Sunday 11 December 2011

The Poison Palace

On Saturday night we had friends over for games, and I was feeling nervous. These friends - Mark and Katie - are gamers, but gamers in the sense of splashing about in the sunny, healthy shallows, while we lunatics are 100m down in the depths, comparing mechanics, writing blogs, dreaming of meeples etc. Only the other night we had a 5 minute conversation about Stabcon without actually mentioning it by name.

So the reason for my nervousness was that I had dangled, carrot-like, several gaming options to lure them away from the comparative safety of classics like Carcassone, Ticket to Ride or Trans-America. But having done so I'd had a fit of panic when they chose Poison and, specifically, Tinner's Trail.

"Tinner's Trail?" Joe's face fell. "Are you sure?!" - one of Joe's many large steps toward social pariah-dom was taken when he attempted to inflict this game on his family and friends. "It was a disaster" he related grimly. I was thrown. A disaster? Really? Auctions, time-tracks, copper, tin, water, adits, historical themes, a slightly complicated scoring system involving investments that recoup less over time... what's not to like?

Well, I supposed compared to say, Settlers, it might seem a little complex. I borrowed Alhambra from Joe as my Plan B. As it turned out, Mark seemed to take Plan B as an affront on his gaming prowess, and was determined to play Tinner's Trail, but after a curry and chips, several glasses of wine and three rounds of Poison it was simply too late to crack open anything Martin Wallace might have thought of, so Alhambra it was.

Poison scores first: We played each round as an individual game and I think I won the first two. Mark definitely won the last one with a big fat zero. I'd managed to Jefferies-curse Katie by suggesting via email she'd be good at this, so naturally she came off worst in every game.

But in Alhambra the Carcassone-Chiseller of old was cracking her knuckles (except for the one dodgy finger) and going for a healthy spread of second-and-first places in medium buildings plus a fancy wall to pull off a debut win:

Katie 110
Sam 103
Mark 95
Sally 93

Mark, who had been lagging behind after the first two scoring rounds, snuck past Sally despite having the most erratic wall-builder in all of Spain, and hit me with both barrels on the Towers, nabbing the last two in one turn to sneak into first and deprive me of a possible win. Sally was the victim of fatigue; having led after round one and two, her game went to pot as she - well, all of us, to be fair - got too preoccupied over whose turn it was to concentrate on tactics.

Nevertheless, both games went down very well. Mark threatened to buy Poison for Katie (instead of knickers) and Katie said she was tempted to come to Stabcon. Mainly to see how weird it is, it must be said, but in this church we'll take our members by stealth if we have to.

So no Tinner's Trail this time, but was it a missed opportunity, or a near-miss? I guess the only way to find out... is to play it next time.

7 comments:

  1. That's a very respectable Alhambra score from Sally. Perhaps she's a natural gamer. Or perhaps I'm just rubbish at it.

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  2. Excellent work Sam.
    I managed to engage our neighbours John and Jane in a game of Perudo very late on saturday night. They'd come over to watch The Killing, and then made the fatal mistake of asking what games they ought to get to play with their grown-up kids at christmas.
    There were audible gasps when I opened the door to the games cupboard. Looking back, I think they might have been gasps of 'oh my god we didn't realise you were actually mentally ill', but at the time I took them to be admiration.
    We played Perudo, and Cha suggested Settlers might be the one they should get, but John really perked up when I showed him Twilight Struggle.
    After the success with Pasc, I'm starting to think it's the forgotten gateway game . . .

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  3. I can never forget Sally saying that Twilight Imperium sounded like having a mint inserted in the 'twilight' region. Now anything with the word twilight in it sounds sexually dubious.

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  4. Yes, Twilight Struggle is what ensues when someone resists the insertion of theTwilight Imperium . . .
    They're both quite complex games, anyway — perhaps Sally would be more comfortable with arschbombe

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  5. Is arschbombe what happens when the imperium is successfully inserted?

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