The Seven Commandments

There was at one stage nine of us last night at Anja and Steve's house, although the ongoing pipe-based escapades of their particular street meant we were never actually all at the table at the same time. Such is life when, like Steve, you plumb in the moonlight. 

But we began as an eight. Whilst Anja was getting Lennon settled, the assembled ranks of gamers placed their wagers on Hot Streak. With the full complement we elected to eschew the drafting and play the 'secret betting' variant, where you simply choose a racer to back based on the cards, and most also go with your hunch on a side-bet. There's a little less control in a game with minimal control already, but it plays nice and rapid. 

As is the way with Hot Streak, there is no official winner - the rulebook foretells your future instead - but unofficially this was Pete's game: he ended with $38 ahead of Joe's $28, with the rest of us dismally arrayed between 8 and 15. 

We split into two groups with Martin and Joe introducing 2 Win to Louie and Ian whilst the rest of us played the simple-yet-inscrutable dnup. 

Having already played 2 Win I can give a brief précis. Each round players choose two cards to play as a number, with the significant caveat that it must be higher than their last one (-your first number can be anything, but you want it to be reasonably low). If you play the highest number, you get a card from the deck. If you play the most stars - these pop up on some numbers - you also get a card. And you get a card in another way I can't be bothered to explain here. However you get 'em, cards are good because the winner of 2 Win is the last one standing: as your cards run out you either don't have enough or, more likely, your numbers are too low. 

from earlier

Joe won this, with Louie second and Martin and Ian first out. Meantime Steve was unscrambling dnup's inscrutability with some success, picking up a win in just three rounds despite asking what the rules were during the second one. 

The 2 Win gang had now subbed Louie out for Anja and set up Martin's new trick-taker Master Makatsu, so we moved on to Mykerinos, my new second-hand classic of the Beige Games Era. However at this point - I missed how it happened - Steve was called away to plumb. Being unsure how long he'd be, Adam suggested we play dnup again, and won just in time for Steve's return. We'd fleetingly seen him covered in water as he passed through the house like Super Mario, but now he was back and dry and ready to dig for artifacts. 

In Mykerinos then we send archeologists out to dig in order to claim cards at the end of the round via area majority: first place gets first choice, second gets whatever's left over. The cards you harvest will score points at the end of the game: exactly how much depends on what rooms you're able to reserve in the museum back home: you can sacrifice a card to take the reserve action instead. 

dig

the museum

The catch with the digs is that there's limited space and players get in each other's way. Mykerinos also does not like you branching off from your digs, so you can only extend them from either end, with up to two cubes. Or you can start a new dig anywhere with one cube. Or you can pass and keep cubes back, or you can call on a Patron. 

from earlier

Claimed cards, as well as being your points, also flip over and become special-move-endowing patrons, something Adam put to good use as he used Lady Violet to continuously claim extra cubes from the supply in a limited economy. Despite my earlier reservations and ousting of Pete for shared card objectives, it was enough to give him a victory on a tiebreaker: cubes left over. Steve's strategy of asking what the rules are halfway through served him less well here than in dnup.

Adam 51 + two cubes

Sam 51 + no cubes

Pete 40

Steve 27

Whilst all that was happening, Ian had won Master Makatsu (points are bad) 

Ian 14

Martin 15

Anja 16

Joe 18

And I know little of it despite Martin explaining the rules to me in the car on the way home. That was almost twelve hours ago now and things have changed. I do know that Ian followed this with another win in Mille Fiori, staging some kind of epic comeback from the mid-game doldrums. 

Ian 203

Anja 184

Martin 182

Joe 161

And now, as the room vibrated to the sound of Molly's snoring...

Adam left for home. Anja suggested So Clover, but we realised nobody had So Clover with them. Then Pete said it might be in his car - in case of breakdowns I suppose - but with demurring voices Adam and Katy not present we realised we could play Triangulation, and broke into teams. And what a game it was. 

I kicked things off in moronic style with The Ten Commandments. Not only did I confuse the commandments with the deadly sins but I wrote 'ten' as one of my clues, thinking Ha ha, there are ten of them to myself. Dumb as a bag of spanners, leaving teammates Joe Ian and Steve at a loss.

Because we failed in round one, I cost us a point. But then I redemptively suggested Big Bird from Martin's large and yellow and it proved correct! We just about got Disneyland after Pete's gracious giveaway that we were close, and Joe twigged that Steve's clues were about Zoolander. 

Anja's team successfully got IKEA and then we failed to grasp Ian's clues for Tim Burton (though Joe's idea of Beetlejuice got us very close!). Down to the final round and we flipped over Martin's DC and five, initially making us think of comic superheroes before I wonder if the Pentagon was in Washington. Ian thought it was, and we intercepted for the win! 

In a quirk of fate Martin realised that - having intercepted Joe's launderette and blue for Levis - their team would have won if he'd written his clues a little slower and they'd have gotten to guess first. Crazy. 

But now the hour was past 11pm and so we wrapped up another week. 

Who’s on Third?

Tuesday at Joe’s. I arrived at the same time as Adam T and Joe lead us downstairs to his kitchen, we were greeted by a group of five more eager gamers, Ian, Martin, Adam H, Katy and Sam. The scent of peanuts filled the air as two nut-based snacks sat in bowls in the middle of the table. As an octet we decided to play a game together and Triangulation was brought to the table.

In this game a clue-giver writes three clues to try and make his team guess a word (always a Proper Noun) but in such a way that the opposing team can’t guess the word when given two of those clues, chosen at random. Joe, Adam H, Katy and Sam lined up on one side of the table and Ian, Martin, Adam T and myself were on the other.

Joe started the game and the first clue to be revealed was “Rusty.” Blank looks all round. I suggested Mad Max, so we went with that. This caused a certain amount of deliberation from Joe before he said no. This made us think that this might be somehow related to Mad Max - an assumption not entirely disproven by the next clue “Dusty.”

In fact the answer was Springfield. Joe had misremembered the name Krusty the Clown as Rusty, hence the confusion. I had a similar experience on my turn. I chose Stan Lee but then couldn’t remember if he was Marvel or DC. I felt fairly sure it wasn’t DC so my clues were Marvel, Origin and Pauper - the third clue based on Stan Lee being screwed over by Marvel.

Another source of confusion was when Martin’s first clue was “Third” and Sam wondered if it was an allusion to the famous “Who’s on third” comedy routine by the Three Stooges, until he realised he meant “Who’s on first” by Abbot and Costello.

Martin, Ian, Adam T and Andrew 4

Sam, Katy, Joe and Adam H 1

After this, we split into two. At one end was Spyrium, a game that harked back to a time when every board game had a cyber punk aesthetic and was all about building engines, and me, Ian, AdamsT and H set up to play. 

The other players chose Bella Vista, a game with an appropriate name as they all build up their delightful multistory somewhat Parisian apartment blocks across a city according to a varying set of rules. 

Katy ended up a clear winner, reflecting her desire to make a better world. In this case, one full of parks.

Katy 104

Martin 90

Joe 78

Sam 70

Spyrium played out as you may expect. Ian and I went for points while the two Adams seemed content to sit on zero points for most of the first two rounds. Of course, the two Adams had just been toying with us. While my final round involved no building at all and a desperate attempt at converting anything in my reserve into points, both Adams still seemed to have a plan and the money to complete it. Adam T’s experience gave him the edge over H’s innate sense of how to win a game.

Adam T 62

Adam H 55

Andrew 51

Ian 46

And then I left. Only two games, but still a full evening. As I left, Sam, Katy, Joe and Martin were playing Dnup. It was a card game where you have the opportunity to turn your hand of cards upside down, which would give you a whole new set of numbers to play with. I know little else about it, including the scores.

But thanks all, it was special.

Winning Streak

 As I walked through Bristol, I was enjoying the blue skies and fresh breeze, feeling like summer was finally here. As if to confirm this, Adam H rode past me on his bike, waving at me in a t-shirt and reflective sunglasses looking for all the world like he's headed to the beach. But he wasn’t. He was heading to Sam's house for this week's gaming interlude. 

When I arrived I also met Sam, Laura, Ian and Joe, with Pete joining us soon after I sat down. We played Hot Streak - a Magical Athlete type of game with a retractable track that extends from the game box across the table. But while Magical Athlete has a cast of dozens, Hot Streak consists of four runners who have a distinct lack of super powers. As such, it should be easier to predict the winner, right? Runners move according to cards drawn from a deck that everyone has seen, but then has had a card added to it from each player and then, as the race progresses, cards are removed from the deck. This means, whatever information we all had at the start, gets more and more inaccurate.

Joe was assiduous in his preparation for the game, supplying a music soundtrack to enhance the excitement of the game. One of the tunes was “Yakety Sax” which we observed, despite its fame, wasn’t the kind of tune you’d put on to listen to at home.

Ian was the best at predicting the results by quite a margin. Pete, though, in many ways played the perfect game: finishing with exactly the same amount of money that he started with.

In an example of Flavour Text gone mad, each possible result has its own i-ching-style life prediction. I didn’t note them down except that they all seemed quite long except mine which was a single sentence.

Ian 68

Adam 57

Laura 46

Andrew 39

Joe 34

Sam 14

Pete 10

Now we split into two groups. Ian, Adam, Sam and I go for the 3-D co-op puzzle that is La Boca while Laura, Joe and Pete went for Pandemic: Rising Tide. The rules explanation for this game were pretty lengthy, continuing long into our game of La Boca.

La Boca is a cleverly designed game. Like Hot Streak, the box itself is intrinsic to the game itself acting as a stage on which the two players build a wall according to two different (but compatible) designs. 

We all collaborated with each other in a random order and we soon discovered that the easiest level was far too easy, instead playing with the slightly harder designs and the, in our final turns, the hardest of all. 

I did very well, maybe I got lucky with card choices. The fastest time for a round to be completed was just 14 seconds.

Andrew 50

Adam 35

Ian 34

Sam 33

No idea what was happening in the Netherlands, but at our end of the table we played Survive The Island. In this game we have to rescue our meeples from a steadily vanishing island and increasing numbers of sea monsters. We also have to avoid each other, as the game allows plenty of dickish strategies to send opponents into the sea or even bounce them onto tiles containing monsters.

After a quick start, I was very slow to get my meeples off the island. Eventually I decided to stop waiting for another raft and swim for safety. Might have worked too, but then the third volcano on the island erupted and the game ended.

Adam 21

Ian 17

Sam 16

Andrew 7

And so I was done. But the rest continued long into the night as Sam will explain….

*                        *                        *

After Andrew left they were still frantically putting fingers in dykes in Rising Tide, so Adam went to the front room and returned with a small selection of games for Ian and I to choose from. One of them was Steam Power, but at 9.45 we both felt - not realising how far away the end of the evening was - that it was a little late to start route-building. Instead, with Laura's encouragement from the sidelines/Holland, we set up Tipperary. All of us were pretty rusty on the rules but it's dead simple. Especially if you're Adam. 

In brief, Tipperary is a polyomino game with multiple overlapping ways to score. Finding ways to combine them is where it's at, and whilst myself and Ian sprawled our farms erratically over the table, Adam's homestead was much more rigorous in its structure and discipline. 

Whilst he was never in the running for 'largest flock' Adam shrugged off this minor oversight with a bagatelle of other point-scoring shenanigans. 

Adam 98
Sam 78
Ian 60

Despite our Dutch dammers insisting the game was nearly over, I suspected that we might have time to squeeze in a quick luck-pusher in Lure, the game of catching fish. But suddenly Rising Tide was over, and despite the fact it took considerably longer than the advertised 45 minutes (Pete and I anticipated an hour, so we were only 50% out) everyone seemed happy - especially as they won. The Netherlands was saved!

Pete, Laura and Joe - Amsterdam!
Pandemic - Rotterdam

doesn't really make sense, sorry

Surprisingly, nobody was making moves to go home, so we split into teams - Ian/Laura/Pete v Joe/Adam/Sam - and played Triangulation. 

We got off to a solid start when Adam and Joe figured out Red Bull from drinking/caffeine/races and then intercepted Ian's cocaine/horror/Maine as Stephen King. His 80's cocaine habit was new to us - Ian said that apparently he doesn't remember writing Cujo - but we were off to a flyer. 

Adam's first reveal was towel and Pete instantly suggested - correctly - The HItchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Laura revealed Joey and we guessed Friends. But her second clue gave away that it was Australia, and then Joe's wood/Helena/Mars for Tim Burton wrapped up a win for our team. We did Pete's clues anyway and Ian and Laura correctly guessed Subway from High Street/Underpass/foot. 

Adam now left for home leaving five of us to finish the night with the traditional So Clover. We opened with a 6 - I was rather pleased with my white lie for elastic/fable - but ran into problems with Pete's clue of Wogan, which seemed to loosely connect with lots of things. Surprisingly the answer was radio/stud, which Pete appeared to be tinged with regret about. Laura's clue of Mr. Y Bear for light/magician was another baffler, prompting thoughts of Yogi Bear and Logie Baird before Laura revealed it was intended as 'mystery bear'. Beyond that, she volunteered no further information, happy to cackle gleefully into her beer. I think we finished with Joe's, which was another 6: spicy for demon/noodle was nice. 

It was now shockingly 11.30pm though which for us five clarity bears meant bedtime. A cracking Tuesday night, thanks all!

The Night of Obscure References

I arrived at Sam's only a little late but still late enough for Sam to beat Joe at a game of Aspen and for the two of them to start a game of Cross Clues with Ian, Katy and Martin. I got there just in time to be given the last free card.

We clued each other adequately enough, with Martin having to explain an absurdly optimistic clue referencing Kim Joy who is a celebrity chef who’s made a board game. General blank looks all round.

20 out of 25

Then we set up Triangulation, a team game based around giving clues to certain things: pop culture, places, people etc. You have to give three clues but the opposing team gets to guess first, using two of those clues. Pete was expected to join us soon but, since it was a team game, he could just join in once he arrived. And when he did, he made quite the entrance, dropping his metal water bottle loudly onto the floor.

Not to be outdone in the attention-seeking game, Sam then went outside, across his floorboard-free decking, balancing on joists several feet above the ground, just to pick up a couple of cans of gin and tonic.

Sam wondered aloud what kind of thing might be allowed - does the moon count as a proper noun? My favourite clue was Ian’s “Washington” “Compass” “Flight” which should have made us think of West Wing, but didn’t. Seemed so obvious after the reveal.

Then we split into two. Martin and I were early recruits for President Maker, but seemed to have enormous trouble getting extra candidates as everyone hedged their bets, waiting to see what else was on offer.

In the end, Dewan was the other game, with Ian, Katy and Joe. Sam, Pete, Martin and I chose President Maker, but Sam had to do Explaining duties on Dewan.

Once Ian, Joe and Katy were happy to continue, Martin talked us through the intricacies of the Korean electoral system as represented by five bits of cardboard and some cubes. In this game players can “rally” which means they can increase their popularity in an area, especially if no one else goes there.

Then you can play a card which allows you to move cubes, with the proviso that you may collect bombs - too many of those will damage your popularity with the voters.

Finally, all these cubes translate into tiles that go into a black cloth bag. And, once for each area, we draw tiles to see who gets the most votes. It was Sam by a country mile, and he couldn’t help but laugh as he pulled out yellow tile after yellow tile, somehow avoiding all of the many purple tiles in the bag. 

As we began the fifth and final area, Sam’s lead was so great that Martin observed his only way of winning was if all his tiles came out, and none of Sam’s. But Sam then drew two of his own and any sense of excitement was done. Except for Sam, who kept getting votes and very nearly broke the scoreboard.

1st Sam (Progressive)

2nd Andrew (Centrist)

3rd Pete (Independent)

4th Martin (Conservative)

Dewan finished without me paying it much attention, except for Joe’s disdain for the dividers in the game’s box as he tried to put it away.

Joe 43

Katy 40

Ian 16

Katy left and the six of us played Triangulation again. I can’t honestly say we were any better than the first time.

We saw some painfully obscure references where no one got the answer despite seeing all three clues (Pete’s “rise” “Of” “Pandemic” was a cryptic allusion to Cthulu, and my “Calvin” “Chuck” “Eighty Eight” did not lead anyone to Back To The Future although Ian mentioned it in passing while they deliberated) but equally we experienced some almost telepathic correct guesses after one word. Martin was aghast when “Material” lead almost everyone to agree on Madonna.

Pete, Sam, Andrew win

Ian, Joe, Martin don’t

Then Joe gave me a lift home. Only 10:10pm. Days of near-midnight finishes seem so long ago…

But the evening continued, as Sam reports.

 *                *                *

After Andrew left we had time for a couple more games. 

First up was Catan: On The Road, which dumps the original's spatial element whilst keeping the resources, trading, and first-to-x-win condition, which in this case is 7 points. We'd all played before but that didn't stop me getting confused about the harvest phase. Ian briefly flirted with winning, but then Martin stole his big road and I took the biggest army. Then Martin built a metropolis and won. Something like that, anyway. Martin and I have conferred today and found our memories somewhat erratic. 

Then it was time for the green plastic. We did very well, rolling 4 sixes straight out the gate in pretty short order. There were some nice clues in there, with Martins tip for waiter/garbage being perhaps the most lateral. We were so pleased, and Martin had so much beer left, that we played again. The second game was so bad nobody took any pictures, but here is the first:

And with that, the GNN Tuesday closed up shop for another week. Until then!