Gettin’ chilli with it

Joe's at 7.30 was this week's destination for the first weekly meeting since the big games weekend. Sam was already there when I arrived and Martin wasn't too far behind.

At least I think so. I'm writing this on Friday, a full three days late so, just like AI rendered hands, things might be a little out of place.

First we played Rome In A Day, a game in which you have to build areas of tiles with matching buildings to score points and you get these tiles and buildings from your neighbour who has taken their allocation of tiles for that round and split them in two.

Sam played while still in his fluorescent orange jacket and (unconnected, I'm sure) we kept forgetting which neighbour we were supposed to be taking from.

At the end of the game, Joe was counting up the scores and added up one column to the total 47 and said “urgh” in disgust, thinking it was his. But it was Adam's. 

Sam 57

Joe 49

Adam 47

Andrew 46

Martin 37

Sam's winning strategy was to simply take which ever set had the most tiles. Can it really be that simple? It was entertaining enough 

Katy was expected later so we began another quick game: Too Many Cooks. It's a game about German cuisine in that you have to collect cards to make soup (Pea, Mushroom or Onion) while avoiding chillies because they ruin everything, apparently. Unless you're making chilli soup, of course. You collect these ingredients by playing cards to the table until the value adds up to 10 or more, then that player collects all of them.

We played all of round one before we remembered the rule about one of the zeroes actually being worth 10. And I had trouble recognising some of the mushroom cards since they had illustrations of butter on them. But I was fine in the end, taking a win without really knowing how.

Andrew 23

Joe 22

Adam 19

Martin 11

Sam 10

Katy arrived and we split into two groups of three. Joe Adam and Katy played Robot Tricks and Martin and Sam introduced me to Havalandi.

In this game a hot air balloon glides around the edge of the triangular playing area and the active player can put down a landing site (cardboard counter) somewhere along the balloon's line of view. You score points for groups of three or more (on the same terrain) and also for flipping tiles as long as they are contiguous and cross the central path.

It was nice. Gently puzzly and a bit screwish. I forgot about the end of game scoring and, despite being quite competitive in the first half of the game, Martin and Sam (almost literally) drifted off, far above me.

Martin 104

Sam 94

Andrew 82

With that, both Sam and I got ready for an early night. I watched a little bit of Robot Tricks to see if the game was going to end. It didn't, but I did see Katy pick up an ace which, apparently, was bad.

Hopefully we'll get a result in the comments although it's pretty likely that everyone has forgotten.

Thanks all! It was special.

Too many rules

Is it even possible to have too many rules? We at GNN gave it our best shot this Tuesday at Sam's with a couple of AP-inducing semi-epics. Adam T, Adam H, Martin, Ian and myself joined our host around his kitchen table for our first Tuesday evening together in a few weeks. Martin, Sam and Adam T chose Pax Pamir while the rest of us chose Orbit.

In Pax Pamir, the game recreates an Afghanistan riven by divisions and subterfuge caused by the British and Russian forces. Sam had recently bought the second edition, with its charming textile map and large tactile pieces. There was a bit of setting up and rule learning/refreshing to be done and it all looked very complicated.

Not like Orbit, the game that we insist is like Ticket to Ride in space except it isn't really, which is far simpler. In terms of rules, that is. This time we avoided the familiar and newbie-friendly space agencies of NASA or ESA and set ourselves a real challenge. Adam was India (no feul) and I chose Japan (no points) while Ian had the Soviets. Then we put the planets in their astronomically correct positions and we were off. I was a little rusty, but Adam kept things moving. We needed a pause or two to check the rules. I forgot that on returning to Earth, a ship goes back to the docks, and Adam questioned my move of landing on a planet with a different rocket to the one that put me into orbit. It was a challenging game. Ian had only one feul for the whole game since it would've taken so long to put it up to two that he always had something better to do with his turn. This became a real weight around his neck in the latter stages of the game.

Adam looked smart in his three-feul three-speed ships and our only hope was that he'd pick up unfortunate mission cards. I got lucky with mine, getting two cards that I'd already done to offset the one that I couldn't. Ian kept reaching for cards like a madman who'd recently come to regret his lack of investment in fuel.

Adam 49 (including +15 in mission cards)
Andrew 24 (including +1)
Ian 23 (including - 9)

Pax Pamir was still in full swing. If "full swing" is the right way to describe a game in which no one scored any points at all in the first hour. After two hours, Martin had fallen behind 3-3-0 but then a costly mis-step from Sam gave him the win. I don't know what the details were but suddenly he had ten points and they were packing up saying how much they'd enjoyed it.

Martin 10
Sam 3
Adam T 3

In the space between end of Orbit and end of Pax, we three had a few jolly rounds of Love Letter to fill the time until Ian had to go and get a bus.

Andrew 2
Adam H 1
Ian 0

At this point, Adam T also left and the remaining four of us played Two Many Cooks or, as Adam dubbed it, Too Many Rules. After our collective brains had been frazzled by two heavy games, we found ourselves struggling with some of the finer nuances. Such as having to follow suit, except when you don't have to. And how some zero cards are actually tens unless you play them first in which case they are zeroes.

But we battled through yet another trick taker with a twist. Adam said it was all random and then Martin wins, which I think is possibly a game category on Board Game Geek. It was fun. No Texas Showdown, but fun. And Martin didn't win.

Sam 26
Andrew 22
Martin 21
Adam 16

And with that, the evening was over. Only four games played. Whatever happened to our stamina? Our verve? Our giddy reckless stumbling through one game after another? Nevertheless, a good evening and I'd like to get another game of Orbit in soon: I was surprised how rusty I was at it.  Thanks to all. Let's do this again soon.

Senator, you are spoiling us

Missing GNN planetoids Andrew and Katy as well as several orbiting satellites, at one stage it looked like just Ian, Martin and myself. Would Martin be persuaded to play Underwater Cities? Fortunately for him, Adam T and Joe swooped in to save the day, abetted by Stanley.

Joe was running late and Stan was in the garden attacking his brother with a space-hopper, so we started the evening with a quick play of Kariba, a very Knizian game by, unsurprisingly, Knizia.

Animals (numbered 1-8) come to the waterhole to drink, but three or more animals of a higher number will scare away the next-lowest numbered animal - and these scattering prey become your points if you played the card that did the scaring. The lowly mice (number 1) aren't completely hopeless - they're the only animal that can scare away the otherwise-indomitable elephants (number 8).

Sam 15
Ian 14
Martin 12
Adam 7

By the time Kariba wrapped up (it only took ten minutes) Joe had arrived and enticed Stanley into a try out of Shards of Infinity. I played with Joe at the weekend so can give a quick precis: it's a battle between players to be last one standing: each player begins with 50 health and then damage is done via the medium of cardplay and deck-building. The neat twist with Shards of Infinity is that you have a Mastery score that, when improved to certain points (5/10/20) empowers some of your cards: get your Mastery to 30 and it's possible to destroy your opponent outright when you pull the Infinity Shard into your hand.

While that epic played out at one end of the table, we were busy with Martin's latest sentient-vegetable game, this time another old Knizia in Too Many Cooks. This is a trick-taker of sorts where each player announces what kind of soup they intend to make at the start of each round, with the cards themselves the ingredients. If you're making onion soup, you want to win a trick with lots of onions in - and no chilli. If you're making a chilli soup, you don't want bouillion. Because the trick is only complete when the collective score of all the cards reaches ten points - and some cards reset the score to zero - it's more than likely that someone will throw some chilli in your lovely pot of onions, or even pick them up themselves. The 'wrong' ingredient doesn't necessarily do any damage, as long as it's not really wrong.

But as well as that reasonably-simple premise, there are cards that score zero when led but a whopping ten when played in a 'live' trick, complicating things somewhat. Additional complications arrive in the form of these cards being erroneously labelled zero instead if ten, and one recipe being 'no soup' - don't win any cards at all. The fact that previously played recipes can't be played again muddies things further, as the last couple of rounds you are more at the mercy of fate, depending on what cards you get.

Ian began badly and announced he didn't like the game. He surged back into contention and seemed briefly more enamoured. Then he fell away again. I stagnated too, but Adam made hay in the penultimate round, establishing a lead that was too strong for Martin to catch him:

Adam 20
Martin 16
Sam 14
Ian 12

Martin and Adam liked it. I was somewhere between their enthusiasm and Ian's chagrin. The main take-away for me was to have the song from Too Many Cooks going around in my head all night.  Just after we finished, Joe vanquished Stanley in a nail-biting finish to Shards: with them both at death's door it was Joe's turn to attack and Stanley didn't draw the shield he needed.

Joe: wins
Stan: off to bed

Which left us as a five. Martin was keen to play Senators so after brief speculative mentions of Battle for Rokugan (one day...) and Northern Pacific, we embarked on our weekly bunfight for the senate.

forgot to take any more pictures at this point, here's Senators being played at Martin's house

It was brutal. Adam in particular suffered from a dearth of money and fortune, as he constantly found himself penniless and senatorially bereft. Martin kept trying to extort money from me and being appalled when I sold things to him. Ian kept up a cash-supply with impressive consistency, especially in a game as barmy as Senators is. He at one point pulled off a spectacular 4-senator cash-in to take the lead, only to have Adam exact some minor pleasure from the game by immediately taking a senator off him.

Martin gambled on events that didn't arrive, and I paid nine sestertii for a Senator when everyone else bid zero. But despite that lavish spending, I pushed ahead of Ian and Joe to claim the seat of power:

Sam 12
Ian 11
Joe 10
Martin / Adam: 5

Adam, exhausted from Senators work, now took his leave and we were a four again. We ended the evening in proper GNN style, with some short silly games.

pic courtesy kalchio, BGG

In Tomatomato you pronounce increasingly long variations on the word tomato: get it wrong and your opponents get to - possibly - claim points; by spelling out the word 'tomato' obviously. Martin's speed at this game was so spectacular that neither Joe, Ian or I could keep up with him and had to trust his word that he wasn't just making random tomato-related noises up. Ian and I stumbled the most, but Joe and Martin tried to claim the same reward - cancelling it out - and I snuck the win:

Sam 3
Joe 2 (wins tie-breaker by owning a potato)
Martin / Ian 2

Then we split into teams to play Push It. Ian teamed up with Joe and I with Martin, as we sat diagonally across from each other. In the past we've played Team Push It pretty much to the same structure as solo Push It, but Martin spotted the team variant in the rules suggests that whichever team is furthest from the puck is currently active. This changed the dynamic of the game considerably, as it escalates the need to be close to the puck: remain furthest away, and you can swiftly run out of discs to fire at it, leaving your opponents with 2 or 3 free shots. Martin and I capitalised on the rule as we raced to a surprisingly one-sided victory:

Martin + Sam 21
Ian + Joe 2

Their only points came from me accidentally hitting the puck off the table. So astonished were we by this lopsided result that we played again. Joe was sure that going first was key to success, and his theory looked like it might hold water when he and Ian quickly established a 5-1 lead. But then it imploded as we raced past them again to another victory:

Martin + Sam 21
Ian + Joe 5

Despite their lack of success both Ian and Joe liked this team rule - we all did, as though it didn't make for the dramatic finales you often get when playing rigidly clockwise, it does enable some big results - and potentially big comebacks as well.

It was reasonably early for a Tuesday, but Ian especially had an early morning to look forward to and the evening came to a natural conclusion. Thanks all!