The Da Vinci Mode

Yesterday was Andrew's birthday, and would you believe, he initially refused my offer of a game. But one doesn't turn 43 having a quiet night in, and when I waved Fresco under his nose, Andrew's gaming gene kicked in and he succumbed.

Hopefully he feels it was worth it. I really liked the game. Each player assumes the part of a painter, collaborating on a fresco in some cathedral or other. As you paint, you send your assistants off to market to buy paints, to the workshop to mix them, or occasionally sell a painting for a bit of cash. And there's a Bishop wandering around in the cathedral - if he witnesses you doing a particularly handy bit of the fresco it's worth a little extra on the victory point track.

Fairly straightforward then. Only there are a couple of teeny twists. One is that each player chooses what time to get out of bed - get up early and you get first dibs on everything, but the market is more expensive and your assistants can get in a bad mood - potentially bad enough for one of them to abandon you. Get up later and everything's rosy - but that green paint you wanted from the market may have gone.

The other twist is that everyone chooses where to send their assistants secretly before revealing. I think this would be more nail-bitey in a 3 or 4 player game; in a two player (as it was our first game we ignored a dummy player rule) it didn't affect us too much - until the last round when suddenly it was really tense! I loved the ramping up - not too brain-burny at the start, but not a stroll through the end.

Great game. I'll bring it tonight.

Sam ?
Andrew ?

As it was still early and we were flushed from our experience, we decided to try out our long-mooted idea of the 2-player variant of Tinner's Trail (Wheal of Fortune) from the geek. Unfortunately it wasn't a great success on this occasion - there's a dummy player who is basically a spoiler for your best-laid plans; dice are rolled for him, and usually he sinks a ship or throws a miner into the sea. He spoiled Andrew's game more than mine, and I nabbed a win.

I felt we couldn't end Andrew's night on such an underwhelming experience, so we chose our cars and played Monza. This little game comes in a little box - you rolled coloured dice and move little cars as far as they'll go. But about a year ago we (me and the kids) played it so much we made our own Monza track, with room for Matchbox cars to career around it.

Andrew rolled well and despite rattling around the track in a camper van he took the win from my sportier car. Nice way to end the evening... Andrew left for home with three more games in his belt for his 43rd year.

Bright Lights, String Theory

Last night Sally and I entertained Katie and Mark, gamers in every sense bar the enormous collection, card-sniffing habit etc. On a recommendation from Joe we'd bought Mark Vegas for his belated birthday present, so after a hefty helping of cheese we cracked it open and dived straight in.

It's a very simple game of allotting your dice to different casinos and collecting cash when they pay out (when everyone is out of dice). The numbers on your dice are irrelevant; it's about how many dice you have in each casino... the catch being that if more than one player has the same amount of dice in the same casino, they are all rendered null and void.

the fun never stops

In the end it Katie "the chiseller" Daniels who took first place, with some canny die-play that picked up a lot of $60 and $50k cards while the rest of us fought over the odd $90k:

Katie $480k
Mark $430k
Sam  $390k
Sally $340k

With the night still young and lactose surging through our veins, I took the plunge and broke out String Railway. Like Vegas it's very simple, but the friendly feel of round one was clouded by growing analysis paralysis over subsequent rounds as the 'board' became more and more crowded. We didn't help ourselves by playing one more round than the game recommends for four, but anyway... I was barricaded in by the river and spent the first four rounds fretting, but my final play into the mountains finally got me a decent score and I leapfrogged Katie into third place...

the fun stops

Mark 25
Sally 24
Sam  22
Katie 20

The tactical challenge exhausted everyone, but I managed to convince Mark into a game of Monza to finish off - it's a very simple racing game, a little like Ave Caesar but with almost zero strategy. Basically you can move your racing car according to the colours on the dice you roll, so though it says ages 5-99 on the box, I somehow can't picture Wallace sitting at home exclaiming "Hey! Who fancies a game of Monza?" We won one race each, then in the decider Mark found himself stuck on the second corner, rolling a series of useless dice as I skidded to an unlikely victory.

Monza!

We decided to start a little KMSS leaderboard and see who was doing best between the four of us, so here it is, based on our games from last night (ignoring Monza), and previous games nights in August and April. As you can see, Mark is the man to beat, heading the form table by some distance.

KMSS						Points
Mark		1	2	1	1	5
Katie		4	1	3	2	10
Sally		2	4	1	4	11
Sam		3	3	2	3	11

I do feel a bit ropey today though. Too much cheese.