Whittle down the will

Six gamers, two of whom had travelled thousands of miles since they last met a year ago, congregated at Joe's kitchen table for an evening of games: Joe, Sam, Martin, Ian, Katy and me.

We began with Maskmen, the curious game of emergent properties (of wrestlers). The Mountain Goats provided a thematic backdrop with a concept album (about wrestlers) while Katy and I were introduced to the game.

It is strange and difficult to judge, not just what to play but who is beating who. The very sparse scoring system meant that in a six player game, three would get no points at all ("I'm okay...for zero," said Martin) while a fourth would get minus one. Fine margins indeed.

It was Katy who unleashed her gimpish inner fighter to best effect.

Katy 4
Andrew 2
Joe 2
Martin 1
Ian 0
Sam -1

Next we stayed as a six for a game of Not Alone. In this game, one player is the native of an alien planet trying to capture the other players who have all been stranded on said planet and are waiting for the rescue ship to arrive.

Katy was tonight's alien and she did very well, stopping us from doing all of the necessaries to escape. In the first move she went to the river at the same time as me, Joe, Sam and Ian did. Luckily Martin saved us with a survival card that moved the alien to an adjacent place.

Of the survivors, Martin did the best, saving our bacon with survival cards on more than one occasion. The rest of us had our will whittled away completely at some point (maybe Sam avoided that, not sure) and in the end Katy was able to assimilate us by catching Joe again, with the rescue ship only two spaces away.

Then we split into two groups. Katy, Sam and Joe played Tiny Town which looked adorable but apparently is full of Take It Easy style analysis paralysis. Ian Martin and me chose Senators, a new card game of bidding and buying, with the peculiar rules that all losing players should stand up at the end and say "Hail, Caesar!" and also that there is no second place.

In the game you can start an auction (to try and buy resources or sell them and get money), cash in sets of three resources (for money), embezzle publicly visible cards from your opponents and all of this is so you can buy senators (points, basically). Most points wins.

I had very little money early on after I went a bit nuts in an auction round. I had plenty of resources, but no sets of three. Martin is able to get some money by cashing in and while Ian started well, he fell away towards the end. My blushes were saved by a bit of a mega move where I got five points for myself and knocked one point off Martin. Not enough to catch him, though.

However at the end of the game neither Ian or I stood up to hail our new leader and, to make things worse, I decided there was a second place after all.

Martin 13
Andrew 12
Ian 8

A nice game and one I'd like to try again.

While we played that, the other half of the table got through two games of Tiny Town.

Joe 31
Sam 24
Katy 22

The second began with Sam declaring early on that he had a plan, and he certainly did better than before, only losing to Joe on a tie break. Katy seemed to have trouble differentiating between certain buildings and icons.

Joe 31
Sam 31
Katy 16

At this point Ian set off on the long trek home while we remaining five play Nakanuki Paradise to a soundtrack of "nice" music as requested by Martin to the Google Assistant. The game was new to me and my notes read simply "crazy game" but it was a lot of fun, and it is like a concentrated version of Polterfass.

Martin 11
Andrew 9
Joe 8
Katy 8
Sam 6

And since it was now a little after eleven we all bade our farewells and set off home. Thanks to all, especially to Joe for hosting the second games events in four days! What a gent.

Where there's a will

As Ben, Ian and I discussed events of the day suddenly lightening flashed, thunder boomed. Then the doorbell rang: it was Joe, soon followed by Chris, and finally a slightly damp-looking Andrew, who didn't escape the downpour. The rest of us wrapped up our game of Pairs as it stood (Chris won) and went into the front room to discuss options.

I kept mentioning Lancaster, but nobody seemed that interested. However, as the discussion slowly broke down into a kind of collective diffidence, I realized people were weakening: I pushed for Lancaster again, and managed to rope in Joe and Ian. Ben also returned to the kitchen, allowing Chris and Andrew to make the choice for the other game: they went with Castles of Burgundy.

I talked Joe and Ian through the rules of Lancaster, and we were off. Because the heart of the game is worker-placement/bumping, the finesse of it comes in the voting for laws: at the end of each round certain laws reward certain players, so how you spend your votes (you potentially have many) can be crucial. Ian and I didn't manage to prevent Joe from ushering in a 9point swing in his favour, as he was rewarded for battling the French in three different places. In the early rounds I decided against screwy moves, and in the later rounds I failed to stop myself making stupid ones: twice I voted the wrong way on something - after the first do-over, there was no excuses.

Joe sped off into the lead and stayed there. Ian and I battled for second, and during the final round I realized that the strength of my knights meant I was looking at third place - so it ended. I didn't jot down the scores, but Joe was miles ahead on the scoretrack and Ian a solid 8 points or so ahead of me. Joe didn't rate the game though, only being able to raise a shrug of indifference. Maybe it was too easy. Conversely Ian and I liked it; the hidden voting gives it a flavour that Waterdeep doesn't have.

Castles of Burgundy was still ongoing, so Joe dealt out the cards for Money. This was new to me, but the rules are simple enough, as long as you're no fool. I was a fool, however, and had misunderstood the scoring to the point where I was literally throwing away points during the game, allowing Joe to pick them up. He won with a thousand points; Ian had 870 and I - thinking I was about to pull off a debut win - had a measly 520. I wouldn't mind trying this again, but it did feel a little like a mechanic more than a game.

Castles of Burgundy was finally over, and Andrew had pulled off a solid win:

Andrew 186
Chris 166
Ben 129

And while Andrew headed off into the night, the rest of us played Not Alone, Joe's new game of alien predation/human survival. Joe took the role of the alien, trying to second-guess our human destinations as we roamed the planet, holding on until the rescue ship arrived.

It was a close thing at the end: we were staring up at the sky, waving excitedly at the rescue ship, when Joe stole in and sucked the will out of Ben in a gruesome end to the evening.

Hooray for Hollywood

Despite having come back from a four-day gaming glut this weekend, I found myself itching for another game when Joe’s email popped into my inbox offering to host for this week.

It seems I was in a minority, as there were only five of us: Joe, me, Katy and Ian, with Martin expected at eight.

The four of us began with Not Alone, an exciting semi-co-op game with one player as the alien hunter, trying to assimilate the band of unfortunate Terrans who’ve crashed on the alien’s planet.

Joe was the alien, and Katy, Ian and I as the apparently easy-to-predict stranded space travellers. It looked close for a while, but Joe was able to predict our movements with enough accuracy that we couldn’t hang on until our rescue ship arrived.

Martin arrived punctually on our tragic demise, and we sat down to play Fuji Flush, an oddly named card game in which you have to get rid of your cards. It’s almost co-operative since the deck is built such that there are multiples of the lower cards and far fewer of the higher cards.

The trick to this non-trick-taking game is that as each player lays one card at a time, higher cards eliminate previously laid lower cards (these are discarded and replaced from a draw deck) but also when a player puts down a card of the same value as a previous card, they add up. In other words at 3 followed by a 3 would count as a 6, and if another player wanted to beat these two they’d have to play at least a 7.

It all seemed like a bit of a luck-fest with limited options and afterwards I likened it to me watching myself play a card game. Katy got, I think, only one card above 10 which meant she was relying on others to put down the same value cards as she had. This caused some frustration for her.

In the end, Martin won, and he decided it was an interesting idea for a game.

Martin 0 cards left
Joe 1 card left
Ian 1 card left
Andrew 1 card left
Katy 4 cards left

After this, Martin noticed Hollywood Blockbuster in among Joe's collection and suggested it. I'd pretty much forgotten about this game, played once over two years ago, but I quickly remembered its main mechanic: that people who win auctions evenly share out the money they paid to the other players.

No one finished a film in round one, so it was all hands to the deck in rounds two and three. I became a veritable dream factory, churning out film after film. My epic comedy Gopher Shack won best film, but Ian and I tied for Best Director which meant neither of us got the points.

My cheap and cheerful conveyor belt of films didn't beat Martin's thoughtfully put together canon of work.

Martin 75
Andrew 68
Ian 67
Katy 61
Joe 55

And so Martin left at this point, practically ushered out of the door so we could get cracking on the next game. It was only just past 9.30 but none of us had the strength for Lords Of Vegas. Instead we went for two short games, the first of which was For Sale.

I started badly, paying too much for a twenty, and I never recovered. I don't remember much about what happened (no notes, you see) apart from one particularly nasty range of cheques on offer in one round, but it finished:

Ian 65
Katy 61
Joe 55
Andrew 44

Next up was Land Unter. This game of saving drowning sheep has a clever twist in that the hands of cards are dealt out at the start and these hands are passed from player to player at the start of the round so everyone plays one round with each hand. Ian started with a terrible round and got eliminated. When I saw what he had, I could empathise. And I empathised even more when I was eliminated too.

When Joe saw the cards, his initial reaction was the same as ours but when he played, he avoided the pitfalls that we fell into. While Ian and I got -1 with those cards, he scored 5. This put him joint first with Katy after three rounds, and she hadn't had the shitty hand.

But they hadn't reckoned with her gaming nous. She also scored five while Joe looked on in annoyance that his gaming miracle had been replicated. He only scored one that round, leaving the points at:

Katy 13
Joe 9
Andrew 5
Ian -2

And so we were done. Technically there was time for more games, but we thought an early night would be sensible.

Nothing much changes on the Division, with Sam and Katy holding onto their respective titles.