Hold your breath...

...it's Underwater Cities! But Underwater Cities played at such a rate of knots you almost could have held your breath. Andrew and I played a rapid-fire two-player game this evening - so quick we were finished at 9.05pm. It's much quicker a. when you know what you're doing b. with 2 players and c. knowing Adam is not there to make you feel like every turn was a wasted opportunity should you fail to optimise.

Andrew built pleasurable, diverse cities with a lot of upgraded tunnels. He coined in the cash in production and, what's more, grabbed two of the government contracts. My cities by contrast looked a bit Little Englander early doors, focusing on only one or two types of building but then upgrading the biomatter out of them for big returns in production.

My metropolis also rewarded upgrades, and in the final count-up, these sent me into a convincing win:

Sam 100
Andrew 76

Brief though it was - accompanied by a visit and advice from Stan - we needed something silly afterwards, so played Tomatomato. Officially it plays 3-6 but it's been such a hit in the house we already have a two-player variant devised.

The game is just flipping tiles that say tomato, to, ma, or mato. As a row of syllables get longer, you take turns attempting to pronounce it - stumble or pause, and it's a tile to your opponent. It's very silly, especially when the rogue Potato tile pops up, and Andrew's familiarity with the Japanese language - I like to think - gave him a convincing victory:

Andrew 4
Sam 2

After that we tried our hand at a recent gift in the form of an educational/dialogue-provoking game in Less is Max, a Spanish publication aimed, it seems, at classes. Players win by developing the nine parts of their personality, and do so by bidding on cards that allow you to add your tokens on the board, where each constituent part is laid out. Some cards have bad effects though that remove tokens, and there's also a shared element in the common good, which fills up with suns to reward everyone with more cash, or poison to take it away.

Our game, thanks to an odd falling of cards, took about 15 minutes, after I grabbed the card that let me do sport once a week to tick off the leisure box. Both of us got very excited by the option of theatre, and I tried not to use plastic bags. It's not a gamer's game, but it was an interesting experience and very pertinent.

Sam - most rounded personality
Andrew - Loser!!! nyah nyah nyah-nyah-nyah

We ended the night with Push It, and what a masterpiece of gaming this was, including flicks of brilliance and - more often - flicks of pathetic mental collapse. Andrew surged into the lead; I pulled him back. He surged again; I pulled back again! Then he was poised to win at 20-19 but got the yips and I picked up double points to grab the victory:

Sam 21
Andrew 20

Although writing this now it occurs to me that the official rule, I believe, is someone has to be two clear points ahead to win! So Andrew - to be continued...

Whatever is the Biomatter

Today's post is named after Adam's insistence that we identify the exact nature of biomatter.

The games began early when Stan and I nearly played chess, but then abruptly changed tack to Flipships. We blithely obliterated the oncoming mass of tiny attackers but realised we had a single round to hit the mothership 6 times. Still, we had 24 attempts to do it with. And every missed attempt would just made the final hit that much more glorious... except we hit the Mothership exactly once, and sent our other pilots careering uselessly around the kitchen table and into the salad dressing.

Alien Invaders: win
Sam and Stan: lose

With Andrew and Adam still half an hour from arrival Stan wanted a crack at The Mind. Without making any kind of verbal pact, we started playing at a much brisker pace than normal, and barrelled our way up to the eighth round before expiring. But round five was a Mind Classic: I got down three low cards and Stanley two, before I sat back with my cards face down on the table. Stan scrutinised my face for ten seconds, then played his 95. I played my 96 and 97, and he slapped down 98/99 for a clear round. Genius!

The Mind - wins
Sam and Stan: lose

Stan vacated the kitchen for the front room as Andrew and then Adam arrived to find Underwater Cities set up and ready to go.

very similar to last week

Last week's play gives a more in-depth run down of the rules, but suffice to say in Underwater Cities, you're building underwater cities. Actions are paid for by cards, and if the card colour matches the action colour: bingo! You get the action on the card too. This simple twist on worker-placement is genius when everything combines neatly, and annoying when you regularly end up with a hand of like-coloured cards. I got the rule sweats - not only is there a fair amount to get through, I was also conscious of Sally in hearing-distance as I said things like "An upgraded desalination plant gets you biomatter"

"So that's shit, essentially?" asked Adam
Andrew and I protested that biomatter could take many forms, but for the rest of the evening Adam referred to his desalination plants as 'piss factories'. Is this what Vladimir Suchy worked so hard for?

piss factories not shown

Andrew and I knew Adam would win, but by how much? There have been times in the past where his debut attempts at games we already know have been embarrassing for us, so it was up to us to keep the pressure on, which we did with lots of sarcasm about how long he took to take his turns. It didn't work - Adam had come with pyschological ploys of his own, which included pointing out my schoolboy error in round two (I coulda built a symbiotic city! Instead I'm a bum) and waving sugared peanuts in Andrew's face. Andrew hates nuts, sugared or not.

Other snacks featured, including the rowdy salt and vinegar twirls that attracted Sally's attention ("What are you eating? It's so loud") which Andrew rationalised as the acoustic properties of the twirl over our table manners. Back in the game, Adam's natural inclination to hoard, even in a world where resources can be hard to come by, became evident as we hit the final straight and his nose was just visible behind a pile of 'science'. I grabbed the first two government contracts. Andrew grabbed the next one. Adam looked unconcerned. We snapped up Special Cards with end-game bonuses. Adam shrugged. After round ten we counted up and found I had won! - If you exclude Adam, that is.

Adam!!!!

Adam 94
Sam 84
Andrew 81

We'd bashed out three submerged conurbations in rapid speed, taking a little over 2 hours. "It felt longer" Adam admitted, but that's just because he thought about it more than we did. Anyway, there was still time for a little closer which was Spy Tricks. Andrew accidentally broke the game in round two when he revealed the hidden card with what he realised was a drunken decision. I capitalised with a winning bet, and wrapped things up in round three:

Sam 27
Adam 22
Andrew 10

This morning when I mentioned my win to Stan, he archly compared the 'deep strategy' of Spy Tricks to the 'luckfest' of Underwater Cities. Pithy cynicism from an 11-year-old - this is the world we're living in now...

We couldn't persuade Adam to stay any longer, but Andrew and I finished the evening with an old favourite in Love Letter, where Andrew shot into a 3-0 lead in a matter of seconds, guessing my cards and baroning me into submission. I surged back to 3-2, in a princess-missive-mission-recreation of the recent Man City-Spurs game. I was helped a lot by my handmaid, as Andrew found himself forced to discard his own princess. But Andrew took the win when he guessed I had a shitty Baron, giving everyone a victory on the night... a delightful night too, considering the amount of biomatter involved.

Lords of Deepwater

At the optimistic time of 8.45pm Andrew, Ian and I sat down to play Underwater Cities, undertaking the (futuristic) building of said cities, under the water. Not literally under the water, although it did feel a bit like that at times. Ian, last to arrive, surveyed the board and said it looked a bit mad. Then I explained the rules and he said it sounded pretty straightforward. Smell wasn't mentioned, but I'd guess it was salt, with a whiff of solder.

ready to dive

It is pretty straightforward too: long-time players won't be surprised to hear that before building anything, you need to harvest the appropriate resources. In Underwater Cities that's credits, science, steelplast, biomatter, and kelp. There's never enough kelp. The harvesting is where Underwater Cities gets more interesting; aligning the standard worker-placement fare with card 'payment' for the action. Each action on the board has a colour (green/red/orange) and if you pay with a card of the matching colour, you get to activate the action on the card as well.

Turn order is important. Although there's a way to take an occupied action space, it costs credits, and credits are needed for construction of cities and the perennial board game favourite: desalination plants. Other buildings are farms and labs. Tunnels also need to be built to connect your cities together - if you don't link back to your starting city, your cities and buildings are devoid of population and production, like a watery Barrett estate waiting for young families to arrive. After rounds 4, 7 and 10 (the last round) your network runs production: Farms produce food, Labs science, Desalination and Tunnels give you credit income. Upgraded buildings and tunnels produce more, including victory points as society recognises your growing success. Symbiotic cities, if you manage to build them (Andrew and I didn't) also provide points, as they represent a more harmonic existence within the environs of the ocean.

Ian's cities (white/red) farms (green) and desalination plants (yellow)

Ian began tentatively by playing lots of cards with if this-then that type effects and muttered that he didn't know how to use them. Andrew expanded quickly. I built and upgraded Farms, mindful that when Stanley beat me earlier in the week, I'd been crying for Kelp. Andrew and I eyed Ian's growing engine and voiced our concerns. The first production arrived reasonably quickly and we all relaxed as our buildings paid out like fruit machines... only to find that our expanding networks swallowed it all up rather quickly.

As Andrew and I hit the government contracts (meet the requirements: grab the rewards) Ian's plethora of cards were starting to combine in worrisome ways. Even when he paid for an action with a non-matching card he hoovered up compensatory steel and credits, and after the second production phase our concerns looked justified.

Action slots around the edge of the board; contracts and special cards in the middle

However (#1) the game seemed to to turn in my direction when I played a special card that would reward me for my insatiable farm-building. Ian was convinced I'd won, seeing as a metropolis on my board - everyone has three - also rewarded upgraded buildings. As we surged - if you can call anything in Underwater Cities surging - through the final three rounds, Ian felt it was a fight for second between he and Andrew. In turn we were worried about his mahoosive pile of resources: at the end of the game players score for their network of cities (the more diverse the buildings in them the better) their end-game cards and metropolises, and their resources. Ian had tonnes - far more than anyone else. But I still had my bonza rewards for the aforementioned insatiable farm-building...

However (#2) I'd slightly misunderstood the scoring for my Metropolis tile, and got precisely zero points for it.

However (#3) Ian's score was so advanced up the track anyway, even if my interpretation had been correct, I'd still have been back in second! Scores were something like:

Ian 84
Sam 72
Andrew 69

As we surfaced for air we reflected on the game which Ian likened to Lords of Waterdeep and Andrew Terraforming Mars. It was long - I wouldn't even attempt it with four - and that simple nub of action-taking, abetted by cards, slows down considerably when any player builds a tableau with as much choice as Ian did. Unlike Terraforming Mars, however, the hand-size limit is three cards, which goes some way to confining the AP moments. We all had do-overs. But playing it again - which I would like to - I do think that would drop considerably. I felt despite one or two cards it avoided the sinking-into-abstraction of many long games, and it isn't a point salad either. One for the Euro-lovers no doubt - we all agreed that Adam would enjoy it, and probably show us that Ian is catchable after all...