Night on the tiles on the cards

Friday night! Whilst other folk were out at pubs, clubs, or maybe a one-off event, the real action was at my (Sam's) place. Andrew came over early, as the boys were looking forward to a game with him. Ascending Empires was mooted, as was Lords of Waterdeep. In the end though we went for Relic Expedition (the Friendly Animals variant). Joe teamed up with me and across the table were Andrew and Stanley.

Off we went on our explorations. Andrew and Stan conversed, schemed and planned. Joe made weird noises with his mouth and wandered around the kitchen scavenging for actual food, but he did at least roll the die. My team collected the first set of 4 matching relics needed for a win, and headed off to the helipad to conclude matters. Thinking I was being generous I said I needed to roll a 4 on the action die to catch the helicopter (and win) but my generosity was moot - I rolled a two (three is needed to use a helicopter in the real rules) and on the next turn they - having since gathered a set of their own - rolled the 4 they needed to win. AAAAARGH! I cried in anguish. Luckily for Joe, he had nipped upstairs for a poo at this point.

Stanley and Andrew: 4 relics, safely home
Joe and Sam: 4 relics, waiting at helipad with a sense of indignation

Andrew began perusing the games cupboard as I put the boys to bed. When I returned Lords of Waterdeep was now set up, and we dove in without further ado. The score track saw a lot of action as we both built buildings (or 'shops' as they tend to get called) that saw a lot of use, with lots of minor scoring quests - plus the odd doozy. I thought I was safely ahead and then Andrew came back at me. In the end it was down to the Lords rewards - Andrew scored 24 points but I'd managed to get every single quest to score me a 4pt bonus, and ran out OverLord of Waterdeep:

Sam 202
Andrew 180

I chose next, and went for the lesser-spotted Mord Im Arosa. Andrew loves this - and I have to admit it was the second-funnest game of the night in the expletive-loading sense. For those not familiar, the Mord in question is a death - two, actually - in the hotel Arosa, where players are first trying to find the bodies and then secondly trying to implicate each other by guessing where their cubes have landed, having been dropped in the top of the cardboard hotel.

Please enter on top floor

I successfully identified Andrew's location several times, but was totally obliterated when he found my cubes (or detectives) hanging about inappropriately close to the crime scene:

Andrew 6 pieces of evidence against (wins)
Sam 13 pieces of evidence against (banged up)

Heck Meck/Pickonimo was up next. This was completely unpredictable. Andrew surged off into the lead and I was fighting for scraps. But with both of us having claimed all the low tiles on the table, suddenly we were returning tiles of our own as our attempts to claim the multiple-worm tiles faltered.

Itsa Knizia

I was hoping there'd be a pattern where Andrew would return his tile and I'd subsequently pick it up. It didn't work out like that, but - thanks entirely to Lady Fate - I did grab the win, just...

Sam 10 worms
Andrew 9 worms

Finally we bashed out a quick game of 7 Wonders. I didn't get involved in military at all and my plan to have Dirk out-army Andrew never materialised. Dirk did pretty well himself, but it was Andrew who walked away with a convincing win:

Andrew 57
Sam 50
Dirk 45

It was still only ten past ten, but we'd been playing for three hours and Andrew called it a night.

I didn't realise I was this drunk