The Magnificent Seven (hour game)

If a games weekend is a rare treat then two in the space of a week must be the height of decadence. But there we were, Sam and I, just six days since we returned from the last one, back in a car full of board games heading for the countryside. This weekend centred around the fast-aging quartet of gamers who used to gather and play when they lived in London. We'd booked the same cottage that we had two years ago, near Wool in Dorset. And our first impressions were that it hadn't changed at all (except the outside had been painted).

2016

2018

We had, though. After a brief spell of greetings and unpacking, we sat down for our first game, only to all get up again and get our spectacles.

This game was Decrypto. How strange it was to play this in daylight and sober. It was the Coffee Drinkers (me and Sam) against the Tea Drinkers (Paul and Chris) and they got two interceptions for a quick win. “Lucky we’re good at guessing random numbers,” remarked Paul.

The next game was Auztralia, Martin Wallace's genre bending game, part Steam, part Hit Z Road. Sam quickly got stuck in a corner and had to repeatedly recycle his cubes in an unproductive way. I built up a network of farms and railways, hoping my defences would hold firm.

Paul, as ever with a new game, was in an experimental mood. When he picked a card that allowed two enemy tiles to be revealed, he actioned it immediately. I thought it was a bit too early in the game but the tiles he chose to flip over weren't near me, so I didn't caution him against it.

I wish I had since one of them was a shoggoth and in this particular game those buggers just wouldn't sit still. The first made mincemeat of Chris's farms, a second one piled into Sam's and a third had a pop at me. Finally the first one, bored with Chris, turned its attention to neighbouring Paul and worked its way through that network until he was at Paul's port. If he lost that, we were doomed. The shoggoth moved next turn. It had 6 hit points and Paul whittled it down to one left when it struck the fatal blow. Paul's port was destroyed and the game was done. A resounding win for Cthulu.

Cthulu 64
Sam 10
Andrew 8
Paul 6
Chris 1

Chris didn't seem too keen on a game where he scored just one point in ninety minutes.

Chris then made food while Paul, Sam and I played Take It Easy. Another late-night game brought several hours forwards. We all used “Memories of Maidstone” (where we studied) as our theme when calling tiles. How nice to revisit moments like “Me and Mike on the sofa in the Rising Sun” or “Dave Pearce playing guitar during a power cut.”

Sam 460
Andrew 406
Paul 337

After this was risotto from Chris, which was a huge success.

By now it was almost seven, so we got out a nice fun evening game: Lords of Vegas. It was Paul’s first game, but he took to it very quickly, with his $15m bets and he came up with old folksy sayings like “I don’t want to leave all my fish in a barrel.” Chris played a very focused game, in that almost all his property was in one block of the city. Sam had two unassailable casinos of four and five which neatly propelled him up the scoretrack. He was in such a strong position that a mid-game wobble (when a re-organisation of a three-tile casino went all wrong) couldn’t stop his march to the top.

Sam 54
Andrew 36
Chris 26
Paul 23

Then we played Face Cards, the game that allows you to say things like “No, that Rockhopper Penguin is not Abraham Lincoln,” without seeming mad.

Andrew 11
Sam 9
Chris 8
Paul 4

Next we had a break, sat back and worked our way through a WHSmith’s box of trivia questions we’d found in the cabin, before following that up with a game of Sausage and Mash.

But as for real games, our next one was Texas Showdown. I did have Beef Jerky in my bag, but I’d forgotten my promise to bring it out if we play a Western-themed game.

Paul 5
Sam 8
Chris 13
Andrew 19

And after this was Letter Tycoon, with occasional forays into obscenity. I mean, it was eleven in the evening. Chris, the Scrabble player, won.

Chris 43
Sam 40
Paul 31
Andrew 27

By now there was no stopping us. Raj hit the table and Chris nabbed another win, holding off my late surge.

Chris 64
Andrew 61
Sam 37
Paul 27

Finally, Decrypto came back to the table. Now it was The Barchester Chronicles (Sam & Chris) against The Tess Of The D’Urbervilles (me & Paul). The Barchester Chronicles won, although Chris did use a couple of punning clues (ie, “A book” pointed to the word “red”). Also, Paul’s stomach was extremely vocal for much of the game.

Finally, it was time for bed.

Saturday dawned, I was up first and I spent some time reading the Quick Start rule book to Twilight Imperium, the giant box of game that had been staring at us since we got here. As people emerged, we turned our attention to the crossword.

During this time, Chris and I banged out a quick Biblios, which I won thanks to remembering the final card in the auction deck was a “move two dice up” card.

Andrew 9
Chris 7

Next we continued our theme of playing games-usually-only- played-when-drunk by playing The Mind! We didn’t do well, only getting to Round Five. Paul lost us a life when he was distracted by Chris’ story about buying a record by Tiffany from Woolworth's.

After this was the first big game of the day: Keyflower. It has been a while since I last played (three and a half years!) so I needed a rule refresher. I wish I could remember my strategy but, apart from making sure I upgraded my upgrading ability first, I don’t remember much.

Andrew 53
Paul 49
Chris 48
Sam 41

Then we went outside for a walk. As far as I can tell, exactly the same walk as last time we were here.

Having returned, we settled down for a game of Spheres Of Influence the Risk-y game of global domination. I got stuck on the sides of the board, with Canada and Japan not making great partners. Sam cut a swathe across Russia to China and then down into India. Paul set up camp, Risk style, in Australasia and then pottered about in South Africa and Malaysia. Chris took South and Mid America and the US as well as North Africa.

Tension mounted in the final round as an enormous flotilla of Sam’s ships left India, headed for the Mediterranean to do mischeive with Chris’ troops that had recently set up camp in Europe. But, shock, they turned their attention to North Africa, while Sam’s ex-Soviet troops try to unsettle the EU. It was the right thing to do, and it nabbed him an extra capital city for the win.

Sam 2 spheres, 3 cities
Paul 2 spheres, 2 cities
Andrew 2 spheres, 2 cities
Chris 1 sphere, 2 cities

Paul wasn’t keen, pointing out that he’d made no real progress in the final three rounds of the game.

After this, with a request from Paul to avoid dice-dependant combat games, we chose Kingdom Builder. Sam sat down with his laptop to do some work while the three of us battled it out.

Paul 54
Chris 53
Andrew 38

Now it was my turn to cook, and people rested and tried the crossword again. After my pizzas, we set up a game of Rajas of the Ganges, reassuring Paul that these were good dice.

Sam went big on cash while Paul went big on fame. Chris and I didn’t really do either although whenever any of us rolled two ones, we always put them on the chest area of the dice statue as sort of dice nipples. I’m pretty sure Chris started that.

It couldn’t have been closer in the final reckoning, with Sam and Paul ending with their two tokens barely past each other, and Paul winning on a tie-breaker.

Paul
Sam
Andrew
Chris

Then we played the Book Game, in which a book is chosen from the bookshelf by one player, and the blurb on the back is read out aloud. All the other players have to come up with a potential opening line, and all these are read out together by the Book-Chooser. The idea is to spot the correct opening line, and you get points for people guessing yours.

Our source for The Book Game

Sam fooled me completely with an opening line for a book based around youth in the 1970s, which he put down as “Pip, pip, pip.” I thought no one would reference the sound of an old public telephone except a paid writer, so I chose it, forgetting that Sam is a paid writer.

Paul threw us all with his first choice of book, whose opening line referenced sweating “down to her sensible cotton underwear.”

It ended with another dead heat between Paul and Sam.

Paul 7
Sam 7
Andrew 6
Chris 4

During this we discussed how David Bowie’s taste in games might have changed as he approached death, going from big, epic games to trick-takers. And talking of short games, we ended with Fuji Flush, the seemingly random card game that I am somehow good at.

Andrew 0
Paul 1
Sam 2
Chris 2

Once more to bed.

With the sound of distant quad bikes, we slowly stirred on Sunday morning until we were all up by nine. At first, we didn’t mention games at all. Were we all ignoring the elephant in the room? The elephant in question being the large game box containing Twilight Imperium.

Chris gave us every opportunity to reject it, but I was curious and, besides, this would be the only opportunity for us to actually play it. We agreed, with the proviso of a 6pm cut-off point. We set it up, somewhat surprised that Chris had added a little whiteboard to the package. I wondered just how complicated this was going to be. After a rules explanation, we set off into the universe at 11.45am.

There were, inevitably, some issues with the rules. I think the term “production value” of a planet caused some confusion and what happens to it when the planet is exhausted. Sam was first to score a point, and it was still only round one!

Apart from Paul’s mad dash to the centre, it was quite a genteel game. When trading tokens, we actually swapped them instead of simply moving them from one part of our player board to another. And we broke for lunch during round two, with Paul providing sliced malt loaf.

Paul upgraded his cannons in round three, and seemed very keen to use them on anything that came close. With his control of the central planet of Mercatol Rex, he found himself in a lead at the end of round three: Paul 4, Sam 2, Chris 2, Andrew 1.

View from the window as round four begins

Chris and Sam got into some “friendly” invasions as they realised they needed each others’ planets to score points before Chris started to worry about Sam’s close proximity to his home planet, and had a pop at him anyway. Chris won that space battle, but couldn’t land troops to retake the any territory.

As we began round five, it was clear that this would be the final act of the game. Paul and Sam engage in a decidedly un-epic space battle with no hits on either side until Paul announced his retreat, and then he started getting some hits like someone walking away from an argument they weren’t going to win while still shouting insults.

At the end of the round, Sam tried to attack Paul in Mercator Rex as a fitting finale to the game. Sam was wiped out by Paul’s not inconsiderable amount of ships and cannons on that previously peaceful planet. A fun spectacle to end the game, at least.

View from the window as round five ends

Sam 8
Chris 7
Paul 7
Andrew 7

I enjoyed it. It was pretty intense, and it certainly didn’t feel like seven hours. Each player is always involved and I certainly never had to wait 17 minutes for something to do like I did on Spheres Of Influence (yes, I timed it).

Paul and I went out in the dark to take out some recycling at the end of the dirt road that lead to the cottage and when we’d come back, Chris was still packing away the game! An epic in every sense.

After Sam’s salmon supper, we played Calimala. Chris won this game while achieving either (a) a piece of brilliant misdirection from him or (b) a massive lack of visual comprehension by us. Troyes was the publicly-known end of scoring card, but everyone had forgotten about it. In he final scoring, Chris won it with only one cube in there. None of us had even registered it. It was worse for me, since I had a trading house already built there and could’ve shipped to Troyes at any time! Afterwards, Chris told us he didn’t want to ship any more there in case that alerted us to how important it was. Marvellous play.

Chris 35
Sam 29
Andrew 27
Paul 24

And what better way to end a weekend in an isolated cabin than a game about zombies? Hit Z Road hit z table (see what I did there?) and we all diced with death. Sam went big on survivors, having seven at one point. Paul used his many resources to get out of a tight scrape while I bid high to get first choice of the paths to safety, naming my four meeples Andrew, Paul, Chris and Sam to make it more interesting.

The four of us, in meeple form

Chris, by now looking a bit like a zombie himself, never bid for starting player and relied on luck to get him through. And he got it. His second to last battle was his three survivors against six zombies, followed by another six zombies. He got past the first with six ranged shots and then took out two of the next bunch at long range. He then managed to kill off the final four, but not before they’d finished another of his survivors. In the next round, his luck held out (beating four zombies in a defiant last stand) and he made it to the end, alive but clearly ready for bed.

Sensible Paul picked up all the bonuses for resources, and ran out a clear winner.

Paul 13
Chris 10
Sam 8
Andrew 7

And so we were done for the day. And for the weekend. Back to reality tomorrow and I remarked that this must be how Superman feels when he changes back into Clark Kent. No more amazing battles or incredible stories.

At least, not until next time.

Four Tribes. Five Days.

Five days in Dorset with four families - Joe's, mine (Sam), our friends Tom and Hannah (plus Theo and Esme) and Alison and Simon (plus Elliott). It's something of a tradition now, as this was the third year running we piled into a rambling 1930's house and indulged ourselves in fine wine, fine food and of course, games.

It's only really myself and Joe who are committed gamers, but Tom, Simon and most of the children are at least intrigued, and often keen. It was amazing to watch how young children will pick up a game very quickly, whereas some of the adults will start to glaze over, defeated, as soon as there is a third or fourth rule.

I'd brought along a few games and Joe a few more. We both had a new purchase with us - Istanbul for me, and Machi Koro for Joe. Both were big hits.

Image courtesy JackyTheRipper

Machi Koro is a game of dice and cards. Thematically each player is building a city, and they grow from their initial two cards (Bakery and Wheat Field)) by generating money to build more buildings (or other things, such as the curiously un-urban Forest), which beget more money, which beget more buildings and so on. The first player to build four specific landmark buildings - Radio Tower, Train Staion, etc - wins. Personally I didn't get on with it. A series of rubbish dice rolls and consistent strategic ineptitude on my part in three attempts all ended with me soundly beaten and somewhat frustrated. But I was the sole voice of dissent, as Joe, Tom, Simon and the kids played it serially over the five days to much appreciation. I think Tom usually won.

Istanbul won the Kennerspiel des Jahres, the award for the "Gamers Game" this year, apparently seeing off Concordia in doing so. I don't know if it's the better game, but it's certainly more accessible. It's slightly reminiscent of Five Tribes in layout and movement, but any similarities end there, as the game moves much faster and finishes much quicker. Each player is trying to be the first to get a number of gems - 6 in a two-player game, 5 with more. Everyone has a merchant they move around the variable set-up board, dropping off assistants to do tasks in worker-placement style. You can try and generate money and buy gems, or pay for them with resources. Getting certain in-game bonuses or extras will also get you a gem. Key to the game is movement - you can only do the action of a building if you're dropping off or picking up an assistant, so you can't go scattergun all over the place.   I played this as a two, three, and four player and enjoyed them all - admittedly I won them all, but Tom never played it.

 Image courtesy Kenneth Hiew

Cube Quest was also a big hit, particularly with the kids. Big Joe and I spent a good deal of our time searching for cubes behind or under furniture as the flicking velocity increased. It's a great leveller, Cube Quest. I won a few games - but I also lost to both Little Joe and Stanley, and Stanley defeated Tom (Tom!) with possibly the Flick of the Trip - a two-mat sniper-style hit on Tom's King.

Little Joe prepares for battle

Possibly the biggest hit, though, was a variation on many party games which Alison introduced: one by one the adults chose a book and read out the title, and blurb on the back. Then everyone wrote their own opening line to the book in question, and they were all (including the real one) read out. Points are awarded for a correct guess and for anyone who guesses your own faked effort. I won this game narrowly but it helped me massively that, being only fairly drunk in a room full of paralytic people - courtesy of some extremely strong margaritas - I had my wits reasonably about me. I have never seen Joe as drunk as during this game. I'm not sure I've seen anyone as drunk as Joe during this game. He fell off his chair three times, went outside for a mysterious 'walk', and fell asleep upstairs during the last round whilst the children - still up to witness events - regarded us all with appalled, yet justified, disdain. The game definitely benefited from our inebriation though, as well as an impressive collection of 1950's literature on the house's bookshelves - titles including The Swish of the Curtain, The Houses Inbetween, Destination Unknown - and best of all Gently Sahib, the story of a tiger killing someone in a sleepy England town and poor old Detective Gently assigned to investigate. Our own investigation of the novel itself featured a fleeting appearance of Sausages and Mash, the game of reading out sections of a book and turning any words beginning with S or M into 'sausages' or 'mash' - or variations thereof. No-one - or maybe everyone - is a winner with this venture.

Our rival to Simonen

Other games were played - Dominion, Fauna, Camel Up and X-wing (basic version). The latter three were curiously flat: Charlotte admitted Fauna had never lived up to its first play when there was hysteria over the Bushy-Tailed Gerd. Though we played to the end nobody requested it again. I had a disaster, finishing stony last and embarrassing myself by thinking Balearic music came from Central America. Music and geography - not my specialisms. I tended to focus on the map and not guess at length and weight that much. Personally I really struggle with weight once you get beyond a pound - I've realised I measure weight in terms of cheese.

Dominion, and Elliott's leg.

But Fauna was probably the success of the non-successes; Camel Up was okay but it lacks the immediacy of something like Cube Quest, and actually is a tiny bit fiddly rules-wise for something that plays in 20 minutes. X-Wing I really need to learn the proper rules to, as the base game - played by Elliott and I - is fairly dull. I'll bring it along to GNN and let Matt teach me! Trans Europa also saw the table at one point early on, and the eerily prescient event of Tom winning happened. I think apart from Fauna and Cube Quest he may have won every game he played.

Take It Easy got played a couple of times, with Joe beating me in a two player, and I'm not sure who won the group game. Probably Tom. Wizard also made the table, although I only witnessed a small part of the game which was Theo going for every single trick in two subsequent rounds. Tom won.

Simon won Dominion (Tom didn't play) in a tie-breaker with Elliott, who had a bit of a crazy week overall. On the second night he fell out of a tree and broke his leg in two places. He spent a night in hospital and then returned with his limb in a cast and recommenced gaming, albeit more statically before. As someone who can generate a few days' worth of complaint about a split nail, I take my hat off to his calm stoicism throughout the whole episode. He also - pre-break - beat myself and Theo at Raj, when I picked up two minus cards thanks to the boys tying on lower bids. A late surge when the boys were left with low-numbered cards was not enough to catch up. Oh Raj! Why dost thou forsake me so?

There were also several games of Top Trumps, both Stan's several-years-out-of-date European Football Stars deck (Tom beat Stan) and Joe's Transformers version. I now know that Optimus Prime travelled to Earth after thousands of years in search of the Allspark, only to find his nemesis Megatron awaiting him. Poor Optimus.

Vegas, and the crossword

We didn't spend the whole time at the table. There was walking and beaches and Lyme Regis and football and cycling and even mushroom foraging, leading to the discovery of the Shaggy Ink Cap, which is non-poisonous unless eaten with alcohol, or even (apparently) combined with potent aftershave. Simon already knew this, as he recounted the fact that Georgians tried to cure alcoholism by feeding the afflicted with the shaggy ink cap, and thus supplying them with non-fatal yet lingering hangover symptoms.

We didn't need mushrooms for that.

Shaggy

On the last night we played (Las) Vegas (Tom won) early in the evening, and Joe's plan for Lords of Vegas as the main event were stymied by lengthy meals and lengthier chat, including Joe himself coming up with the tagline for the relaunched Soda Stream: Force Air Through It! He did still try and push Lords of Vegas through, but at 10.40pm, my shying away from it dissuaded others. Sorry Joe. Instead they played Long Shot, the game of betting on plastic horses. In fact that's what he, Tom and Simon are playing now as I write. All that remains to be seen is who finishes second behind Tom. I'm going to bed.

Last Train for Yuletide

With Christmas threatening to erase all our fun with festive cheer and public holidays, Sam, Chris and I managed to squeeze in one last night of board games before Santa takes over the world.

I got to Sam's house a little late, and found Chris and Sam nearing the end of a game of A Castle For All Seasons. This game of worker placement and bonus-building has been a semi-success in GNN towers. It would be an unqualified success if we could just work out what to do with one bonus building that always seems to be the decider in who wins. We really should check on Board Game Geek. Anyway, Sam won, beating Chris who scored a respectable 60ish points on his first go compared to Sam’s 80+.

After this, we discussed what to play. We decided it should be something that Chris had played before, but didn’t own. After a little debate, we went for Railways of the World again. To be honest, I was a little sore after my recent third place and I was desperate for a chance to put things right, so when it was suggested I tried to be nonchalantly keen on the idea in case my eagerness put people off.

We used the Mexico map, and I was in charge of distributing the cubes across the various cities. I didn’t do a great job. Most cities had cubes of the same colour, unable to move until the later stages of the game. We all sat and stared at the board, a little baffled as to where to go at first. But there were two New Industry cards in the first round, which Chris and I used to good advantage, creating two new coloured cities to deliver to.

It seems that Martin had an influence on Sam’s and my tactics (that's semi-regular GNNer Martin, not Martin Wallace). At the end of the last game of RotW, we counted up our number of bonds and he said “Wow, we usually finish with fifteen!” With this in mind, this time the two of us were less frightened by the looming debt, and went for broke. In fact, in the first round Sam had to take a bond to pay back the debt caused by his other two bonds, which I think is a first. Chris, meanwhile, kept a close hand on the purse-strings and completed the game with only one bond.

It was pretty tough out there. We all scored bonuses for routes or cards, we scrambled for engine upgrades and tunnel engineers, and we made awful puns on a train theme: “I’m getting up a head of steam now,” “I just need a platform to build from,” “I’m going loco!” But before too long we we’d run out of puns and were just saying anything related to trains: “High visibility jackets!” “Shrink wrapped sandwiches!”

I was totally invested in this game. I even turned down Sam’s offer of some Waggon Wheels because they weren’t thematic enough (and also because they’re quite nasty) and I took photos of the board every couple of rounds, so if I lost I could go back and pinpoint where I went wrong.

It remained close on the score track, but Sam’s eleven bonds dragged him back into third. In the end, the result was decided by a choice Chris made right at the very start of the game. When he got two baron cards, he discarded the one giving a bonus for most money and instead went for one that gave bonuses for owning hotels. As it happened, he ended the game with most money, and hardly any hotels came out at all. If Chris had got the bonus for the money baron, he would have ended level with me on points and, of course, won the money tie-breaker.

Andrew 63
Chris 57
Sam 53

What a game! Even with a starting position as miserable as the one we had, it still offered possibilities for fun and profit. I am in awe of Chris’ amazing powers of wealth-generation. If I ever want to start a company from scratch, I’ll be asking him for advice.

And it still wasn’t even ten o’clock. We decided on a new game for Chris: Love Letter. We told him the rules, and we were off. It is, like A Castle For All Seasons, one of those games that you need to play once before you can really understand it, but Chris did well.

Apart from the time when Sam read the rules according to Sausage & Mash rules (read some text but substitute any word stating with “s” with “sausage,” and any word beginning with “m” with “mash” remembering to keep plurals, verb and adjective endings intact, i.e. “-ing”, “-ed”, “-ly”) the highlight of the game was one short lived round when I, on a whim, used a Guard to accuse Sam of having the Princess.

At this point Sam hadn’t even looked at his card and he said “If I am the Princess, I’ll be very angry.”

He looked at his card.

“I’m very angry,” he said as he revealed the Princess.

Next was Chris, who then accused me of being a Baron. I sighed as all my good work was undermined: I was the Baron. Chris got a win on a freakish stroke of luck (or maybe he’s psychic? Actually, his final score would suggest not...)

Sam 3
Andrew 2
Chris 1

After this, I left, preferring to head down Gloucester Road before the pubs shut. Chris and Sam stayed for a couple of rounds of Biblios. Sam texted me the scores:

Chris 7
Sam 5

Sam 13
Chris 5

A lovely way to finish the GNN term before Xmas (unless any one else can squeeze something in?) and I was certainly buoyed up by my win on RotW. On my way home, I strode past the stragglers and pub bouncers with the confidence of a man who knows how to move wooden blocks over cardboard hexagons. Surely this is the level to which all people aspire.