Bubble Trouble

This week, five games were sat around Sam’s kitchen table, quite unaccustomed to the space available. We were Sam, Joe, Martin, Katy and myself. The numbers weren’t right for Babylonia and so we passed the first games night for some weeks without a sight of Knizia’s latest classic.

Instead, we chose Tulip Bubble. This was new to me and Katy, but the other three all said how happy they were to have another go at it. This game recreates those heady days of tulipomania in the Netherlands in the 1600s. The five of us bid on cards representing tulips of three different colours and if we were the sole bidders for one cards we got it for face value. If there were multiple people bidding on one card, then an auction would begin and this is where prices could get crazy. Then, at the end of the round, the value of each type of tulip would be adjusted according to how many cards of that colour remained. It is a clever mechanic, ensuring that tulips that were expensive one round would usually fall in value in the next (and vice versa).

In the first round, Sam asked for a do-over when he realised he’d put bids on two of the most expensive tulips available, despite only having 20 guilders. This early faux pas seemed to haunt him as he would occasionally berate himself for that terrible opening move and then struggled to remember the sequence of the rounds. “I understood this a lot better the last time I played it,” he mused while it dawned on him that he was already quite drunk.

Martin wasn’t drunk but giddy with luck. His early despair at seeing the price of white tulips collapse was wiped out when they rallied again and he was able to sell some of his cards to “a collector” for a bonus return. The same thing happened again a couple of rounds later leaving him with a surely unassailable lead. The next person to reap rewards of their speculation was Joe who had to endure our scepticism regarding his investments in the already expensive reds, only to see them rise again, netting him a decent profit.

Katy, Sam and I battled for most pessimistic and Sam won.

Martin 123
Joe 57
Katy 43
Andrew 29
Sam 14


After this we broke out Mamma Mia. This game might seem like more luck than judgement but that wasn't the way Joe played it. Twice he ended the “making pizza” part of the game with no cards, having used them all to complete pizza recipes that he’d played earlier in the game. This cool-headed efficiency was a joy to watch, but he fell foul of the tie-breaker rule which requires a player to have lots of ingredients left in their hand.

Sam 5 recipes completed (5 cards left)
Martin 5 (4 cards left)
Joe 5 (0 cards left)
Katy 4
Andrew 2

After this, we went all co-operative and lovely, with a game of Wavelength. The co-op version involves beginning with a set number of clue cards and then, every time you score a 4, you add another card. In this way you can keep going, like a game of keepie-uppie, and score as many points as you can.

Notable event was Martin’s clue of “Good Day Sunshine” by The Beatles for the spectrum “Happy/sad song.” Sam, Martin and I had to sing it to Joe and Katy while Martin implored Joe to try listening to the album Revolver. Joe, whose apathy towards the fab four is legendary, didn’t seem hugely excited at the thought. But our singing must’ve been good, because it got us three (maybe four) points.

Overall score: 18, a good score!

We ended with more co-operative shenanigans: Just One. We were remarkably duplicate free and Katy can count herself unlucky that our clues all pointed to boots as well as socks, and she chose the wrong option. The first duplicate was for me: all I had was Joe’s clue of “Bixby” and Katy’s clue of “Milk.” Bixby had to be a reference to Bill Bixby, the actor from The Incredible Hulk, but what about “milk”? I plumped for “Incredible” as my guess, but it turned out to be “Hulk” and there was once an advert for milk featuring the Incredible Hulk. If only I’d known.

Overall score: 9, not good apparently.

At this point we decided to leave so Martin ordered an Uber which was waiting in the road outside by the time we’d left the house. Amazing.

Self-Raising Flowers

What once threatened to be eight players (Paul and Anja dropped out, Andrew turned out to be Not in the UK After All) settled into the classic GNN conundrum that is five - what to play, when so many games out there only go up to four? As it was the enthusiasm from myself, Joe and Martin, persuaded/bamboozled Ian and Adam into giving Tulip Bubble a go.

businessmen

This is based on the first ever speculative bubble brought about by over-enthused tulip-investors back in 1637, when the craze for tulips bottomed out and the market crashed (I'm probably getting all these terms wrong, but tulips are definitely involved). Martin shrugged off his unfamiliarity with the rules and bashed through them in about 20 minutes - something that would take me an hour at least. His ability to process information at speed would come in handy - but so would luck, as we shall see.

Like Hab & Gut (other stock-manipulation games are available) the gist of the game is buy low, sell high. There are three colours of tulip (red, white, yellow) and each colour has a type (A, B, C) with the ABCs also having subsections of B1, B2, and so on. It sounds like the ingredients list on a jar of Marmite, but it makes sense after the first couple of rounds.

the market

There are three rows of flowers, the Next Shipment (not available to buy yet, but en route) the New Arrivals and the Just-Sold. Players can bid for up to three flowers in each round from the latter rows, using bidding chips. In the subsequent rounds, they can sell the flowers, either back to the market or to a collector: collectors want specific groups of flowers, but pay more in return. In essence you're trying to get rich, or wither trying.

rich enough to buy the Queen of the Night? Do it and instantly win the game!

The catch is between the buying and the selling the values of the flowers will change: the flower colour with most cards left behind after the buying's done will decrease in value. Conversely, the colour with the fewest cards will increase. And after that, an event card will trigger a rise or fall for at least one colour as well, meaning you are speculating on tantalisingly incomplete knowledge. This went badly for Ian, who splashed out on a gorgeous red tulip only to see it bottom out instantly, and well for Martin, whose three yellow flowers shot up in value just before he sold them to a collector.

The clergyman wants three B tulips of the same colour

There's some nice little mechanisms around that central idea: players can get the bank to pay for a card and hope to resell it at a higher value, claiming the difference for themselves. The catch with that is doing so occupies one of your bidding chips, so you're now you're short one (or more) bids in the buying. If multiple players bid on a flower, the losing bidders will usually get a small pay-off, and that encourages a bit of brinkmanship on bidding for flowers you might be happier without in order to force some pennies your way. And the game ends in extremely unnerving fashion: somewhere in the bottom three event cards is the Bubble Burst - the game ends instantly if this is flipped, leaving everyone on a knife edge as to when exactly they should stop bidding at all; as the flowers themselves obviously are worth nothing when the bubble bursts.

Ian, in hock

Joe spent most of the game borrowing from the bank and not selling anything. Ian decided from the first round he was fucked, and when Martin later said he was fucked, Ian reminded him that that was Ian's catchphrase. Adam made use of my lack of attention to detail by encouraging me to bid for yellows, meaning his yellows would then be worth more. But this trickery backfired when there was a crash and yellows market value dropped dramatically. Joe recovered from his lack of commerce to finish strongly. But in the end, Martin's oranges made the difference...

Martin 102
Joe / Sam 74
Adam 64
Ian 49

Tulip Bubble had taken us a while but the verdict seemed broadly positive. I'd certainly like to play it again. And Joe and I tying for second began a feature of the evening - every game featured a tie somewhere in the placings.

about to go zero!

Joe suggested Zero Down next, so we blasted through that. I began the first round with a zero, but fell apart after that. Martin cursed his cards. Adam scrutinised silently. Ian scored the worst in the first round but then zeroed the second and scored minimal points in the third to grab a win:

Ian 21
Joe 35
Sam 38
Adam/Martin 40

Next up was Mamma Mia, the game where I always refer to pineapple as cheese.

spot the difference

Sorry everyone. It does look like cheese, to be fair. Martin told Adam it was Rosenberg's best game, and Adam gave him what can only be described as a look. Joe completed a single pizza the whole game - surely there were walk-outs in his trattoria?  Ian repeated his Zero Down trick of starting innocuously only to super-charge his way over the line, or in this case, out-pizza us with his ingredient-manipulation and reserves of memory.

Ian 5
Martin/Sam 4
Adam 3
Joe 1

With the clock ticking on what was left of the day, Adam now departed and left us as a quartet. We finished the night with Kribbeln, as Martin challenged us to work out his Decrypto word from the weekend from the clues Mountains, George, and Ska. Answers in the comments below!

Back on Das Exclusive though,  Ian began poorly again, but this time didn't recover. Everyone went bust at some point, but in the end it was yet another tie - this time for first place!

Joe/Sam 23
Martin 20
Ian 17

And with the time now well past eleven, another mini-classic came to a conclusion.