Spy Power

 I arrived just in time to see the last couple of clues of Cross Clues being posed. Ian, Laura, Joe, Martin and host Sam did well for time but fell short of perfection, getting three or four wrong.

The six of us stayed together for a six-player game of Wandering Towers. This was my first attempt at this simple game, new to GNN last week, and I managed to put a meeple in the tower with my first move. But any notion that I might have had that this would be easy was soon dispelled – I wouldn’t get another meeple into the tower until after Ian neatly dropped his third guy into the castle, triggering the end of the game.

Laura was the last to play and she thought she could get her last meeple in the tower, if only she knew where it was. Her first card allowed her to move a tower. She chose a tower, hoping to see her third guy underneath. No joy. Such is Wandering Castles.

Ian 3

Sam 2 (and four filled potions)

Joe 2, Laura 2, Andrew 2, Martin 2

Then we split into two groups of three. Joe, Ian and Sam chose Switch The Signal, a co-op train game. Laura, Martin and I played an ancient classic, Web of Power. This was Laura’s first game and my first game for about ten years, so a rules explanation was duly doled out by Martin.

But Web of Power has a few quirks that kept tripping Laura up, such as only one cloister in a new territory and that the maximum number of advisors in a region is equal to the number of cloisters in that territory owned by leading player in that region.

I enjoyed it. It was nice to go back after all this time. I don’t think I did particularly well, apart from a move that annoyed Martin, robbing him of ten points. That was satisfying.

Martin 75

Andrew 58

Laura 48

I didn’t really follow Switch The Signal, apart from catching the phrase “he’s got an itchy bum now,” uttered by Sam. At the end of the game, they declared themselves winners but only after awarding themselves an extra turn which, according to the rules, shouldn’t have been given.

While they were finishing off Switch The Signal, Laura, Martin and I banged out a quick High Score. As Martin explained the rules he demonstrated with a number of successful dice rolls. He put his cube high up the score track while I argued that those were just examples and shouldn’t count. My logic wasn’t taken seriously but I needn’t have worried. A run of good results for me (in round four, I scored 32 while Martin scored 8) meant I went into the final round just needing to avoid going bust to win. I accepted my first legal roll and took first place in a close match.

Andrew 15

Martin 14

Laura 13

On the other half of the table Sam won a quick game of Spicy, having won two 10s which was the first time he’d ever done that, apparently.

Then Laura left and the five of us played Decrypto. Joe and I were a team and we got a miscommunication in our first round. Joe’s clue of “Pret a Porter” should have pointed me to “Pocket” but instead I thought “Porter” was a reference to portaloos, so I chose “toilet”.

But I made up for it, noticing that Sam’s clue of “Ant/Zebra” seemed to reference A-Z, eventually leading Joe and I to guess Dictionary for that word. We got an interception for our second white token and won the game. Interestingly, I think both teams were on the right track for most words, even though we’d only played three rounds. Clearly we are all out of practice.

Joe and Andrew, I spy with my little eye

Sam, Martin and Ian, Blind Man’s Buff

At this point I went home, leaving the remaining quartet to play Ghosts of Christmas.

Martin 16

Joe 16

Ian 3

Sam 2

Thanks for the evening, everyone. See you next week.

Easton Uprising

Katy writes from the frontline:

For my (Katy) inaugural blog posting I took home scribbles on the back of a receipt after a rather epic evening of fifteen games at Anja and Steve’s (thank you for your excellent hostings). None of the usual bloggers were available and no one else seemed keen, so I thought I’d give it a go, apologies for the lack of the usual humour, wit, concise reporting and gaming insight.

We were nine in total, and as soon as myself, Joe and Ben arrived, a rather stirring (mainly Adam, who almost woke Luther) rendition of Happy Birthday was projected towards Joe, who will be 21 (again) on Thursday. The choir, initiated by Anja, also included Steve, Adam, Ian, Matt and Martin, the Easton (ish) masses.

We started with the usual negotiation of what game to play with whom and the rest is history:

Isle of Skye
Rather embarrassingly I’d forgotten most of the rules for Isle of Skye, which is actually now my game. Thanks for Matt and Ian for their patience with explaining the rules and the various uncertainties we faced. It seems like a quick game though and rather close throughout and at the end. Bothies and lighthouses were win win but scarce and fought over for most of the game.

Katy 51
Matt 49
Ian 44

Eggs of Ostrich
It was my turn to explain the rules of Eggs of Ostrich to both Ian and Matt as I was the only one to have played, thankfully it’s quite simple and from the results you can see that we were all playing rather nicely in the second game, once all the rules had been ironed out. This was obviously not going to last and we clearly became a bit more cut-throat towards the end; Martin would have been proud.

Katy 14
Ian 10
Matt 1

Ian 9
Matt 8
Katy 8

Matt 11
Katy 6
Ian 2

Aggregated
Katy 27
Ian 21
Matt 20

Push it
Ian 7
Katy 4
Matt 2

At this point myself, Ian and Matt had played five games, push it being a filler whilst kingdoms were finished being built in the lounging area.

Kingdom Builder
I’m unable to comment on this game, apart from the fact that they seemed to be getting on well, as I can’t remember hearing any loud profanities, which was surprising as both Martin and Adam were playing… together!

Adam 61
Steve 60
Martin 54
Anja 44

At this point in the evening we did some switching around, although looking at it, we only actually made one change; Martin left the lounging area, complete with comedy poising cat over the back of the sofa, and Ian lounged in his place and the following games were played

Web of Power
The key to web of power, which was rather nice and simple, looked impressive, had nice wooden pieces and played fairly quickly, was the Advisors. Advisors are tokens that you place on shields/cities in one of many countries depending on your cards (you have three each, playing up to all three to place up to two pieces). There are also Cloisters that can be placed on roads across and between cities. Cloisters score twice, on the first and second time through the deck of cards, but Advisors score only on the last, but when they score they score big and gave me the win. Whilst Martin and Matt seemed to be slogging it out in the same two or three countries, I seemed to have several to myself; skill rather than the luck of the cards? Who knows.

Katy 72
Martin 54
Matt 40

Whilst the above seven games had been taking place the, until now, in blog terms, allusive Ben and Joe had been playing Arkham Horror, the card game.

Arkham Horror, the card game
They started to chat about this on the way over and I thought I’d transported into a parallel universe… when I remembered, they don’t actually exist (or do they)! I understood not a word of what they said and looking over at the game I also had no clue what dark magic they were up to. At the end of their epic journey they reported having won, it’s a cooperative, and defeating a Ghoul Priest, whoever s/he may be. This, apparently is the only game that Joe allows himself to buy any of, although he did say he was in a game shop foundling games and muttering under his breath twice in the last week!

Ben and Joe Win
Ghoul Priest No Win

Eggs of Ostrich (again)
Martin managed to persuade both myself and Matt to play Eggs of Ostrich again, I did not fare as well against Martin’s ruthlessness, although I expect I was equally almost as ruthless, which is how we handed two out of the three matches to Matt, playing the same hands and fighting amongst ourselves. We played three games, which seems traditional and there was some debate about how these should be reported on the leader board, the question on everyone’s lips was, do we continue as before, each game is a game or do we aggregate our scores over three? I’ll leave it up to the master of the leader board, Andrew to decided.

Matt 12
Martin 4
Katy 4

Martin 11
Katy 10
Matt 6

Matt 8
Katy 7
Martin 4

Aggregated
Matt 24
Katy 21
Martin 19

Actually… in both cases, maybe it should be aggregated :D

Battle Line
Whilst we were engrossed in Web of Power, or was it Eggs of Ostrich, Joe and Ben played Battle Line, there was a line and I presume a battle, using cards in various ways and maybe some other mechanisms to win. Joe felt that Ben was playing some rookie errors early on, but he managed to smash Joe in this game of war… what is it good for…

Ben Wins
Joes Does not win

Fuji Flush
We managed to finish two games at more or less the same time and so myself, Martin and Matt joined forces with Ben and Joe to play this ever more innuendo based game. This time, as well as dick points, for putting a card down one higher than any opponent and stopping them pushing it through, there was also the swinging dick, which is where you wipe out everyone else’s cards in one go. We briefly discussed scoring this alongside the standard scoring. I envisage counters that are handed out during the game, one standard counter for a dick point and some sort of shiny gem for each swinging dick. Next time please. The first game was notable for Joe handing the win to Martin, so he could come third!

Martin Win
Matt 2
Joe 3
Katy 4
Ben 5

Ben Win
Martin 1
Joe 1
Matt 2
Katy 2

St Petersburg
St Petersburg, in the latter stages played to the sounds of much swearing and foul language (sorry about that), apart from that I know little, apart from the results, that needed to be texted in, by Adam, at 23:13, the scores were worryingly similar to Kingdom Builder

Adam 65
Steve 54
Ian 46
Anja 43

When thinking about writing the blog last night I thought I’d summarise by awarding everyone at least one prize, such as most plays of Eggs of Ostrich (myself and Matt, six each) and most profanities (Joe). Alas, I was too ambitious in my thinking and this has gone on long enough. Thanks for having me, a good night was had by all, until next time.

And here's this week's division, in glorious technicolor.

Ship of fools.

Due to my kids chunder fest on Sunday night games night was postponed to Wednesday this week. I had got three new games for my birthday and I was itching to get one of them played. We opted for Medici, rules are simple to learn and it has a quick playing time. So quick in fact that we managed to play three games on the trot but I'm getting ahead of myself here.

The first game for the newbie merchant ship captains was a curious mix of badly over bidding for goods and random tactics so it is probably little wonder that I came out on top. In this game each player spent a little time out in front.  It was quite incredible that the final score spread was only 5 points.

Chris - 129
James - 126
Paul - 124

Afterwards with all present staring at the board it was generally agreed that this was a smashing game with James going as far to say that it was his new favourite, of the shorter games.

So to round two, where I played a mean game of only bidding on the high tiles. A couple of winning ships later and I had quite the lead. It turned out to be enough in the end with neither Paul or James being able to mount a comeback.

Chris - 165
James - 123
Paul - 104

It seems in our last game that James had learnt all my tricks (Whatever they were) and sailed off round the scoring track, momentarily looking back over his shoulder every now and again to sail off in a puff of spices.

James - 169
Chris - 127
Paul - 107

For our final game we thought we'd give Web of Power another spin. This time it was a very cagey game with a few complete territories not even broken by the first scoring round, which James edged. I fell into my usual flawed tactic of spreading my advisors around the place and running out of them James and Paul managed a much more focused approach and in the end some canny placement by James won him the game even if he did think he had a road of 11 cloisters. It was actually one of 6 and one of 5 which only made the total of...........11. HAHAHA.

By this point we had all shared a big bag of Maltesers and a similar sized bag of skittles. I think we were all on a sugar rush...

James - 64
Paul - 53
Chris - 48

Webbed Feat

The members of the Bracknell three met up on Monday night despite the news of the pope retiring. In an attempt to put that sad news behind us we quickly unboxed Lords of Waterdeep easily the the trio's favourite game. The instructions state that the last person to visit a city should go first. Although Paul technically lives in London I actually visit Birmingham every month. Because of this it seemed unfair that I should always go first so I deferred to my left which happened to be Paul.

Pope quits:"I've never seen my boss at work since I started"

Inexplicably Paul refused any of the juiciest of building offerings and instead went for a choice quest. James needed no further encouragement and snapped possibly one of the strongest buildings in the game, Smuggler's Dock. This little beauty allows the agent to pick any combination of 4 warriors or rogues and the owner receives 2 gold. It was used every turn. Soon after James was on a roll snapping up other useful buildings which offered nice rewards and completing tricky quests early on to give him plot quests that actually were worth something. Where Paul and I gave ourselves false hope by barreling off down the scoring track with easy to fulfil quests James eventually reeled us back in and sailed past to comfortably win.

James - 171
Chris - 157
Paul - 152

For our second game we chose Web of Power. Back in the day this was a firm favourite for the London 4 as an evening starter. Even so both Paul and I were full of half remembered rules and made the knowledge transfer to James hideously complicated. However he manfully stood up to the plate even though he admitted he had no idea what he was doing. (Often the case with new games). For the uninitiated Web of Power is a territory and counter placement game where the object is to be winning amounts of Cloisters and Advisors in each territory so that you can score points for the various links between them. My faint memory of the game was that getting advisors down early was good as they took up a large part of the scoring at the end. My plan sucked and it turns out a more focussed and balanced approach worked better. Who knew.

Paul
James
Chris
(No points on the score track).

Also for the record I played James at Stone Age last week but was too busy to post a report. I won but spent the latter stages of the game telling James that I thought he had won. For this I apologise!!!

SeptCon Report!

FRIDAY

With Andrew sadly unable to come, and me unable to coerce another member of the GNN club out into the sticks - perhaps it sounded a bit scary - it was just myself (Sam), Paul and Chris competing for the SeptCon championship, a veritable Olympics of gaming both for those competing and anyone who can be arsed to read all of the below.

We converged at a picturesque cottage in the village of Foxham, and having met the farmer and his wife, their dog, three cats, and helped them bring a van-load of fresh meat into their kitchen, we sat down to commence a marathon of gaming, starting with a 7 hour session on Friday night.

Poison was first. This was new to both Chris and Paul but it's an easy one to explain so after doing my best impersonation of Reiner Knizia in a cape we were away. Everyone opened with a low-scoring round but Paul, the variant king, then began experimenting with strategy and this went horribly wrong in his second round. Chris scored a second zero in a row as I picked up a couple of points, and Paul's improved third round score - and my terrible one - wasn't enough to recover from third position. Chris came first to set the tone for a successful evening for him - but we all agreed that 3 players is exactly the wrong number to play Poison with, as unless someone plays aggressively it's very easy to slip into a pattern of everyone picking up their own colour.

Chris 6

Sam 14

Paul 17

Our gaming loins girded, we moved swiftly on. Paul and Chris had been playing Ticket to Ride so that became game number two. Contrasting styles here as Paul and Chris started building immediately and I started hoarding, looking to build a strong playing hand for later in the game. A slight misunderstanding over the rules too as Chris and Paul play the (correct) rule of only being allowed to build ONCE along the dual-track routes in a three-player game. I'd misunderstood this and thought we were playing the rule that the same player can't build both routes to block people off. It didn't change my strategy much though and everyone agreed that each player could break this rule once and once only.

My card-collecting routine (the Hillmann-method) paid off well come the final score, hoarding obviously gives you a lot of flexibility so when I was blocked I had alternative options, and I completed all my routes to end the game. Despite Paul completing extra routes I made first place, with Chris just sneaking second:

Sam 137
Chris 102
Paul 100

After a bit of tea, next up was 7 Wonders. This seems to be Paul's bête noir from a comprehension perspective, I think I explained it a lot better than last time but he still professed to utter bafflement and could not repeat the second place of his debut a few weeks ago. Instead Chris finished first in what was actually quite a tight game, to surge back into the lead overall:

Chris 42
Sam 39
Paul 37

Three reasonably fluffy games aside, we moved on to the meat of the evening: Stone Age. This was - again - new to Chris and Paul, but it's such an intuitive game it didn't take too much explanation before we were off and running. The newbies both enjoyed this - Chris especially so - but early on Chris seemed to be stumped as to what his tactic was. And despite my stressing of the importance of cards for a long time it was only me picking them up as the others went through a lot of hut-building. Despite that though, Chris staged a very decent first score in the end as his hut-multipliers popped up in the closing stages and he nabbed them. I was under the impression I was miles ahead - possibly because Chris kept saying I was, in a belated and disconcerting bit of NLP - next time I'll not be so blasé!

Sam 265
Chris 236
Paul 145

Time for one more game before we packed off to bed, but as it was gone eleven we went for the relatively brief 7 Wonders again. I ignored armies for a change and concentrated on sciences, but I made a fatal error in thinking my wonder allowed me to build a discarded card at the end of each age. No, Morrison! Only at the end of the second age, you fool! So my perceived brilliant move of burning a card for money in a plan to pick it up later (when I could afford to build it) came to naught. 9 points down the drain, and Chris pipped me for first.

Chris 55

Sam 51
Paul 30

The embryonic leaderboard (1st/2nd/3rd=3pts/2pts/1pt) showed Chris currently in first. Could he hang on to that position in the morning?

SATURDAY

Like some middle-aged family man - oh - I woke early and pottered about while those useless layabouts slept through a couple of hours of potential game time. After breakfast we pretended to be normal people and actually went for a walk in the country, taking farm dog Oscar with us. It was a beautiful area, the perfect place to sit indoors all day pretending to be Cornish miners or something.

So that's what we did. After our little perambulation we cracked open Tinners' Trail and explained it to Paul, who was in for another day of learning enough collective rules to start a new, bureaucracy-loving coalition. Chris opened the game with a canny bit of play, encouraging Paul and I to buy mines at cheap prices but leaving himself with lots of room to develop his own, and having done so he was the only player at the end of round one to invest any money - establishing an early, daunting 18 point lead. It was a long way back for Paul and I, but we gave it our best. Incredibly I pipped Chris by a point in the final reckoning, but only after he failed to give himself enough time to gather all his copper and tin in round four, fatally building a port when he should have been mining. A dramatic end, then, saw the final scores as:

Sam 150
Chris 149
Paul 90

We broke for lunch, making a swift trip to the shops followed by a fry-up. So far no fruit or vegetables had passed our lips for nearly 24 hours - Chris even suggested 'crisps' as a side dish to his planned meal of hotdogs - so if we ever do this for a week the winner will probably be the one still alive at the end of it. After eating, Web of Power was broken out the box. For those unfamiliar with it, this is a placement game with each player building cloisters across Europe and advisors to link countries together in scoring opportunities. We didn't play the proper rules for half the game, but it was the same for everyone and I nabbed another win as Paul finally broke out of third place:

1. Sam
2. Paul
3. Chris

After the delicate logarithms of Web of Power we decided to go with something that would melt our brains a bit more and Paul and Chris were keen - or willing, at least - to play London, so we gave it a shot. Not trusting myself to explain this one properly we went through the rule book a bit and it was mostly confusion-free; after a few rounds the newbies were up to speed - but Paul suffered both for unpaid loans and excess poverty, taking some severe penalties as Chris and I contested for first.

Sam 74
Chris 61
Paul 24

Perhaps because I was feeling the stress of explaining - badly - several sets of rules, it was the first time I didn't massively enjoy London, feeling it a bit of a grind. Certainly by the time it came to explaining The Adventurers I couldn't read any more rules and had to pass them onto Paul and Chris, the latter having an extremely juvenile giggling fit over the idea of sunbeams coming through a passage. Really, Chris!

Paul was a picture of maturity and calm next to him, at least until he suddenly decided to hurl a digestive biscuit at the window. He said he was aiming for the dog, but it was clearly a comment on Chris' behaviour.

Anyway, this deceptively simple game isn't alone in making the rulebook like some kind of test of stoicism, but we eventually got there and probably spent marginally more time on the game than we did on the rules - at which point Paul triumphantly claimed his first pole position. We all survived the Raiders-style traps but it was Lord Jefferies of Croydon who'd loaded his pack with the most treasure:

Paul 27
Sam 25
Chris 18

It was now early evening and, possibly gripped for a nostalgia for simpler times, we elected to play bean-growing-game Bohnanza. In this mini-classic you grow beans. That's it, basically. And despite my sluggish start I managed to consolidate my strong leaderboard position with another victory as Chris and Paul tied for second:

Sam 22
Chris/Paul 20

We broke again for food and, as winner, I was allowed to choose three games we could then argue over as to our next battle of wits. I was hoping we might go for Year of the Dragon, but after much enthusiasm from Chris and placid amenity from Paul we went with my second choice, Stone Age.

This time it was a much tighter affair, but I squeezed into first place:

Sam 227

Chris 207

Paul 206

It was fast approaching midnight so we had a little non-leaderboard game of poker then called it a night, with me now perched in first place overall.

SUNDAY

By the time the morning rolled around our initial zest for gaming two days before was starting to sag slightly, as the perpetual analysis - not to mention the intense pressure of competition - ground us down into faded husks of our former selves, like large ghostly meeples smelling faintly of sausage. The three of us living together in one house, gaming for all eternity, was no longer the beautiful ideal it seemed on Friday night. Nonetheless we remained committed and borderline enthusiastic, so we embarked on a game of Ra. Now I started off reasonably, but halfway through the second round I had three victory point chips to Chris and Paul's ten or so each. I was not confident at that point, but I managed - more by luck than judgement - to wangle first in a dramatic final round that saw us as close as possible:

Sam 33

Chris 32

Paul 31

Everyone quickly agreed to a rematch, but this time it wasn't so close, and Chris found that his very strong bidding hand in round 2 actually hampered him as he couldn't bear spending it on the pitiful offerings I was calling Ra on. As he clung on waiting for a justifiable expenditure to arrive, the round was closed out with him picking up very little, and his stronger third round couldn't rescue him.

Sam 54

Paul 34

Chris 21

On the final straight now, and we had time for one short and one long game. TransAmerica was the former, and it was another buttock-clenching final-round fight, this time Paul emerging victorious:

Paul 12

Sam 16

Chris 20

This was actually one of the best games of the weekend, and if we play it again on a Tuesday I highly recommend adding the 'Vexation' rule; utilising two tracks of your own colour to block off other players from your network. It transforms the game from a diverting filler to a devilish highlight.

And so: what game to end on? We debated Collosseum, Galaxy Truckers, another game of London? But it was a third and final Stone Age, the 15th game in a marathon session to rival StabCon. Very, very tight this time, with all of us focussed on our strategies and not deviating an inch from them. In the end my year or so of Tuesday night practice paid off again, but Paul's hot breath was leaving droplets of mist on my mammoth-fur waistcoat:

Sam 204

Paul 200

Chris 170

So SeptCon finally ended with GNN regular Sam (me, worryingly talking about myself in the third person) taking the glory. Admittedly I knew all the games and the others didn't, but I like to think of that as dedicated research undertaken specifically for this competition. Hopefully next time Andrew will be there - anyone else care to join us???

FINAL LEADERBOARD

Sam 38pts

Chris 28pts

Paul 23pts

Here's a frog Paul found.