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! 

Dark Web Gogglebox

 7.30 Tuesday evening. Joe let me in and I walked down the stairs into his kitchen, noting Tom Waits on the speaker, finding a group of gamers sitting around Joe’s table: Ian, Katy, Sam, and Martin. Adam H had been expected at 8.15 but then he email to say he’d be here at 7.50. This left us with a quandary. Find something short to play or talk to each other for twenty minutes.

Happily, reason prevailed and we got out For Sale. Katy began with her usual insistence that she’s terrible at this game which, for once, is justified. Sam, too, never seemed to get going while Ian picked up a last round $15k cheque with only a 15-value house. Not enough to win, but very satisfying. For him.

Martin 54

Ian 53

Andrew 49

Joe 46

Sam 36

Katy 33

Adam arrived mid game and so we split into two. At one end Adam, Katy, Joe and Martin played one of the many games called Orbit. It’s so new that it’s listed as a 2025 game on Board Game Geek! Martin explained the rules and they set off in this dickish game of intergalactic high-jinks. How they laughed when Martin complained “I’m absolutely in the middle of fucking nowhere,” which is, I suppose, a valid criticism of most of outer space.

Ian, Sam and I played Around the World in 80 Days. There was a lot of detective work this time, as we kept trying to upset our opponents with not-so-chance encounters with the law. Ian tried to use a balloon - a transport that uses a dice instead of the value on a card to tell you how long a journey took. He rolled a 5 and stating that statistically he would probably get a lower number, he paid a coin and rolled again. A six. Of course.

Thanks to a lucky last-minute purchase of a card from the deck, I get back to London in double-quick time, arriving at the door of the Reform Club after only 69 days. Sam cursed his luck as, once again, he finished stuck in New York.

Andrew 69 days

Ian 78 days

Sam dnf

While we waited for Orbit to finish, we played Push. A simple card game, build up three columns of cards but no duplicates of numbers or colours. Then you take one column and your opponents take the others. Ian’s lack of luck with a die in Around the World was compensated as he dodged having to discard cards when rolling the dice in this game.

Ian 81

Sam 77

Andrew 72

Meanwhile Orbit ended with Martin’s green planet being moved out of his reach and then Katy swooping down towards her own home planet, clearly relieved that people hadn’t noticed that she was about to win. One of the first people to win at Orbit, she told herself.

Katy wins!

The others don’t.

They packed away, with Katy remarking that Martin’s player mat was covered in crisps, and as a septet again, it was time to change things up again.

At one end of the table Martin, Sam and Ian played Saer while Joe, myself, Katy and Adam played Sunrise Lane. Two rules explanation hummed around the room at the same time, and even seemed to synchronized/interfered with each other.

Martin: You have 3 cards.

Joe: You have 3 cards.

Martin: Face down.

Joe: Not face down, in your hand.

Martin: In your array.

I know nothing about Saer except that I thought I’d played it when I saw it. It didn’t have the most original visual aspect.

Martin 12

Sam 9

Ian 4

As for Sunrise Lane, I quickly got a long chain of buildings and then got tall buildings in both blue sectors. But I ignored the red quarters, which could’ve been my downfall.

Joe 87

Andrew 83

Katy 74

Adam 69

Again, we were all together. So Clover doesn’t play seven, so we dug out Hitster, that game of putting random songs in chronological order thanks to an app that links to Spotify.

Or, rather doesn’t link to Spotify. After only a few songs (one of which, You Can’t Hurry Love, was wrongly identified as The Jam by Katy and, in fairness, A Town Called Malice does have a very similar opening) the app gave up. Instead we changed to just singing the song for the other people to guess. 

Of course, this meant that most songs after 2005 were discarded because we didn’t know them. But otherwise it worked fine. For certain obscure definitions of “fine”. Imagine the scene where half of us are singing a hit from the late 20th century while the other half are arguing about it. “Like a Dark Web Gogglebox,” observed Sam, giving this blog post it’s title.

I had to leave just as our row of guesses stretched across the whole table, with only a few mistakes here and there. The rest of the blog is courtesy of a few messages from Sam.

After I left, they played So Clover twice: 24/30 and 26/30 (so someone else must have left too).

And Sam also told me that at the very start of the evening he and Joe played Landmarks, a word association game that involved getting across an island.

What an evening! See you all soon.