That's a Fact

With Laura and Andrew bowing out on the day, there were still seven of us clustered at Joe's house come 7.30: myself, the host, Katy, Ian, Martin, and 'the Adams' which kicked off an evening of confusion when, on arrival, I thought Adam T and Joe were talking about calling everyone Adam would be a 'great system' but it transpired they were speaking of other things. I should have known. I got even more confused by whose birthday it was. Katy brought cake.

Everyone threw their games on the table. Adam T's included one he'd forgotten how to play and the rules were in Russian. Martin's included Orbit, which immediately had plenty of volunteers - he began setting that up as Adam H and I explained Looot to Joe. 

Despite Looot's quirky name and simple rules, it's quite a thinker, packing that puzzly euro game feel into a fast-moving half-hour or so. As Vikings, we raid the central board to take things home to our homelands, and then score them depending on configurations: you surround buildings or longships with the resources they need to flip them: once flipped, they make said resources worth more points. It's a take-and-make style game reminiscent in one sense of Cascadia/Calico, but competition on the shared board makes it far more cut-throat, as Joe serially discovered at the hands of Adam. 

Meantime Orbit was being played out in teams, with Katy and Ian suffering the slings and arrows of Adam T and Martin. And vice versa. 

I didn't get all the details but I did catch, I think, some reminiscing over when or how the term 'space cunt' originated a discussion about Katy calling someone a cunt (again). It's probably nice being a team though, as you are c**t-side of everyone in this game. Meanwhile on hexagonal Earth, I was losing my way despite playing Looot a few times already this week. My vikings lacked coherency, gathering gold boosters when I severely lacked any gold to boost. Adam - having been the most dastardly - took a clean win here, with Joe coming a solid second on debut. 

Adam 99

Joe 91

Sam 76

Orbit was still in full-dick, so we set up A Message from the Stars. This melted my head when I was a human being, but thankfully I was now an alien, with far less cognitive load, as Joe and Adam took up the role of cryptographers.  

They did very well. It was fascinating to watch them make so much hay from a single word, but my brain contains about as much logical deduction power as a conference pear. I just needed to give them enough clues to work with, which is a comparatively simple undertaking. They cracked the code, and after a near-miss with Royalty, we deciphered each other's messages!

Adam, Joe and Sam: joint winners.

Orbit hadn't quite finished so we set up Misfits. Adam got us off to a brutal start with horrible bit of foundational sabotage, but we managed to build it quite high up before it finally fell over on Joe. 

While that was happening, Katy and Ian triumphed in Orbit! I don't have Andrew's powers of dual-focus and (more) diligent note-taking, so I know very little about it. I did hear Martin hurrying Ian along at one stage, saying he had so many cards to choose from. "And they're all crap" Ian said. But they won anyway. I think around now we had cake. But it may have been later. 

They began playing Saer - I missed this too, apologies - as Misfits continued to implode on all three of us at different stages. Joe did his best with an enormous stack of pieces, but he couldn't quite do enough. During several late-game half-collapses, it was Joe who took the hit again when the entire tower fell over. 

The others finished Saer, with Martin taking a win despite Ian's huge array of cards in Ragnarok!

Martin 10

Katy 9

Ian 8

Adam T 4

They paused to watch the Misfits finale - I took the win - then we debated what to play next. There was a general move towards Fun Facts, which Martin protested, but he was overwhelmed by the amenability of others to it, and we set it up in the face of his ongoing chagrin when no suitable alternative could be decided on. 

My notes here just record the questions. Water! Birthday! Dancing! Lists! Old People! Fixing Things! Museums! Musicals! With the question in each instance being more or less how much we like them all (the exception was museums, where we were queried on how many we'd visited in the last 12 months). The numbers often surprised us and we didn't manage a single perfect round. I was surprised with how much everyone allegedly enjoys dancing, as it's never featured in the years of GNN, but I guess it's very context-specific. We were right in assuming Adam H and I love <the idea of> fixing things, and everyone was more amenable to old people than they are musicals. "I was thinking film musicals" Katy admitted afterwards, her brain perhaps marginally scrambled by all those museum visits (one a month!).  Adam was ashamed of his zero museums, saying this was highly atypical of him. We scored 44, to the rulebook's slightly snooty indifference, and Martin told us he didn't think much of Fun Facts at this point, in case we hadn't realised. 

Adam T left us and as a six we migrated to So Clover. Our first stab was a decent affair, with Katy's Hunger for Diet/Pine one of the high spots. I thought it might relate to the Alt-J song, but Joe realised the 'pining' logic Katy intended. 30/36

Adam and Ian now headed off too, but the four of us had one more game to play. We still had the So Clover itch and set up again.  Martin's Sifting for Flour/Fishing was particularly nice, and though there were a couple of hairy moments we navigated them successfully to join the record of legends or whatever it's called, with a perfect 24/24!

And so to bed. Just one more GNN until Novocon, everybody! 

Dark Web Gogglebox

 7.30 Tuesday evening. Joe let me in and I walked down the stairs into his kitchen, noting Tom Waits on the speaker, finding a group of gamers sitting around Joe’s table: Ian, Katy, Sam, and Martin. Adam H had been expected at 8.15 but then he email to say he’d be here at 7.50. This left us with a quandary. Find something short to play or talk to each other for twenty minutes.

Happily, reason prevailed and we got out For Sale. Katy began with her usual insistence that she’s terrible at this game which, for once, is justified. Sam, too, never seemed to get going while Ian picked up a last round $15k cheque with only a 15-value house. Not enough to win, but very satisfying. For him.

Martin 54

Ian 53

Andrew 49

Joe 46

Sam 36

Katy 33

Adam arrived mid game and so we split into two. At one end Adam, Katy, Joe and Martin played one of the many games called Orbit. It’s so new that it’s listed as a 2025 game on Board Game Geek! Martin explained the rules and they set off in this dickish game of intergalactic high-jinks. How they laughed when Martin complained “I’m absolutely in the middle of fucking nowhere,” which is, I suppose, a valid criticism of most of outer space.

Ian, Sam and I played Around the World in 80 Days. There was a lot of detective work this time, as we kept trying to upset our opponents with not-so-chance encounters with the law. Ian tried to use a balloon - a transport that uses a dice instead of the value on a card to tell you how long a journey took. He rolled a 5 and stating that statistically he would probably get a lower number, he paid a coin and rolled again. A six. Of course.

Thanks to a lucky last-minute purchase of a card from the deck, I get back to London in double-quick time, arriving at the door of the Reform Club after only 69 days. Sam cursed his luck as, once again, he finished stuck in New York.

Andrew 69 days

Ian 78 days

Sam dnf

While we waited for Orbit to finish, we played Push. A simple card game, build up three columns of cards but no duplicates of numbers or colours. Then you take one column and your opponents take the others. Ian’s lack of luck with a die in Around the World was compensated as he dodged having to discard cards when rolling the dice in this game.

Ian 81

Sam 77

Andrew 72

Meanwhile Orbit ended with Martin’s green planet being moved out of his reach and then Katy swooping down towards her own home planet, clearly relieved that people hadn’t noticed that she was about to win. One of the first people to win at Orbit, she told herself.

Katy wins!

The others don’t.

They packed away, with Katy remarking that Martin’s player mat was covered in crisps, and as a septet again, it was time to change things up again.

At one end of the table Martin, Sam and Ian played Saer while Joe, myself, Katy and Adam played Sunrise Lane. Two rules explanation hummed around the room at the same time, and even seemed to synchronized/interfered with each other.

Martin: You have 3 cards.

Joe: You have 3 cards.

Martin: Face down.

Joe: Not face down, in your hand.

Martin: In your array.

I know nothing about Saer except that I thought I’d played it when I saw it. It didn’t have the most original visual aspect.

Martin 12

Sam 9

Ian 4

As for Sunrise Lane, I quickly got a long chain of buildings and then got tall buildings in both blue sectors. But I ignored the red quarters, which could’ve been my downfall.

Joe 87

Andrew 83

Katy 74

Adam 69

Again, we were all together. So Clover doesn’t play seven, so we dug out Hitster, that game of putting random songs in chronological order thanks to an app that links to Spotify.

Or, rather doesn’t link to Spotify. After only a few songs (one of which, You Can’t Hurry Love, was wrongly identified as The Jam by Katy and, in fairness, A Town Called Malice does have a very similar opening) the app gave up. Instead we changed to just singing the song for the other people to guess. 

Of course, this meant that most songs after 2005 were discarded because we didn’t know them. But otherwise it worked fine. For certain obscure definitions of “fine”. Imagine the scene where half of us are singing a hit from the late 20th century while the other half are arguing about it. “Like a Dark Web Gogglebox,” observed Sam, giving this blog post it’s title.

I had to leave just as our row of guesses stretched across the whole table, with only a few mistakes here and there. The rest of the blog is courtesy of a few messages from Sam.

After I left, they played So Clover twice: 24/30 and 26/30 (so someone else must have left too).

And Sam also told me that at the very start of the evening he and Joe played Landmarks, a word association game that involved getting across an island.

What an evening! See you all soon.

Space Arseholes

A very sparse Tuesday met with just three attendees last night: Ian, Martin and myself (Sam). Martin was first and complimented the new look kitchen, which will look even better once the huge radiator dominating the floor has gone. It's so big it feels like its presence is an extra person lying on the floor, in a cardboard coffin. While we waited for Ian we played a couple of rounds of Odin. 

Ian arrived with the score at 3-2 in his favour but I declined to award him victory, with plenty of time to recover had we kept playing. Instead we set up one of Martin's newbies, Up or Down. This is a game of building columns of cards that, like Lost Cities, may veer numerically up or down, but once you start in a direction you're committed to it. You can only ever have three columns, so if you're forced to take a card that won't fit into a set, you have to sacrifice a set of your choice and start over (although these discarded cards are worth a point each)

You have a hand of three cards and add to your set by playing into this central display, slotting your card into the place it would go in number order (above, for example, you could only play 66-68 between the 65 and 69) and then claiming one of the cards it's adjacent to. Then you replenish your hand with the top card from either deck: face-up or face-down. When the cards run out your columns score number of cards in them x most cards of a single colour. 

Because the numbers keep changing and you're watching both that wheel of possibilities and the sacrifices you're making in your columns, it's quite a thinky undertaking, albeit also ripe with dickishness, particularly at the end-game where everyone must play the cards from their hand too. Ian came out top, despite announcing his impending doom:

Ian 103

Martin 91

Sam 62

Then we moved on to a game deserving of its own curtain flourish and red carpet: Knizia's new space racer, Orbit. This only just launched on Kickstarter yesterday (along with two others by the doctor) but Martin had been gifted a preview copy. It's a bit like Powerships with more control over your own movement, but less of the environs, as the other players keep moving things just as you're about to reach them. 

The goal is to visit all the planets before returning to your own: first home is the winner. You have a hand of cards and on your turn you play one card and activate all the actions on it, in whatever order you choose. There's a number that moves your ship around the intersections of the grid, usually a planet to move along it's orbital path (the one card that doesn't move any planets changes the flips the direction of travel instead) and possibly extras like improving your hand size, improving your energy capacity (energy can be spent on additional movement) or replenishing up to your energy limit. 

As you barrel around space visiting planets, you keep progress on your player board. Knizia has also thrown in space stations that are dotted around the galaxy: ending your movement here grants you a bonus: the aforementioned upgrades/energy, hyperjump portal (jump to another hyperjump space) or hyper accelerator cannon (move as far as you want in any straight line). Additionally, if you're on a planet when it moves, you move with it.

Everyone can see everyone else's progress and play cards accordingly to push planets away from them, something we all fell foul of. Martin got off to a thrilling start but his seemingly unassailable lead turned out to be assailable as first I, then Ian, caught him up while he dawdled in deep space. All of us gave ourselves one planet remaining to visit, but despite having precious few upgrades, luck favoured me as hopped onto the purple planet on the way home to my own. A galaxy of space arseholes, this is Knizia at his most dickish.

Sam wins

Martin and Ian - lose

We moved back to Earth for Landmarks - a third new set of rules for Ian, although probably the easiest of the night. Despite the theme of exploring an island for treasure before seeking the exit, this is a word association game that plays a bit like So Clover on a map. One player knows the landscape of the island, which is made up of treasure, traps, curses (lose the game) an amulet (heals a curse) and water (replenish tiles) and must guide the others to treasure and then safety by writing words on tiles and hoping they'll place them where the clue-giver/navigator intended. 

Two curses or running out of tiles before finding the exit is a loss. In our first game I was the navigator and tried my best to guide Martin and Ian to first the treasure - success! - and then the exit - fail!

Navigator's secret map

Martin took over the navigator role for game 2 and was immediately frustrated by the game's occasional woolliness: oftentimes steering your team can feel like a lottery because a clue may clearly go with word x, but if word x has three open hexes next to it, the team has no idea which one you want them to go to. That had us all slightly baffled, although having played successfully with Sally the night before, I was more forgiving of the rough edges. Martin spent much of his navigator time with this expression:

But despite his chagrin, his stint as a navigator was a success - we only picked up two treasures but got off the island alive! And having escaped, we perused the shelves and Ian suggested Mille Fiori. 

I got off to a good start here, completing early bonuses to establish something like a thirty point lead. But as we all know, 30 points in Mille Fiori is nothing, and though I held them off as long as I could, both Ian and Martin overtook me. For a while we were bunched close together in most un-Fiori-like fashion, but when we hit the final round Martin pulled off some kind of bonus-triggering spell and moved just out of reach. With his final turn he built on that lead, with Ian taking the collateral as the side-points I scored from his turn pushed me into second by a wafer-thin margin:

Martin 199

Sam 180

Ian 179

It was getting late but there's always time for So Clover. Our first attempt was a triumph, with a rock-solid 18/18 just as Martin had predicted - and this was despite neither Ian nor I being sure who Boadicea was. I felt she was heroic, and Ian rightly felt the Romans were involved somehow. We nearly went wrong in multiple ways before we went right:

Thrilled with our eighteen, we played again. Instantly everyone was complaining about their words and Martin decried our decision "Never play again after an eighteen!" he wailed. We kicked off with a four, got another four, and decided we'd go for all fours. We got them! A triumph of sorts. 

That was it. Ian and Martin navigated their way past the sentient radiator and vanished into the night. 

Everyone meet in San Francisco

 The rain that had peppered Bristol’s streets faded away in the evening, allowing walkers and cyclists alike the chance to converge on Joe’s kitchen for another night of games.

Before I'd even arrived, I was informed of an early game between Joe and Sam of Crokinole which was won by Joe.

I had to take a detour to a pharmacy so my ETA went back to 8pm and when I finally arrived, they (Joe, Adam T, Sam, Martin and Ian) were just finishing a game of Money.

Martin won, top of a crazy spread of scores that left Joe bemused as to what exactly he did so wrong. 

Martin 840

Adam 510

Ian 280

Sam 210

Joe 40

We were currently a six and we were expecting Katy at 9, dashing over from her book club. What could we play in an hour? Around The World In 80 Days was mooted, but probably too long with six.

Instead, Ian,  Sam and Joe played Foundations of Metropolis. A game I still haven't played but looks like area-control mixed with tetris. 

Adam, Martin and I pretended to think about what to play but, with a copy of Impulse on the table, it was never in doubt. 

We set up with only the slimmest of rules refreshers needed. We began in quite a generous mood, I put a draw card on the “impulse” (the communal row of cards we can all use) that allowed us to all take more cards into our hands and this seemed to set a trend. Adam even checked the rules regarding whether a player can draw more cards if they're at the hand limit. 

Over on Foundation, Ian made some disparaging remark about Joe not having any money. Sam, meanwhile, cried out “tear down those schools!” with delight. In the end, Joe upends Ian’s dismissive attitude towards the poor with a win.

Joe 105

Sam 101

Ian 86

As for Impulse, we were pretty close together until Martin attacked Adam and landed on 12 points - the level from which he usually pushes on to the game-winning 20-point mark. I had to do something so, after Adam sadly defended himself against further attacks from me, I used up most of my cards and all of my plan in one big push for victory. I got as far as 16 before I stalled. Still, I told myself, if Martin doesn’t reach 20 points, I’m a certain winner!

What a delusional fool I was.

Martin 20

Andrew 16

Adam 7

Now Katy was here. I don’t remember if there was a slight staggering in the end of games or if fate just kept us in the same groups, but Katy joined Sam, Joe and Ian for a delightful romp of Around The World In 80 Days. Martin, Adam and I decided on another old familiar, San Francisco.

This meant that one group was playing a game in a location that appearing in the other group’s game. I don’t think that’s happened since Wallenstein and Castles of Burgundy were played on the same night.

In fact, we noticed that 80 Days contained a lot of locations with games named after them (London, Yokohama etc…). We considered a variant whereby landing in a location meant you had to all actually play that game. The longest board game in the world!

We started at about the same time, with Katy promising us that she’d let us know when they arrive in San Francisco.

As for the games, Joe spent 12 days going from Bombay to Calcutta on an express elephant. Ian, for the record, was first to get to San Francisco and the first to return to London. [spoilers for the original novel] And he didn’t even need the International Date Line quirk to succeed [/spoilers]

Ian 72

Katy 73

Joe 90

Sam stuck in New York

As for the real San Francisco, it was all about Martin. Whatever I tried, nothing seemed to stop him from picking up massively beneficial cards. He built skyscrapers, completed rows, got architect tokens. Adam and I were reduced to fighting over majority points for most workers in a row. My two skyscrapers at least stopped it looking like I hadn’t even tried.

Martin 16½

Adam 8

Andrew 7

At this point, not quite ten o'clock, I chose the sensible option and left. I missed the rousing finale of 80 Days but got the scores from Sam in a late night message.

Then I learnt about their two attempts at So Clover. The first ended 31/36 but was notable for Joe’s clue of Dildo for double/end as “it was the only thing I could think of with two ends.”

Then they tried again with 34/36! Oh, So Closver!

Thanks all. Special as always.

Key(s) to Victory

 A quartet of gamers congregated this evening at Joe’s. I was a little late and I found Joe, Sam and Martin deep in thought over a game of fiction. This plays the same as Wordle, except that one of the clues given is a lie. Therefore, the player(s) trying to guess the word also have to work out which of the clues in each guess isn’t true.

 

The game also comes with some nicely illustrated cards that contain sections from classic literature, such as Wizard of Oz, The Great Gatsby, etc. In these sections all the five letter words are highlighted, with those unique words picked out in yellow. I suppose knowing which novel a guess comes from might help the guessers?

Anyway, Sam and Joe eventually got the word, Swarm, having agonised over the ramifications of each clue being a potential lie.

As a foursome, we began with Agent Avenue or, as Joe called it, “A gent. A venue.” This takes the ancient mechanic of going in a circle, trying to catch your opponent, and adds some cunning double bluff as the distance that your “agents” move is decided which of two cards you pick up at the start of your turn. 

There are only two agents, so we played as teams. At the start of the round, the two players on a team chose a card from their hand. One is placed face up, the other face down. And then the other team chooses which card to take.

Do they take the safe option – the visible card? Or do they gamble on the hidden one that may send your agent many spaces forward or drag him back?

It was a lot of fun and it got pretty desperate towards the end when the draw pile ran out and we had to rely on those cards left in our hands.

But most fun was had from the unexpected innuendo as the two people on each party would ask each other if they wanted to go face up or face down. Oddly, it never stopped being funny, like extremely polite foreplay.

Andrew & Martin - Spycatchers!

Sam & Joe - face down in the gutter

Then we dug out Mille Fiori, an old familiar that we could set up and get going within seconds. I chose red instead of purple, somehow mistaking my usual favourite for blue. Not sure what happened.

By the end of round 1 Martin has chained together a bunch of keys for an extra go and a twenty point bonus such that the scores were Martin 57, Andrew 13, Sam 8, Joe 7. Surely it was done and dusted.

But then we whittled away his lead and I managed to chain together a 35 point move and squeezed a few points ahead of him! Maybe there was hope! 

Well, no. At least not for me. I was stuck with some dopey cards and I fell further and further back. Joe, meanwhile, shifted up a gear and in the fourth round - when Martin was starting player and theoretically had the biggest advantage - he was able to overtake us both. He was in the lead in round five, when he was starting player again. Could he make the advantage count?

Well, he didn’t have time to find out, as Martin got just the card he needed that scored big and put down his last two tiles for a win.

Martin 213

Joe 194

Sam 175

Andrew 158

Next up was Montage, the crossword game. Joe and I played against Martin and Sam. In this game allows a guess to stand if it fits in with the letters already on the board. For example, when Sam gave the clue “job” for a four letter space, I said “work” and Joe said “poop” and either would have been fine.

Joe and I started well and completed a “zone” (four zones for the win) but then Sam clued and Martin guessed their way through a storming run that saw them complete three zones in one turn and then, shortly after that, finish the fourth for the win.

Sam and Martin 4

Joe and Andrew 1

At this point I went home. The promise of So Clover couldn’t keep me - too many word games, even for me. But they played on without me, scoring 11/18 and then 18/18.

Thanks guys, see you soon.

Synonyms from the Stars

Just the four of us last night at Joe's - as well as the host it was Ian, Martin and myself (Sam) just mobile enough after an ankle sprain to make up the quartet. An unusually sparse evening kicked off with A Message From the Stars, new to me and to be frank even more bamboozling than I found Hooky. I'd read Andrew's report on Message but for whatever reason neither that nor Joe's careful explanation or Martin's interjections stopped me spending the game feeling like a doofus, which I was. 

Martin was an alien trying to clue us a desperate message (although in fact, only three words) and we had our words we needed to convey to him. But it's kind of two-games in one because as well as supplying synonyms and/or related words to the secret ones, we also have to deduce some letters behind the alien's board which have - unless I'm still confused - zero relationship to the words he's trying to make us guess. I think. 

our three words

The 'message' thing is by the by - perhaps that's what threw me - although it does stitch in a seam of comedy. Both sides clued semi-synonyms for their words on the first three rounds then threw in a bonus clue that confused everybody. Martin's 'Trump' we discovered seemed to dovetail with anything remotely negative: tiny, weak, arrogant. But despite this we decoded everything triumphantly, and moved on to Foundations of Metropolis. 

New to Joe and Ian but simple to teach: take cash, buy deeds, or build. But both the deed-buying and the building have a snarky interactive element, as you can cockblock your way around the board with the deeds (©Martin) and leach other's constructions with the civic buildings, which score points depending what they're built next to. Retail buildings score points just for existing and residential buildings provide another parasitic quirk: you score the position of the person ahead of you on the population track. 

Ian's early lead after round one was pegged back as we jostled for position, and my final turn in round two nabbed the population bonus to give me a narrow lead. But in round three Martin's decision to stop giving a shit about citizens and focus on banks proved 'constructive':

Martin 101

Sam 92

Ian 82

Joe 69

Martin suggested Gang of Dice and we all swiftly agreed. I elected to roll all my dice on the very first turn which Martin was appalled at, citing my blithe disregard for probabilities. He was right and Ian won. In fact Ian seemed to win most of the rounds, although Joe popped up now and again to maintain the illusion Ian might possibly not be the victor. 

I kept rolling with an idiotic optimism that did at one point pay off, when I needed to not roll any odd numbers came up with 4-4-2-2 on my final attempt. A stopped clock and all that. 

However Martin's more scientific - or less moronic - approach wasn't serving him well either: he picked up a single win when the rest of us busted. And when he finally ignored his head and went with his gut, that let him down too. Ian picked us off like dice-rolling fish in a casino barrel.

Ian 101

Joe 55

Sam 6

Martin 0

My foot was telling me to go home but I stayed for a quick bash at So Clover, although all of us were stumped by our combos initially. I think Ian was first to finish and we deduced his words with relative ease before stumbling on my clover (Electric/Demon: I'm sure there's a better clue than Lightning but I couldn't think of it). 

I didn't take any photos, sadly, but we managed 22/24 with just my clover falling at the deduction hurdle. It was 10.40 though and pumpkin time for me - I hobbled off whilst they played another So Clover, with a not-dissimilar result after Joe's clue of sharpen for cactus/file a particular highlight. Martin's clover was apparently the shortfall this time, with a lot of possible solutions, but overall a solid 16/18 regardless.

And that was apparently that.