but fortunately Pete and Joe were on hand to help me out.

 

Over the three rounds Joe proved to be best escape artist, as he loosed all his prisoners from chokey every time. His only competition was Adam, as the rest of us appeared incapable of using a spade. I'm blaming going to get the fan on this one. 

1 Joe 
2 Adam
3 Pete
4 Ian
5 Sam

We looked at the stack of 5-player games I'd brought in and wondered if it was too hot for Hansa Teutonica. Or if it would be too long. Or if we'd be done by 9pm (this last one was a gamer's joke, unfit for any other scenario). But there was a general swing towards it so we set up and clarified a couple of fuzzy edge-cases, remembering everything else apart from the fact if you get extra actions you get them straight away - you really had to be there, it was dramatic. 

Initially we mostly split by geography. Outside of the classic fighting over Gottingden Joe focused on the north and me the south, with the others running interference on both. I scored the first point, but if I had ideas that this meant I was in the running - and it didn't - I was swiftly caught and overtaken by Joe. Despite Ian's best efforts to get in his way, he managed to get a little scoring route together in the north-west and starting eking out points. 

Joe (red) takes the lead. Ian (fingers) is just about to move 

him further up the track as well

I was last to get myself up to three actions and paid the price, spending much of the mid-game feeling underpowered as Adam spent his four - and then five! - across the table from me. Although he scored precious little from the route-building he seemed to have timed things well, and spent the last act powering his way across the board. 

But it wasn't enough to catch Joe, who'd juggled the various challenges of HT with aplomb, building a big lead through his routes and developing the joint-largest network. Pete's plans to connect the east-west postal route fell apart - "I've gone wrong" he said, like an early AI postman - and Ian realised that he had no network at all. 

Joe 42
Adam 33
Sam 32
Pete 29
Ian 25

A stone-cold classic - great to play again and it definitely suits five. 

It did take a wee while though - it was past nine now - and it was still hot. We collectively determined we had one more game in us and it would be So Clover. We opened with three sixes - Ian, Pete and myself - but were foxed by Joe's clue of rummers. Joe suggested we could google it but we weren't sure that was in the rules. We were also too hot and lazy. And so we missed glasses/pirate, not knowing a rummer is a glass and being sidetracked by my fixation on the Rummer pub in town, which I thought might be green. Or possibly grey. Sorry Joe. We ended on a 4 with Adam's clover, thrown by the fact he'd written Hoodlum for hood. "I only realised when you said it" said Adam. What with the heat, it was that kind of night. 

25/30 - not terrible by any means. A very fun night - two years and a day since my last play of Hansa Teutonica! Let's not leave it that long again... Thanks all 

The Search for Planet Games

Last night Martin made his way to my house for some socially-distanced two-player games.

After a quick catch up, we kicked off with The Search for Planet X.

In this deductive undertaking, you are astronomers scanning the solar system for the mysterious (and actually plausible in real life) extra planet. The board is separated into 12 sectors (18 if you're feeling expert, but we did 12) and nine have a single thing in them (comet, gas cloud, asteroid, or dwarf planet)  while three are apparently empty (two are genuinely empty;  one will actually be hiding Planet X itself). Each game has some universal rules about how these things relate to each other, and also some specific ones that are furnished by the app. Your goal is to find the Planet, obviously, but the method of doing so is deducing what is in all the sectors, and while you're doing this the game invites you to submit theories as to what celestial body is where - because these theories score points, you can actually win even if you don't locate the planet first.

On each turn you choose whether to survey (look for a specific object in specific sectors) research (uncover facts about how objects relate to each other) and, only twice a game, target (establish categorically what is in one sector of your choice). All actions take time, and the furthest back on the time track is the active player - like a spacey version of Tokaido. Although the app suddenly needed an update halfway through, the mechanics are actually simple - and the submitted theories, when proved right, give additional clues to help you work out what's where. The brain-melting is applying the incremental drip of info to the elimination and clarification of what, exactly, is where, in the firmament.

My early targeting found an apparently empty sector, which didn't really help with my opening theory (you can't theorise that there's nothing ) but found the solitary Dwarf Planet with my second. Martin revealed later he'd located the two comets early on, and he led the running in the theories from the get-go. I could have been first to find Planet X but I made a critical error, surveying when I didn't actually need to. As it turned out, it wouldn't have been enough anyway: Martin's astronomy skills were superior to mine.

Martin 29
Sam 19

Having completed a great step forward for mankind, we took a couple backwards to try Martin's acquisition of Heir to the Pharaoh.  It's a tricky one to precis, but I'll give it a quick go: bid for God cards to put things on a track and get monuments and build obelisks and stuff that point at other obelisks and stuff for points and contribute to a pyramid and if things point at the pyramid they score themselves too and get Magic Animals.

Yes, it's pretty abstract, and pretty bonkers as well, but we liked it. There's a nifty bidding mechanic where sun cards beat moon cards in ties, and bidded cards go to the opposing player at the start of the next round. It was a mixture of Knizia and someone a bit more fiddly, but a lot of fun.

I led through much of the game, but having reached peak red wine around the halfway mark, couldn't quite crack the puzzle playing out on the board itself, satisfying myself with monument collections and pyramid contributions. Twice I ended up with a single God (along with Thoth, the God of catch-up mechanisms and round-resetting) and on the penultimate round I spent so much that my final bidding hand was predominantly a confection of low moon cards.

Martin - loads of points
Sam - about ten less points

We wrapped up with Letterpress, at which point my memories get a little bit blurry except to say I temporarily convinced myself I could spell advisable as advizable and my stashed cards for the final, critical round, looked like some kind of consonant-heavy secret code. I managed a thematically-apt DAZED, but Martin came up trumps with a very impressive BLUSTERY.

Lots of fun. I hope we'll be growing the numbers at some point, somewhere, soon. Meantime if anyone fancies a head-to-head evening of physically distant fun...???