Pink Gravy

This Tuesday saw my return to regular weekday action for the first time in three weeks. Sam was hosting, with his two sons Stanley and Joe and the other visiting gamers were Joe, Ian and Martin.

The seven of us began with Just One, a co-operative word game where everyone is trying to give clues to one player regarding a randomly chosen word. The catch is that any duplicate clues are removed before the guesser can see them. This happened in remarkable fashion in round two. Stanley was the guesser and Pikachu was the word. The six of us managed to duplicate all our clues (Yellow, Pokemon, Electric) leaving Stanley completely clueless (literally).

In the end, we got ten right out of thirteen which, according to the somewhat patronising scoresheet, is "not bad at all."

The clues for "Fur". Joe's clue is "Yummy". That's the level he was operating on.

Some of grown up Joe's clues were a little oblique. For "gravy" his clue was "pink" (luckily, the guesser got it right anyway) and his reasoning was that Pink Floyd had a song called "Gravy Train". The trouble is, they don't. Sam pointed out he was thinking of "Have a Cigar" which does mention "riding the gravy train." But how you'd get there from "pink", I'm not sure.

Next was another word game. This time the two of us split into teams for a game of Trapwords. In this game a clue giver has to describe a word given to him in secret, while avoiding certain words chosen by the opposition. If he says one, then the round is over. His team has five guesses.

Trying to define a word while avoiding obvious descriptors is pretty tough. Sam's clues for "Traffic" ended up sounding like poetry.

It's like a row of automobiles
Crammed together
Waiting.

It was a draw. Sam put his sons to bed while Ian and I watched Joe and Martin have a very cyclical argument. Martin had read the rules to Trapwords and found that proper nouns can't be given as clues. Joe wanted to know if they could be used as trap words and Martin said there'd be no point because they can't be clues at which point Joe said yes, but... This went on for some time. They were actually agreeing, but you wouldn't have known that by looking at them.

Eventually, we decided to play Ethnos. Sam came down as we were setting up New Slovakia, or whatever it's called. The game had a couple of interesting areas which scored highly, even for the player in third. The opening stages went mostly in Joe's favour. He admitted to a little luck after playing six-card hands in both rounds one and two. Sam went for giants to supplement his area control while Martin's usual love of trolls was not enough to put him in contention this time.

Joe 79
Sam 65
Martin 61
Andrew 56
Ian 44

Next was a new game, Rebel Nox. It was a trick taking card game with hidden alliances. And lots of rules. At its heart, it's pretty simple. There are only three suits and each can trump one of the others, in a sort of paper-stone-scissors style. But some cards are assassins (discard the highest showing card) or scouts, I think (swap cards with another opponent). There are two teams, Rebels and Non-rebels who are only made public at the start of a round, by announcing they have a rebel card in their hand. It is up to each player to try and keep track of all the exchanges of cards to deduce who might have become a rebel.

No rebel cards here.

Add to this a triangular formation of cards that, for each trick, may change the winning conditions or how many points you win and a winning criteria that depends on how many people are on your team.

It was all a bit confusing and Joe wondered out loud "Is this actually what the future's going to be like?" Meanwhile, the game's Sulfur City was renamed Salford City, hinting at a distant future where Manchester has been eclipsed by its smaller neighbour.

For all its effort for mixing whist with The Resistance, it felt a bit strained. I rarely knew what was going on and when I and Martin won, it came as a surprise. Because Joe had taken a rebel card from me (which I had just got from Ian), there were three rebels and two non rebels. The winning conditions for two player teams are less stringent and we discovered that we did actually meet them. The game ended in round two.

Martin and Andrew, loyal to the core
Ian, Sam and Joe, rotten apples

An odd experience. A game that I can imagine some groups would delight in, playing it frequently. But our group was full of doubt about it, with Sam saying he hadn't really made a decision for the whole game.

But with that, I was done for the evening. It was eleven o'clock, but the other four were persuaded by Martin to try a new game that only suits four players. I bade my farewells and set off home. Goodnight all!