Reboth

Adam H was our host last night, and as Martin, Joe and I stepped out of the autumnal air we found deep discussions afoot between the host, Steve, Katy and Ian. I didn't quite pick up everything but I think gigs were mentioned, and food, possibly. It was a good five minutes before Joe broke out Champions, causing Martin to mention again how disgusted he still was with those who voted for Sylvia Plath over Kermit as someone who'd keep their Christmas decorations up all year. We explained again that it was her distracted air of accidental neglect, rather than a desire to relentlessly celebrate, but he wasn't having it. Meantime new arguments were breaking out, about whether Ralph Wiggum or Russell Crowe would know all the reality TV stars. 

Ian was champion of champions, correctly predicting the results to all but one of the match-ups. Impressive!

Ian 29
Adam 25
Katy 24
Martin 22
Joe 20
Sam 18
Steve 14

Then we broke into two groups, both of them playing Rebirth, Knizia's new tile-layer than both Ian and I backed without realising the other had. How fortunate though, that we could now have Advanced Rebirthians in the front room playing the Ireland side of the board...

Whilst in the kitchen I talked Katy, Steve and Adam through the less taxing Scotland version. As everyone is now well aware, you have a hand of a single tile, and place it on your turn to score points off farms (food or energy) or settlements. But you can also get extra points for castles (most tiles adjacent) and missions (get a mission by placing next to a cathedral). Steve instantly forgot you can place farms on empty spaces, but recovered from his mid-game surprise to catch us up: and at one stage it was as tight as can be, with all of us poised on 55 points. 

But things changed in the endgame, when Katy realised she had neglected castles and we all had incomplete missions. I forgot to make a note of the scores, but I won and I think Adam was second, then Steve and Katy. The others were still making noises of rumination over the emerald isle, so we began playing Looot, the take-and-make game where the making is puzzly but the taking is spicy.

Katy liked having vikings but became slightly disconcerted by the plundering, where we get in each other's way on the shared board before hauling our booty home again. Adam seemed to be collecting so many longships it seemed impossible to do them. We proliferated. 

Meantime Ireland had been successfully reborn - by Ian. It was a close run thing though:

Ian 206
Martin 201
Joe 200

They all announced how crazy it was. "I want to try Scotland again now" said Martin, like a man who'd been complaining about stubbing his toe and then had someone hit it with a hammer. Seeing we were knee-deep in sheep and axes, they began playing Tower Up. 

In Looot, there was drama on the final round as Steve snaffled up the gold Katy needed to complete two of her longships. It's a mildly dickish game with two, but with four the vindictive side of the vikings really comes out. What's more, Steve's move was enough for Katy's prediction that he would win 'despite not knowing what he was doing' to come true. I'm not sure what happened to Adam, whom I had expected to beat us. All of us had incomplete longships, but Katy had four of the buggers. 

Steve 100
Sam 99
Adam 88
Katy 51

Tower Up ended around the same time, as Joe triumphantly pranced around the room with his hands in the air. Again, it was super-tight:

Joe 55

Martin 54

Ian 45

And that was that! With no So Clover under the roof and Adam needing a reasonably early night, we were done. 

That's a Fact

With Laura and Andrew bowing out on the day, there were still seven of us clustered at Joe's house come 7.30: myself, the host, Katy, Ian, Martin, and 'the Adams' which kicked off an evening of confusion when, on arrival, I thought Adam T and Joe were talking about calling everyone Adam would be a 'great system' but it transpired they were speaking of other things. I should have known. I got even more confused by whose birthday it was. Katy brought cake.

Everyone threw their games on the table. Adam T's included one he'd forgotten how to play and the rules were in Russian. Martin's included Orbit, which immediately had plenty of volunteers - he began setting that up as Adam H and I explained Looot to Joe. 

Despite Looot's quirky name and simple rules, it's quite a thinker, packing that puzzly euro game feel into a fast-moving half-hour or so. As Vikings, we raid the central board to take things home to our homelands, and then score them depending on configurations: you surround buildings or longships with the resources they need to flip them: once flipped, they make said resources worth more points. It's a take-and-make style game reminiscent in one sense of Cascadia/Calico, but competition on the shared board makes it far more cut-throat, as Joe serially discovered at the hands of Adam. 

Meantime Orbit was being played out in teams, with Katy and Ian suffering the slings and arrows of Adam T and Martin. And vice versa. 

I didn't get all the details but I did catch, I think, some reminiscing over when or how the term 'space cunt' originated a discussion about Katy calling someone a cunt (again). It's probably nice being a team though, as you are c**t-side of everyone in this game. Meanwhile on hexagonal Earth, I was losing my way despite playing Looot a few times already this week. My vikings lacked coherency, gathering gold boosters when I severely lacked any gold to boost. Adam - having been the most dastardly - took a clean win here, with Joe coming a solid second on debut. 

Adam 99

Joe 91

Sam 76

Orbit was still in full-dick, so we set up A Message from the Stars. This melted my head when I was a human being, but thankfully I was now an alien, with far less cognitive load, as Joe and Adam took up the role of cryptographers.  

They did very well. It was fascinating to watch them make so much hay from a single word, but my brain contains about as much logical deduction power as a conference pear. I just needed to give them enough clues to work with, which is a comparatively simple undertaking. They cracked the code, and after a near-miss with Royalty, we deciphered each other's messages!

Adam, Joe and Sam: joint winners.

Orbit hadn't quite finished so we set up Misfits. Adam got us off to a brutal start with horrible bit of foundational sabotage, but we managed to build it quite high up before it finally fell over on Joe. 

While that was happening, Katy and Ian triumphed in Orbit! I don't have Andrew's powers of dual-focus and (more) diligent note-taking, so I know very little about it. I did hear Martin hurrying Ian along at one stage, saying he had so many cards to choose from. "And they're all crap" Ian said. But they won anyway. I think around now we had cake. But it may have been later. 

They began playing Saer - I missed this too, apologies - as Misfits continued to implode on all three of us at different stages. Joe did his best with an enormous stack of pieces, but he couldn't quite do enough. During several late-game half-collapses, it was Joe who took the hit again when the entire tower fell over. 

The others finished Saer, with Martin taking a win despite Ian's huge array of cards in Ragnarok!

Martin 10

Katy 9

Ian 8

Adam T 4

They paused to watch the Misfits finale - I took the win - then we debated what to play next. There was a general move towards Fun Facts, which Martin protested, but he was overwhelmed by the amenability of others to it, and we set it up in the face of his ongoing chagrin when no suitable alternative could be decided on. 

My notes here just record the questions. Water! Birthday! Dancing! Lists! Old People! Fixing Things! Museums! Musicals! With the question in each instance being more or less how much we like them all (the exception was museums, where we were queried on how many we'd visited in the last 12 months). The numbers often surprised us and we didn't manage a single perfect round. I was surprised with how much everyone allegedly enjoys dancing, as it's never featured in the years of GNN, but I guess it's very context-specific. We were right in assuming Adam H and I love <the idea of> fixing things, and everyone was more amenable to old people than they are musicals. "I was thinking film musicals" Katy admitted afterwards, her brain perhaps marginally scrambled by all those museum visits (one a month!).  Adam was ashamed of his zero museums, saying this was highly atypical of him. We scored 44, to the rulebook's slightly snooty indifference, and Martin told us he didn't think much of Fun Facts at this point, in case we hadn't realised. 

Adam T left us and as a six we migrated to So Clover. Our first stab was a decent affair, with Katy's Hunger for Diet/Pine one of the high spots. I thought it might relate to the Alt-J song, but Joe realised the 'pining' logic Katy intended. 30/36

Adam and Ian now headed off too, but the four of us had one more game to play. We still had the So Clover itch and set up again.  Martin's Sifting for Flour/Fishing was particularly nice, and though there were a couple of hairy moments we navigated them successfully to join the record of legends or whatever it's called, with a perfect 24/24!

And so to bed. Just one more GNN until Novocon, everybody!