Bishop!

An unusual Wednesday night games occurrence occurred as Andrew, Ian and I all found ourselves free, and chomping at the bit for some more Christmas gaming - Andrew and I especially, having been unable to attend the official GNN last night.

So it was we converged at my table with the pre-agreed Rajas of the Ganges set up. Initially, it must be said it looks like someone ate a Hawaiian pizza and threw up on some Christmas lights, but as previously touched on, the game at heart is quite simple - it's a race to push your cash income one way and your glory another, until the twain meet.

Everything else is about maximising that engine: keeping the dice rolling in, so you can roll 'em back out again, getting money for markets, glory for buildings, and lots of other glorious shit inbetween. Ian rinsed us, having chained together a bunch of spice markets and scored a whole load of buildings. Despite my late-game surge of ten - ten! - points along the glory track, when Ian ended it neither Andrew nor I had managed to get our markers in kissing distance.

That most Euro-y of Euros packed away, we played another new game: The Godfather: A New Don, which we couldn't work out was meant to be a pun on a new dawn or not, but for some reason Andrew insisted we all use Australian accents.

It's a little like Las Vegas and a little like something more directly interactive. Players are one of the families in the 1950's hoping to become the dominant force in New York. You place soldiers in the various New York districts to score points at the end of the game for controlling/nearly controlling/nearly nearly controlling a district, but in order to get a soldier in there you need to spend dice. So dice are handy, but in each round one player is the current Godfather, and they take dice (or offers) off the other players. If you want to be Godfather yourself, you need to work your way up the muscle track, which takes... dice. There are also dice to be won at Las Vegas if you feel lucky.

It all made for a feisty, spicy affair, as being ahead on the muscle track also allows you to eject other players from districts you fancy having yourself. The game end is triggered when either a district is full or a player runs out of soldiers, then it's all about majorities.

As it turned out, Ian was the new don, as his points scored for soldiers left-in-hand pushed him ahead of me on the score track - a crushing twist, as I'd deliberately spent soldiers in order to trigger the end of the game!

We moved on to Phrasell, one of the games from the Wibbell++ deck which I have long wanted to play, and Andrew rated as one of his games of the year.

It's all about coming with an appropriate phrase for a randomly-chosen subject, which officially plays 5 players or more but we thought we'd have a crack at anyway. And it was funny, not least in part due to the difficulty of coming up with a phrase that made any kind of sense. Andrew's Someone Call Nurse Fatima had no relevance to the subject, but he won the round anyway. It's that kind of game.

Overall though, it was yet another win for Ian, who was on a roll. Maybe because Andrew and I were clearly drunk at this point; I'm not sure. I can't remember if Ian was.

Sticking with the Wibbell++ deck, we bashed out the game Andrew and I created with Scrabble tiles some 25 years ago - Hypothetickell. In this game you add a letter to an ever-extending chain of letters, but you must (unless you're bluffing) have a word in mind that has the current letters in it, in the current order (though there can be any number of letters before/after/between them). I don't know who won but we played a couple of rounds before Andrew remarked that if we add it to Games Night Guru we'll have to say there is a shitload of AP. Good fun though.

My word was locksmithing. Andrew added the S as a bluff

And we rounded off the evening with Love Letter - a GNN mainstay and classic. Countless times we've played it and countless times Ian has won. But not tonight. Tonight was Andrew's turn; a win richly deserved if only for the fact he was drunk enough to ask me if I had a Bishop, and I was drunk enough to reply "No". While Ian merely blinked, before we collectively recalled there are no Bishops in Love Letter.

Andrew 3
Sam 2
Ian 1

Thanks guys, a great bunch of games and a lot of fun!