Going Commando

On Friday Paul made one of this intermittent sorties from Croydon, so for Andrew and I the journey from the other direction to Chris' house was a comparative breeze, despite some heavy traffic. We entertained ourselves playing the A-Z game, which somehow led us to the idea of Heston Blumenthal serving a pint of offal as pudding or an Oswestry Trifle being 100% cream. It's a long story, but not one where you probably had to be there.

We arrived to find Chris and Paul finishing off a game of Cosmic Run. I didn't pick the story of the game, but I seem to recall Chris had won.

Chris then had to dash off to pick up his children, so Andrew and I introduced Paul to The Mind. We failed to beat the game, but picked up another admirer in the time it took for Chris to return.

After catching up and being plied with delicious food, we debated what to play before settling on The Oracle of Delphi. This was a game I'd played with Stanley the previous weekend so I had the rules fresh in my head - most of them anyway. What I didn't have fresh about my person was the entire contents of the game, as we discovered after setting up there was a bag of player pieces missing. At this point I was crestfallen, as it seemed Zeus had maybe set us one task too many. But I underestimated our boardgame commando stylings - Chris moved up several gears as he engaged the service of a printer to generate some more tasks, and ransacked other games for other ad hoc replacements.

That out the way, we moved on to the original twelve Zeus had set us, with the winner allowed into the hallowed porch of heaven, or something.

Chris's yellow ship - secretly a temple

I began at speed and was first to complete a task. In fact I think I was about three tasks ahead at one point, but my lack of forward planning meant I'd left myself with not much room for manoeuvre, as Zeus is more picky about certain tasks more than others; you can make any three coloured statues you like, as long as two of them are yellow and green...

And like a breakaway sprinter in Flamme Rouge, I found myself overhauled by everyone as statues and shrines were erected, offerings given, and monsters defeated. Paul played slow and steady, but like the tortoise, it seemed to be the right thing to do.

Paul - chores done
Andrew and Chris - one task left
Sam - three tasks left

Thanks to our early start, the night was still young, but rather than begin another odyssey we went for  the comparative soufflé of Cash N' Guns; new to everyone but Chris but straightforward to pick up. There are eight piles of cash (or other good stuff) and everyone has a gun. Everyone plays a card face down that represents a click or a bang, then the Godfather counts us in and we all point a gun at each other. Someone with a gun (or guns) pointing at them can choose to back out of the round - or they can take a risk and stay in. Cards are revealed and a click does no damage to the recipient. A bang however means you're out of the round - and three bangs means your out of the game!

Each player only has three bang cards and five clicks though, so there's some table-reading at play here. Being Godfather means you can tell one player to point their gun at someone else, but there's a cost to becoming Godfather, as when all the loot is shared out you can forego a share in order to become the new Godfather.

It was fast, fun and very silly.

Chris 206
Sam 197
Paul 127
Andrew 107

Next up was Space Base, the dice-chucking game of spaceship deployment. I persisted with my method of purchasing lots of low-value ships quickly - the idea being to maximise returns on other players turns - but it proved as ineffective as any other time I've used it. Chris's early-game business seemed to leave him never picking up cash on anyone else's turn, but whatever he was up to, it worked out for him. Regularly rolling the right numbers on his own turn helped as well, as he surged up the track leaving the rest of us languishing in the doldrums:

Chris 41
Sam 17
Paul 15
Andrew 10

Paul was eager to return to The Mind, so we did. It was a slightly drunken series of Minds, though, that included a hesitant level one where any misconceived idea of collective synchronicity went up in smoke as Paul banged down his 83. The rest of us had cards in the seventies, which felt thematically appropriate, somehow.

But our third attempt was a bit more valiant, as we crashed and burned at the giddy heights of level 7.

Our consciousnesses aligned, we sought to break them apart again with a fast-moving blast of poker. A fiver each in the pot, winner-take-all, and a mere ten minutes between each doubling up of the ante. Paul looked strong early on, ominously building a lead of chips by whittling off each of us. Chris was first out when his pocket queens were unluckily ousted by my pocket jacks - a third jack coming up on the turn saving my all-in bacon. With the antes upping, Andrew was out shortly afterward, and it was between myself and Paul.

I threatened briefly, but like the candle of youth, my brief surge flickered out as, chips fast-disappearing, I was forced to go all in on a shabby hand. Fortunately for me, Paul followed me in with an almost-equally-shabby one. Unfortunately for me, almost-as is not the same as worse-than, and he made a pair anyway...

Paul + £20
Everyone else - £5

Midnight wasn't too far off now so we made our aperitif Pairs, once a staple of games nights but lesser-spotted these days. This part of the evening is less twelve tasks and more twelve drinks though, and my recollection of the game is murky. I do recall going bust on blueberries, and the fact Andrew engineered himself into a winning position, but chose to twist a few times anyway. Successfully as it happens... kudos to him.

In the morning I noted the leftovers of the kind of party Martin Amis can only dream of, with Zeus's tasks discarded next to a boozy kitchen sink.

As I had to head off to Cheshire, Andrew and I wended our way home early-doors, coming up with twenty six words for the current weather (y was yucky). I enjoyed the puzzly sandbox of Delphi, the silliness of Cash and Guns and I always love The Mind. Great to revisit poker as well. Thanks all for a very fun evening! Hope to see you soon. Paul.

Jack and Jack

No, not a gender-balanced version of the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill, rather it was the most common hand to be dealt in last night’s poker extravaganza: pocket Jacks came up about five times during the evening.

Anyway, since I boasted about my win at Poker last time, I think it’s only right that I should report my loss this time. We were six in total, after the usual spate of last-minute apologies: hosts Tom and Hannah, Joe, Mart, Simon and myself.

Simon was either new to Poker or a mean card shark, as he tried to deal from the bottom of the pack and then sped into an early lead, all the time insisting that he didn’t really know what was going on.

Furthermore, he introduced us all to a Chinese rice win called Baiju. We tried it with ice and found it largely undrinkable. While trying to pin down it’s distinctive flavour, I suggested tennis shoes while Tom thought it had more of an air of petro-chemicals. Either way, it was quite a struggle to drink and even Simon admitted defeat and poured the rest of the bottle down the sink.

To keep things short, though, Simon went out first followed by Joe. I was in a healthy position mid-game, having won big a couple of times with just Card High as my winning hand. My poker face was strong this night.

With four of us left, we fell into the old routine of folding if we had a middling-to-poor hand: something that only usually happens when there’s only a couple of players left. This rather stilted state of affairs continued until Hannah decided she wanted to go to bed. She began betting all-in, but kept winning. She went from a weak position to a very strong one, as Mart fell by the wayside and then I, too, followed (foolishly going all in on unsuited 3-4, hoping for some low cardson the flop. No such luck).

Once it was just husband versus wife, they decided to end the evening and split the £60 of winnings between them. Congrats to the hosts, and thanks for another tense evening.

Luck loves a fool

It’s not leaderboard, but with three GNN regulars in attendance, it would be wrong to not mention tonight’s game. Many, many years ago, when Sam, Chris, Paul and I lived in London and our interest in games was little more than Chris mentioning that he might like to try one sometime, we would have regular Poker nights. Some years later, the Poker nights transplanted to Bristol, but by now they have the added distraction of Settlers of Catan and El Grande to compete with. In the end, the meeples overthrew the chips, and board games became our regular gaming fix, with Poker reduced to the occasional cameo role.

Today, though, saw the first of what might become a monthly occasion. Hosted by Tom, original emails suggested we would be seven or eight in number, with a £10 buy-in. But a number of last-minute bail-outs meant that Tom had to subsidise his wife and eldest daughter to join us, putting the numbers back up to a respectable six.

We were Tom, Hannah (not GNN Hannah) and Lola (these three made up the host and family) and also Joe, Sam and I (the visitors). We began without Sam, who was still en route. He got their soon enough and, panting from his bike ride, and still trying to sort out his sandwiches and crisps, he distractedly kept raising until everyone else had folded. His first win, and he hadn’t even got his breath back.

This was where his good form ended, though. His recent form at Poker has been that he is out first, and so it was tonight. He went all in on one hand, and Lola did the same. I had Q J (don’t remember the suits, but they weren’t the same) and plenty of money in reserve, so I figured I may as well stay in. They had K 7 (Sam) and K 8 (Lola) and Sam had the upper hand with a pair of sevens until the fifth card showed another Queen. I had won, and knocked two players out in the process.

This was especially galling for Lola who had only recently folded a hand on the advice of her father, when later cards revealed that she would have won. But that’s Poker, a game that is hard to write about because so much of it is in the Past Present Conditional tense: “I would have (verb) if only I hadn’t...”. That verb is usually “won.” Accompanied by bitter tears of regret.

So now we were down to four: Tom, me, Hannah and Joe. Hannah, after a poor start had got her mojo back towards the end of her second glass of wine, winning one hand with a straight when everyone else was obsessing over pairs and three of a kinds.

But after a while, Joe and Hannah both fell by the wayside. Joe stayed to act as dealer for Tom and I, which I regretted at first since, under his dealership, my previous good luck evaporated faster than an ice cube on the Sun. The balance of power tilted back to Tom. I moaned, and Joe suggested that he stopped dealing. But I said it was okay for him to continue, partly because I didn’t want to be a slave to superstition, and also because if we did change dealers and I still lost, who was I supposed to blame?

But after a few rounds of me folding or losing, Tom made a tactical error. I went all in on a pretty boring board (those cards everyone can see and use) and Tom matched me. Almost as he did, he said he shouldn’t have, because he had nothing while I had a pair. The last card to be shown didn’t change that, and I won a pivotal round. After this I pushed hard on my next good hand and got another win. After this it was just a matter of waiting until Tom raised when I also had a good hand, in the hope that my luck lasted longer than his.

And it did. I got him out and claimed a rare victory at Poker. Admittedly, a lot of stronger players than me weren’t present, but you can only beat the opponents you play against. And if they want to chicken out at the last minute, then that’s their affair.

However, this win is pretty rare, and I did have a lot of luck. Almost much every hand I had showed some possibility. And what are the chances of me winning two hands in a row on a Full House with three twos in there somewhere? I guess Lady Luck took a fancy to me that night. And so I’m posting about it now. Pure vanity publishing, but hey – I may not win another Poker game for the next couple of years.

Good Weather, Bad Beat

The extended Morrison clan headed to Devon this weekend, to the scout hut. Quite possibly not ever a real scout-hut, this nonetheless very scouty hut-type building perches overlooking the Channel, and on a fine day it feels like one of the nicer places in England to be. There's a short walk to a tiny beach and an even shorter one to a proper Devon pub. Way back in the pre-GNN days myself, Joe, Chris, Andrew and Paul congregated there for a gaming weekend - I'll see if I can't get the hut again for whoever can make it at some point, as it's such a great location.

The reason for the get-together was my dad, Mo (Mervyn Oakman Robinson, to give you the full nomenclature) was over from America. And in-between some cliff-top walks we of course squeezed in some games!

On Friday I introduced Mo and my brother Marty to Timeline. I'd borrowed Joe's set, and as well as having more cards, the card size made the game more accessible to three optically-challenged men. My own cards are tiny, maybe purely to meet the remit of games-that-don't-need-a-box-as-big-as-that. Marty especially liked it, and I think we all won a game apiece. Then after a breather I introduced them to Age of War, which was fun but not as big a success.

Saturday morning dawned about two hours earlier than was strictly necessary, so while the others slept, Little Joe and I took a stroll down to the beach. Upon our return we played Age of War with Marty's youngest, Betty. Nobody won as the appearance of bacon sandwiches meant all the cavalrymen went AWOL to the breakfast table, requesting ketchup.

Sally and Florrie discuss Martin Wallace's penchant for industrial age gaming

Our first walk of the weekend was to Shaldon, 3 miles as the crow flies along the Devonshire coast path. Possibly more like 5 miles as the Morrisons stagger, though, and only some heroic singing by me about men going to mow meadows and baked bean tins not making it into heaven got the boys up the last big hill.

mushroom

After a perambulation around Shaldon and a stay on the Ness Beach (accessed via a Smugglers Tunnel!) we returned to the hut, and as the children played loud and frankly appalling music loudly in the hut, the adults sprawled in the grass outside. After another game of Timeline (I forget who won) I set up Fauna, and Marty and Mo were intrigued enough to play. Sarah was intrigued enough to come and watch and then team up with Marty. This was new to everyone including me, but as those who have played know it's extremely simple, and lots of fun. The only criticism we had of it was scoring adjacent regions on the map, especially for animals in lots of areas, took quite a bit of time and felt at odds with the light game-play. But overall it was a hit, and it did get played again on Sunday morning with me and the kids.

Meantime Saturday day had turned into Saturday night, and the main event was Poker.

I used to have a half-decent pedigree at this game, way back when we played regularly I often finished runner-up and once or twice even won. But the last two or three years whenever I've played I've always been first out, and this event was no different, as I chased a couple of hands and folded what would have been my best hand of the night pre-flop.

Mo followed me out a while later, then Sarah too, leaving Marty and Sally facing off to claim the £50 at stake. Sally claims to not being completely sure what she is doing, but perhaps this seam of randomness helps her game. She was certainly not cowed by Marty's famous 'poker stare' that he picked up in Vegas. The final hand, though, was a doozy.

Marty, needing to build up his chips and keep the pressure on Sally, went all in with about £9. Sally met him and the cards were flipped:

Marty A, 10
Sally K, 7

The flop came and Sally picked up a King!

K, 9, 9

Sally's kings and nines now beat Marty's nines with ace kicker. But the turn came and ka-boom: it was an ace. Marty now back in front with aces and nines. "The only thing that can save you is a king" said Mo. And sure enough, almost as if Paul Jefferies' ears twitched in Croydon, the third king came up on the river. It was brilliant for Sally, brutal for Marty, and the only thing that could follow that was two games of The Resistance.

Perhaps underlining why I'm so bad at poker, I decided from the outset that Marty was a spy in game one, and he wasn't. Sally, who spent the game telling everyone I was clearly a spy, was. The spies won - but only in part because Mart had misunderstood the final goal of the game, and thought it was about categorically identifying who the spies were by the time the fifth mission was completed, rather then preventing them from sabotaging three missions. Which to be fair, he did. Mo was the second spy.

In the second game Marty and I were the spies. After a successful first mission we weren't involved with, we found ourselves both on mission two. We both hoped the other would Fail it, and both returned Success cards. Now the Resistance were only one mission from winning! Again we were both chosen to go, and this time I actually said aloud "I'm putting my fail card in the discards" - ostensibly to assert my resistance membership, but covertly as a signal to Marty, who twigged and sabotaged the mission. It's not exactly Derren Brown, but I was pleased with it.

All we had to do now was Fail the deciding mission. Fortunately I was chosen to go and the spies won again! There was just enough time left to drive to Castle Drogo and go on a three hour walk before heading back home...

SeptCon Report!

FRIDAY

With Andrew sadly unable to come, and me unable to coerce another member of the GNN club out into the sticks - perhaps it sounded a bit scary - it was just myself (Sam), Paul and Chris competing for the SeptCon championship, a veritable Olympics of gaming both for those competing and anyone who can be arsed to read all of the below.

We converged at a picturesque cottage in the village of Foxham, and having met the farmer and his wife, their dog, three cats, and helped them bring a van-load of fresh meat into their kitchen, we sat down to commence a marathon of gaming, starting with a 7 hour session on Friday night.

Poison was first. This was new to both Chris and Paul but it's an easy one to explain so after doing my best impersonation of Reiner Knizia in a cape we were away. Everyone opened with a low-scoring round but Paul, the variant king, then began experimenting with strategy and this went horribly wrong in his second round. Chris scored a second zero in a row as I picked up a couple of points, and Paul's improved third round score - and my terrible one - wasn't enough to recover from third position. Chris came first to set the tone for a successful evening for him - but we all agreed that 3 players is exactly the wrong number to play Poison with, as unless someone plays aggressively it's very easy to slip into a pattern of everyone picking up their own colour.

Chris 6

Sam 14

Paul 17

Our gaming loins girded, we moved swiftly on. Paul and Chris had been playing Ticket to Ride so that became game number two. Contrasting styles here as Paul and Chris started building immediately and I started hoarding, looking to build a strong playing hand for later in the game. A slight misunderstanding over the rules too as Chris and Paul play the (correct) rule of only being allowed to build ONCE along the dual-track routes in a three-player game. I'd misunderstood this and thought we were playing the rule that the same player can't build both routes to block people off. It didn't change my strategy much though and everyone agreed that each player could break this rule once and once only.

My card-collecting routine (the Hillmann-method) paid off well come the final score, hoarding obviously gives you a lot of flexibility so when I was blocked I had alternative options, and I completed all my routes to end the game. Despite Paul completing extra routes I made first place, with Chris just sneaking second:

Sam 137
Chris 102
Paul 100

After a bit of tea, next up was 7 Wonders. This seems to be Paul's bête noir from a comprehension perspective, I think I explained it a lot better than last time but he still professed to utter bafflement and could not repeat the second place of his debut a few weeks ago. Instead Chris finished first in what was actually quite a tight game, to surge back into the lead overall:

Chris 42
Sam 39
Paul 37

Three reasonably fluffy games aside, we moved on to the meat of the evening: Stone Age. This was - again - new to Chris and Paul, but it's such an intuitive game it didn't take too much explanation before we were off and running. The newbies both enjoyed this - Chris especially so - but early on Chris seemed to be stumped as to what his tactic was. And despite my stressing of the importance of cards for a long time it was only me picking them up as the others went through a lot of hut-building. Despite that though, Chris staged a very decent first score in the end as his hut-multipliers popped up in the closing stages and he nabbed them. I was under the impression I was miles ahead - possibly because Chris kept saying I was, in a belated and disconcerting bit of NLP - next time I'll not be so blasé!

Sam 265
Chris 236
Paul 145

Time for one more game before we packed off to bed, but as it was gone eleven we went for the relatively brief 7 Wonders again. I ignored armies for a change and concentrated on sciences, but I made a fatal error in thinking my wonder allowed me to build a discarded card at the end of each age. No, Morrison! Only at the end of the second age, you fool! So my perceived brilliant move of burning a card for money in a plan to pick it up later (when I could afford to build it) came to naught. 9 points down the drain, and Chris pipped me for first.

Chris 55

Sam 51
Paul 30

The embryonic leaderboard (1st/2nd/3rd=3pts/2pts/1pt) showed Chris currently in first. Could he hang on to that position in the morning?

SATURDAY

Like some middle-aged family man - oh - I woke early and pottered about while those useless layabouts slept through a couple of hours of potential game time. After breakfast we pretended to be normal people and actually went for a walk in the country, taking farm dog Oscar with us. It was a beautiful area, the perfect place to sit indoors all day pretending to be Cornish miners or something.

So that's what we did. After our little perambulation we cracked open Tinners' Trail and explained it to Paul, who was in for another day of learning enough collective rules to start a new, bureaucracy-loving coalition. Chris opened the game with a canny bit of play, encouraging Paul and I to buy mines at cheap prices but leaving himself with lots of room to develop his own, and having done so he was the only player at the end of round one to invest any money - establishing an early, daunting 18 point lead. It was a long way back for Paul and I, but we gave it our best. Incredibly I pipped Chris by a point in the final reckoning, but only after he failed to give himself enough time to gather all his copper and tin in round four, fatally building a port when he should have been mining. A dramatic end, then, saw the final scores as:

Sam 150
Chris 149
Paul 90

We broke for lunch, making a swift trip to the shops followed by a fry-up. So far no fruit or vegetables had passed our lips for nearly 24 hours - Chris even suggested 'crisps' as a side dish to his planned meal of hotdogs - so if we ever do this for a week the winner will probably be the one still alive at the end of it. After eating, Web of Power was broken out the box. For those unfamiliar with it, this is a placement game with each player building cloisters across Europe and advisors to link countries together in scoring opportunities. We didn't play the proper rules for half the game, but it was the same for everyone and I nabbed another win as Paul finally broke out of third place:

1. Sam
2. Paul
3. Chris

After the delicate logarithms of Web of Power we decided to go with something that would melt our brains a bit more and Paul and Chris were keen - or willing, at least - to play London, so we gave it a shot. Not trusting myself to explain this one properly we went through the rule book a bit and it was mostly confusion-free; after a few rounds the newbies were up to speed - but Paul suffered both for unpaid loans and excess poverty, taking some severe penalties as Chris and I contested for first.

Sam 74
Chris 61
Paul 24

Perhaps because I was feeling the stress of explaining - badly - several sets of rules, it was the first time I didn't massively enjoy London, feeling it a bit of a grind. Certainly by the time it came to explaining The Adventurers I couldn't read any more rules and had to pass them onto Paul and Chris, the latter having an extremely juvenile giggling fit over the idea of sunbeams coming through a passage. Really, Chris!

Paul was a picture of maturity and calm next to him, at least until he suddenly decided to hurl a digestive biscuit at the window. He said he was aiming for the dog, but it was clearly a comment on Chris' behaviour.

Anyway, this deceptively simple game isn't alone in making the rulebook like some kind of test of stoicism, but we eventually got there and probably spent marginally more time on the game than we did on the rules - at which point Paul triumphantly claimed his first pole position. We all survived the Raiders-style traps but it was Lord Jefferies of Croydon who'd loaded his pack with the most treasure:

Paul 27
Sam 25
Chris 18

It was now early evening and, possibly gripped for a nostalgia for simpler times, we elected to play bean-growing-game Bohnanza. In this mini-classic you grow beans. That's it, basically. And despite my sluggish start I managed to consolidate my strong leaderboard position with another victory as Chris and Paul tied for second:

Sam 22
Chris/Paul 20

We broke again for food and, as winner, I was allowed to choose three games we could then argue over as to our next battle of wits. I was hoping we might go for Year of the Dragon, but after much enthusiasm from Chris and placid amenity from Paul we went with my second choice, Stone Age.

This time it was a much tighter affair, but I squeezed into first place:

Sam 227

Chris 207

Paul 206

It was fast approaching midnight so we had a little non-leaderboard game of poker then called it a night, with me now perched in first place overall.

SUNDAY

By the time the morning rolled around our initial zest for gaming two days before was starting to sag slightly, as the perpetual analysis - not to mention the intense pressure of competition - ground us down into faded husks of our former selves, like large ghostly meeples smelling faintly of sausage. The three of us living together in one house, gaming for all eternity, was no longer the beautiful ideal it seemed on Friday night. Nonetheless we remained committed and borderline enthusiastic, so we embarked on a game of Ra. Now I started off reasonably, but halfway through the second round I had three victory point chips to Chris and Paul's ten or so each. I was not confident at that point, but I managed - more by luck than judgement - to wangle first in a dramatic final round that saw us as close as possible:

Sam 33

Chris 32

Paul 31

Everyone quickly agreed to a rematch, but this time it wasn't so close, and Chris found that his very strong bidding hand in round 2 actually hampered him as he couldn't bear spending it on the pitiful offerings I was calling Ra on. As he clung on waiting for a justifiable expenditure to arrive, the round was closed out with him picking up very little, and his stronger third round couldn't rescue him.

Sam 54

Paul 34

Chris 21

On the final straight now, and we had time for one short and one long game. TransAmerica was the former, and it was another buttock-clenching final-round fight, this time Paul emerging victorious:

Paul 12

Sam 16

Chris 20

This was actually one of the best games of the weekend, and if we play it again on a Tuesday I highly recommend adding the 'Vexation' rule; utilising two tracks of your own colour to block off other players from your network. It transforms the game from a diverting filler to a devilish highlight.

And so: what game to end on? We debated Collosseum, Galaxy Truckers, another game of London? But it was a third and final Stone Age, the 15th game in a marathon session to rival StabCon. Very, very tight this time, with all of us focussed on our strategies and not deviating an inch from them. In the end my year or so of Tuesday night practice paid off again, but Paul's hot breath was leaving droplets of mist on my mammoth-fur waistcoat:

Sam 204

Paul 200

Chris 170

So SeptCon finally ended with GNN regular Sam (me, worryingly talking about myself in the third person) taking the glory. Admittedly I knew all the games and the others didn't, but I like to think of that as dedicated research undertaken specifically for this competition. Hopefully next time Andrew will be there - anyone else care to join us???

FINAL LEADERBOARD

Sam 38pts

Chris 28pts

Paul 23pts

Here's a frog Paul found.