Burnt Cheese

After a flurry of drop-outs, additions and venue changes, four of us ended up in the Greenbank last night for Tuesday games. First to arrive were Jo and Martin, and as Jo had returned from Essen with some finds they had begun with one of them: Kruiswoord. This has a Battleships-type set up with each side calling out letters instead of grid numbers, and both players choosing where to place said letters in a crossword of their (semi) own devising. I arrived in time to witness some of the madness.

Scoring is like Scrabble, although there may be some enforced nonsense words - these don't score. Martin took this with a slender 97-94 lead and we pivoted to a three-hander of another newbie, this time tabled by Martin: Upland and Prairie. 

Despite the wildlife setting of placing three animal-themed disc types on the board, this is really an abstract. The board begins uninhabited, and each turn you draw three discs randomly from a bag: one must go on the board, the other behind your screen, and the last one goes back in the bag. On the board are five critical locations that will trigger the end game if an animal forms a contiguous path between either two of them (the dark hexes above) or the other three (marked with flowers). So the colours don't represent the players - not necessarily anyway. 

When the game ends you either want to have the hidden majority of the connecting animal to win, or - if no animal manages this before the discs run out - the most sets of all three colours. The catch is that to further the colour you're backing, you need to spend it, and both Jo and Martin wagered on the tie-breaker. I was one cat away from winning for my last three turns, but didn't draw one!

1 Martin
2 Jo
3 Sam

We were setting up another of Jo's Essen trove when Andrew arrived, so dealt him in. This was the co-operative racing game Vroom, which takes a Mind-esque approach to car movement: each of us have a car, and each round we play a single card (values 1-7) and move our car along the track a distance that we hope represents the strength of our card. 

The finish line is the other side of the table, and at least one car must reach it after five rounds, before we reveal our played-cards, whose cumulative value must match the car's relative position: ie if you won, your cards would total the highest, whereas if you were last they should be lowest. If we succeed, we win! 

Except we don't yet, because there are two races to go. First ,the distance doubles, meaning you need to double the relative value of each card. Then everyone adds a random element to the racetrack and their car must pit-stop at it during the race. We triumphed collectively with Jo generally the fastest, Andrew the slowest, and Martin and I messing up the pack but saved by the two get-out cards. Fun!

Next: another newbie! This was Martin's self-requested birthday present of definitely-not-cooperative Green City, where we're all trying to move our passengers along the various generated routes - walk/cycle/tram/bus - from the edge of town to their designated destinations. 

Each turn you add a single tile to the board as it fills up with routes, the catch being that a tile will only ever offer two of the possible four ways to travel. If you connect one of your citizens to their objective, they instantly commute and are removed from the city and placed on one of the matching tracks instead: these are triggered at certain junctures of the game and everyone on them scores for each passenger they have present. A track scores less the more populous it gets, so having a single person there when the scoring tile pops out can be very rewarding. 

With four players you only get nine turns for the entire game, but it's a head-scratcher all the same, with multiple passengers to please, different ways to travel having different distance preferences, and the horrifying possibility that many of them will end the game unconnected: at this point they all travel by car (the grey track above) and get minus points. Martin hammered us as Andrew's car-based endgame had him breathing in bad particles:

Martin 67
Sam 54
Jo 52
Andrew 32

We felt we hadn't learned enough new games yet so went for one more: Jo's La Cuerta, another from the Essen bag. This is a card game where we're travelling on a kind of tapas pub crawl, going from bar to bar consuming padron peppers and wine etc before someone has to pick up the bill. The last bit is what everyone's trying to avoid.

On your turn you can add to one of the food groups (meat/fish/veg) with the caveat that the cost must at least match whatever's been played already. Or you can always order more wine, or you can 'discover' that the restaurant actually burned the latest dish (see above) in which case you won't be ordering any more of that. Or you can order coffee, in which case nobody can order more food or wine and you either order more coffee or play a special, like reversing turn order or running off to the toilet - effectively dropping out of the round. Or announce it's your birthday in which case, obviously you won't pay.  Or - horror of horrors - pay for everything. 

You can always choose to pick up the bill, but strategically this would be early rather than late in a round, as the costs will mount up, occasionally into the hundreds of euros. We start with E1000 and as soon as someone hits zero, the player with the most cash left wins. This was me in game one, as Martin was completely tapased into financial disrepair: 

Sam 1000
Jo 950
Andrew 925
Martin -5

We played again, with Jo clinging on to a solid second as positions changed wildly around them. I thought I was doomed, stuck on a paltry 50 euros, but then Andrew had to pay something like 600 euros for some cheese the restaurant had managed to burn. 

Martin 865
Jo 735
Sam 50
Andrew -loads

Happily Martin had brought So Clover. After being destitute in the interim, it was nice to rejoin forces for another co-op and finish the 4p night on a triumph, with 24/24 bashed out in short order. 

Sated by imaginary wine and buzzing from all the fictional caffeine, Andrew and I left for home. Jo and Martin stayed on to play Pacts, where Martin was victorious thanks to 'my banshees' he tells me this morning. A lot of new rules, but a lot of fun new games arriving straight behind them. 

Why did the pterodactyl have to like cake?

A solid six gamers last night, as Ian and Martin arrived earlyish and we kicked off with a three-player Vivo whilst waiting. It's a trick-taker where winning the trick is worth 2 points but playing the lowest card gets you the number value of that card in points, a twist that as Martin remarked makes the game fairly chaotic, but quite funny. We played again with Joe on his arrival, with Martin and I winning a game each. 

Adam and Katy arrived at the same time and as a sextet we kicked off the evening proper with Jibber Jabble, the Just One of limited clues and zero communication. 

This was as funny as previous games, as from the get-go I had no idea what Katy's T might have meant for Martin's word of jungle. Thinking back now there are numerous Ts in the jungle. We recovered from this, and Katy's reluctance to add an S to trunk (the word was swimsuit) and even Katy's horror at the romance/happy combo we supplied her for her word of Love. Could Adam steer us over the line for a perfect 6/6? Yes he could. A very funny 20 minutes, albeit I think the difficult words make the game better. 

We now split into to two threes, with Adam Katy and Martin setting up Hanami as Ian and I signed up for Joe's suggestion of Codenames: Critical Role Adventures. This is very like Codenames, as one might expect, only with a Crew-esque adventure saddled onto it. One player is the cluer and the others control three adventurers, as you make your way through a fantasy fictional world, improving your character abilities for when things no doubt get tougher later. 

The core of clue/number of words wanted remains intact, and we played two missions, first seeing off bandits as hired protectors of a chatty merchant, and then finagling our way into a warehouse. Does Codenames need this additional fiction? No, but it's still silly fun and improving a thing always has a little satisfaction to it. We were all happy to play and eager to return to it in the near future. Meantime, Adam had won Hanami. 

Hanami doesn't do wild scoring variations - the biggest deficit would be 3 points - but multiple ties left two celebration tokens unclaimed and Adam's single point enough to be Most Vicious Picnicker. 

Adam - 1

Martin and Katy - both zero

Whilst waiting for us to escape the warehouse, they'd also played Misfits. I don't actually have a record of who won, but I think it was Adam again. 

Around this point Katy prevented Sally from throwing some processed cheese slices in the bin and began eating her way through what she referred to as burger cheese. Slightly concerned she wasn't looking after herself, I made everyone toast. I don't remember why there are scissors here too. 

 It wasn't even 10 yet but Katy asked for So Clover before she went home, so we did that, seriously threatening the record of legends before coming a cropper on our last clover: Adam's. One of his clues was Gaff-Rig and nobody knew what it was, my guess of a scaffold in an open air concert being so far off I must commend him on his straight face. We struggled for so long that Joe and I were told off for clueing words that weren't actually there, and a fatigued Katy suggested the sun was the centre of the universe. Poor Adam had to watch us score a paltry one, distracted from 'basement' for foundation by my gaff-rig gaucheness. Inevitably as I write I had to google gaff-rig, but maybe you should have a guess. 

Katy wanted to play again, claiming she was now revived, but there wasn't enough momentum in the room and she and Adam - also tired - made their way home leaving us as a four. Martin thought it might be funny to play So Clover and send them a picture, but what we eventually settled on was Roaring 20s, a game about dinosaurs who like kebabs. 

Each round we bid for the dinosaurs (blue card) in question, who have an individual points value but - as they are numbered - will also score points for sets and runs. If you drop out of the bidding, you can claim a bidding card (white), with the extra wrinkle that certain dinosaurs eaten certain foodstuffs: one, two or three of kebabs, cocktails or cake. Or possibly gems. No wonder they died out. 

Everyone liked this. It takes about 20 minutes and you definitely need to keep an eye on what dinosaurs are being collected by others, and can be screwed over by a particular dino not wanting what you have to offer. Or possibly even having too broad a palate, leading to Joe's lament about pterodactyls and confectionary. 

Ian 35

Sam 30

Joe 25

Martin 21

Joe now left as well but as Ian had a beer to finish so we squeezed one more game in: the lesser-seen Love Letter, last glimpsed on these pages three years ago. Martin eliminated Ian in round one but then I eliminated Martin. I was just recalling to myself how Ian has something of a knack for this game though when he won the next two rounds to take the win.

Ian 2

Sam 1

Martin 0

And then, like the dinosaurs, they were gone. 

Enjoying the Shoelace

More games!

A quiet one this week as only Martin and I could make the trip to Anja and Steve's house. Whilst Steve got Lennon settled however Louie joined us for the evening's starter of Pictures. 

This was a hit with everyone, Anja enjoying it despite getting off to a terrible start where none of us could decode her imagery. It's a lovely mash-up of art, deduction and silliness, leading to the post title where Anja checked in on how Louie was faring with his shoelace medium. 

Martin 19

Louie and Sam 18 each

Anja 11

Steve joined us whilst we set up Jibber Jabble, making five players. As previously mentioned, there's a Just One-type vibe to this (one player doesn't know a word; everyone else tries to clue what it is) but the cluers must combine on the clueing, spelling out words without conferring on what they might be. Because of this my opening clues were LUNAR, BEG, and ASPKO, as the second and third clues hit the rocks of limited/no communication. Fortunately my guess of moon was correct. 

As with last time we played, it was notable how all the agonising and confusion is foisted onto the players who actually know what the word is. Here's a bamboozled Steve, trying to think of a letter.

One of our words - Martin's -  actually was letter, and Louie handled this with aplomb, starting off with ENVELOPE and PEN before we added WRITE. Poised on 5/6 I was the guesser for the final round, but despite Anja playing her 'bonus clue' I unfortunately only had WATER, CHAW, VEPICTORIA and BIOSA to go on. The word was lake, but I guessed surf.  No cigar. 

Louie then headed to bed and the evening's main course was determined to be Mille Fiori. I secretly guessed the order we'd finish in (Martin, Anja, Steve, myself) and said if I got them right I'd get a bonus 100 points. Then I realised that my bonus hundred points would no doubt mean I'd got it wrong.

It's not my favourite Knizia but it's nice and speedy and personally speaking I managed to stage a mini-recovery after Martin twice harpooned early turns I had planned. Despite lagging, I suspected he'd surge in the late game and I was right: at one stage he pulled off three bonus turns in a row. But it wasn't enough to catch Steve, who had sailed off to unreachable numbers. My predications were all out:

Steve 220
Martin 197
Sam 191
Anja 185

We debated what to follow this with, eventually settling on Gang of Dice, because Martin insisted it would be fun. This looked dubious at one stage, especially from Steve's perspective as he watched his dice evaporate over the early rounds. 

But it was his turn to surge in the late-game, as Martin ended the game with less than he started with.

Sam 63
Steve 56
Anja 29
Martin 14

It was close to 11pm now and we called it a night. 

The Games Larbotory

After last week's feast of 8 gamers, this Tuesday shrank to a comparatively meagre four. Come 7.30 it was myself (Sam) Ian, Katy and Martin around the table, with no more to come. We kicked off with a new game of Martin's: Pictures. 

A grid of pictures are laid out and, à la Cross Clues, each player is given a secret co-ordinate. The goal is to make a picture that clues everyone else in to what that co-ordinate is, and you'll score points for correct guesses and being guessed correctly. Then any 'used' pictures are discarded and new ones appear for the next round. The catch is that you're making pictures with very specific palettes: a 3x3 grid of cubes, or a couple of shoelaces, some wooden blocks or a collection of sticks and stones. Trickiest of all, perhaps, a bunch of cards with symbols on. 

This was fun. It was surprising how often we managed to guess correctly, but equally there were occasions when someone was appalled by how obvious their picture allegedly was, only for the rest of us to fail to spot it! Martin took this with a solid 20 points after five rounds, during which everyone gets a turn with each medium.

Martin 20

Sam 18

Ian 16

Katy 15

Next up was  Gold Country, Knizia's mining and share-dicking business. Andrew has just given a brief overview in last week's post, but essentially it's buy low, sell high, and fuck everyone over. 

 

I struggled to really make sense of it. It wasn't just Katy calling the gold nuggets potatoes that confused me - I couldn't quite grasp how the spatial element affected the shares, even though whenever I explained it to myself (or someone else did) it seemed simple. But a lot of variables, and a fairly chaotic experience that Martin, perhaps unsurprisingly, handled best. But it was close...

Martin 79

Ian 71

Sam 63

Katy 54

Then we played a new game of mine called Jibber Jabble. This is a co-operative where, like Just One, everyone is collectively trying to clue a single team-mate in on a random word. However in Jibber Jabble we must spell out clues without actually conferring on what they are, so a cluer can end up even more bamboozled by the guesser. When Martin's word was microscope, Katy - unbeknownst to us, thinking of small - began cluing him with S. Thinking of study, I said T. Ian had been assuming science so said C (in Jibber Jabber, you're allowed to misspell words and keep going). Katy and I floundered and Martin's first clue ended up being stcu. Luckily you're allowed three clues total: we followed that with Larbotory and Petridish, but it was still pretty vague. 

That was one of the hard words though. I think we succeeded on the easy and medium ones to finish 4/6 overall. Very funny. You can say Jibber if you think you know what a teammate is trying to do, and Jabble if you can't - not very helpful really, but added to the inanity. 

Martin was keen to try a game called One Round which we could proxy with cards from The Mind. This is another make-connections co-op, where we're trying to get numbers in sequential order in a circle. We start with three random cards at the 12, 4, and 8 o'clock positions (100/zero, 33, and 66) each with a word assigned to it already. and then take turns drawing a card and giving clues that will tell your team-mates where it should go in the circle. 

As the circle fills up, so there become more spaces between cards and more potential connections. But the words also become more and more similar and, one would assume, potentially harder to differentiate between the gaps. We did pretty well, only losing one life (of three) before completing our task in about 15 minutes, I think. 

We went back to competitive with dnup, the Scout-esque card shedder. I won round one and Katy and Martin won a round each leaving us poised to win. But then Ian won the next round forcing a final decider, where Katie was first out to claim victory!

It was So Clover time by this point so we dove in and our first attempt was pretty poor, something like 16/24. Katy - despite noticing it was gone 11pm - demanded we make amends immediately, so we did. And we did! We overcame a potential portobello on my opener and then sailed through the next three clovers for a perfect end to a very nice evening. thanks all. 

Hope to see you soon.

Chicken and lentil surprise

I arrived at Sam’s a little late: the other players around his kitchen table (Pete, Martin, Tanya and Joe) were playing Triangulation. I was parachuted into The Pete and Martin Team and told they were minutes away from losing. As an example of their lack of connection, Martin told me that for the clues “white,” “hat” and “fuck” Pete had guessed Ku Klux Klan but the answer had instead been Gordon Ramsay.

My arrival didn’t turn things around and the game played out for one more round, ending as expected. The Sam, Joe and Tanya Team won.

After this, we were still waiting for Laura and her nephew Sam so we banged out a quick Cross Clues. And what a food-centric Cross Clues it was! Suffice to say that the post game discussion veered very close to a discussion about whether Lentils or Chicken were the best match for the clue “Protein”. But top marks to Joe for his clue “useless” leading us to the answer Chocolate / Armour.

21 out of 25 

Laura and Sam got here just as we were discussing our failed attempts.

We split into two. Martin explained Gold Country to Pete, Joe and I and Sam talked Laura, Sam and Tanya through Survive the Island.

Gold Country is a game where you collect shares in mining companies but in this game there’s more chances to undermine (pardon the pun) the values of the shares as each company carves a path across the board, picking up tiles of plus of minus numbers that then affect their share price. This means things can get mean. And they did. Martin was first to exploit the board in this way as he plunged blue shareholders (me and Joe) into dispair with a number of repair tiles almost bankrupting us. Soon after this, Martin reminded Joe of the rule that your all of you money should remain publicly visible. “Yep,” replied Joe. “Is that it?” responded Martin, perhaps a little cruelly.

Late in the game, Pete did something similar that made also made his large collection of white shares unassailable. It may not have been as pivotal as I recall but I certainly remember realising at that point who was going to win.

Then Survive The Island finished. I had been mostly ignoring it while I focused on my somewhat ineffective attempts at insider trading. 

Our Sam  28

Tanya 19

Laura 11

Laura’s Sam 10

The four of them then started on Misfits while we continued to drain Gold Country of its natural resources. Our game was coming to an end, mostly mopping up final tiles. Laura won Misfits and Sam went to the toilet in disgust. We were still in our final stages when he got back, so they started a game of Heck Meck. During this game, we final totted up our final scores:

Pete 108

Martin 90

Andrew 60

Joe 36

With that, I set off home.

At this point, the report would seamlessly segue into Sam’s continuation of the evening but blogger deleted it and any attempt at hitting undo or ctrl+Z did nothing.

The Sponge and Nestle

Anja and Steve were our hosts last night, so we kicked off the evening with an update on the latter's fly-by-night plumbing activities. What does Anja do when Steve is hurdling rooftops with a tap spanner in his belt? Maybe she mixes cement. But in this instance she was getting Lennon to bed, so we began without her, kicking off with Meister Makatsu, new to Steve, but familiar to the rest of us: Pete, Martin, Joe, Ian and myself. 

 

We'd only just kicked off when Anja and Louie materialised, happy to watch and wait as we played out Knizia's tricks-are-bad semi-trick-taker. If I knew the tie-breaker rule before I'd forgotten it, so was interested to hear that if points leaders are tied, whoever holds the Meister Makatsu token wins instead. I decided early on to try and engineer this position for myself, but though I had the card I needed in the last round, I didn't have the circumstances.

Ian 7 wins on tie-break
Steve 7
Martin and Sam 11 each
Pete 13
Joe 'a horrible amount' 

We split into two groups: Pete, Steve and Ian joined me for Medina as the other four played 2 Win. 

On our end of the table I talked newbies Steve and Ian through Medina's thankfully-simple rules and refreshed Pete, who hadn't - I belatedly remembered - played it with me on Saturday after all (at OGFest). Collectively, we're building the city of Medina, which consists entirely of palaces, stables, and a single street along which citizens march in an erratic procession. 

But it's not a co-operative game: you're trying to maximise the size of your palaces (one of each colour) and position them by the walls and street for extra points. The catch is that as soon as you take ownership of a palace, you can no longer make it any bigger (exception: add a stable). There's some structural ordinance in Medina too: no abutting of buildings, and the walls each side must leave room for a gate (even if, as we subsequently discovered, it's blocked by a building.) We were a short way into our adventure when 2Win finished with a victory for Joe. 

1 Joe

2 Martin

3 Louie

4 Anja

Louie retired to bed, and Joe, Martin and Anja set up Renature, with Joe's new board that changes the mechanics slightly (in ways I unfortunately missed). 

Back in Medina, Steve was constantly foiled by the rest of us grabbing palaces before he could, as I held onto the largest orange palace and Pete held a big brown palace he managed to nuzzle up against the point-giving citizens. 

I forgot to take a picture of the finished thing, possibly because I was focused on sabotaging Steve's late-game attempts to build anything that might push him into the lead. I thought I was harmlessly littering the perimeter with walls but it transpired I was helping Pete nick a wall bonus off Ian. He and I were first out of pieces as Steve and Pete entered a tit-for-tat finale, hedge-betting on who could be the Last Dick. It was Steve, but it wasn't quite enough:

Sam 36

Pete and Steve 34 each

Ian (stolen wall by Pete) 31

Very close! Renature still had a short time to go, so we filled it with the magnetic fun of Kluster. 

Actually not all of the fun is magnetic. Some is in the bizarre rules translation, which tells you to set up the string to make a play area as above, and then instructs players to place their magnets in 'any groove of the sponge'. There were also references to a Nestle which left us none the wiser. The game was fun though, especially after we made the play area smaller. I think we all won once, except possibly Steve. And then Renature finished. 

 

Anja enjoyed her debut, but suffered a little at the hands of non-debutants Joe and Martin. We didn't have precise scores but it was something like

Martin 60ish

Joe 50ish

Anja 40ish

We rejigged, with Martin keen to play Better Letters and me unable to coax Steve into it so I could play Robo Rally instead. He splintered with Anja Pete and Ian into a game of Hey That's My Fish, whilst I sat down with Martin and Joe to make words. 

With no Jo here to maximise the personal scoring I wondered if I might be in with a shout. But my 'shortest word' wasn't as short as Martin's - who had en - and I misread the board, leaving me lagging early on. You can't lag against this pair: Joe was putting in words like liminal and Martin transubstantiation (or similar). Whilst this wordy drama played out, Pete was savaging the other penguins in HTMF.

I'm not sure how he did it, but look at that face. Clearly a self-hating sphenisciphobic. 

Pete 39

Ian 21

Anja 17

Steve 15

They grabbed Misfits off the shelf and went into the front room to play, possibly anticipating me bashing my fists on the table in a fit of pique. 

Better Letters finished just after 11, with Martin narrowly taking the laurels from Joe. 

Martin 50

Joe 44

Sam 32

And I left for home with Misfits still continuing! I heard later from Ian that he caused a huge collapse and Steve jumped in for the win. Whilst that was happening in the front room, Joe was beating Martin at Le Chocolat next door. I don't know much about this other than you're having to split a bar of chocolate and try not to eat - as Martin put it this morning - 'too much shitty orange'. Don't know if there's a score?

Apparently they even considered more gaming with So Clover available, before common sense took hold and everyone went home.