Mind over Mutter

This week's Tuesday GNN saw a reduced table, with long-term absentee Andy suddenly unable to make it and Andrew, our usual blogger, also having to drop out. That meant there were five of us sat around my (Sam)'s table - Joe, Katy, Ian and Martin. At the start we were also joined by Stan and Joe, who requested Fuji Flush. We accepted the challenge, and the memory is foggy now but I think Katy won, with everyone else stuck on one, two or three cards.

That appetiser done, Joe (-little Joe) went up to bed and we split into two groups. Martin, Katy and Stan took on Martin's new co-operative game, The Mind, which Martin insisted was 'excellent'. More on that later.

At the other end of the table I talked Ian and Joe through the rules of Heaven and Ale, undergoing the usual heckling from Martin as I did.

Having already discovered that both Martin and I played a rule wrong on our first (separate) debut games, we now discovered that Martin had been going around the board anti-clockwise instead of (correctly) clockwise. He was furious, and vowed he'd never let anyone teach him a game again. For a moment, anyway - then he went back to laughing about The Mind.

Heaven and Ale is in theory about monks brewing. In actuality the theme is gossamer-light, and it's mainly about getting hexes and monks and triggering them. Or activating them. The rules aren't entirely clear on that and apparently there's a whole thread on BGG about it. Players move their piece around the central board for a set number of rounds, buying things, and can choose - more or less - when to trigger what of the developing brewery on their home board. It can be quite head-scratchy, especially on a first play, and Ian kept muttering that it was 'weird'. Joe was more enamoured, but as Stanley's bedtime arrived and the series of Mind games wrapped up, we agreed to play an abridged version with one less round.

My previous play-throughs and two-header against Andrew the night before saw me victor, though we all suffered heavily for want of a fourth round, when our carefully laid plans would no doubt have seen some exponential scoring shenanigans.

Sam 12
Joe 5
Ian 2

I wanted to play The Mind, having been witness to its hilarity for the past hour, when they'd played something like seven games in a row. But with five of us we were one too many, so instead we settled on another of Martin's new finds: Krass Kariert.

The unusual element of this trick-taker is that when you cards are dealt you cannot rearrange your hand - instead you must try and be rid of all your cards by playing singles, sets of two or three, or runs of two or three cards, with a poker-style hierarchy at play - but taking cards from your hand that must be adjacent! If you can't take a turn, you can add a kind of 'substitute' card into your hand (everyone starts with two of these) but if you're out of substitutes and still can't go, you're bust and lose the round. The other way to go bust is to be the only player left with cards. There's a couple of rogue cards too that add a bit more unpredictability. It was a clever game, played uncleverly by me:

Katy and Joe 2 lives left
Martin and Ian 1 life left
Sam loses.

There was some loose talk of Voodoo Prince but instead it was a third new Martin find we played - a Knizia called Zero Down. The deck is made up of many colours of cards numbered 1-9. "All the colours of the rainbow!" exclaimed Katy, until Joe pointed out one of them was grey.
"-Ian's rainbow" she corrected. I think it was around this point Ian started drinking whisky.

In Zero Down each player begins with nine cards and five are laid face-up on the table. On your turn you simply swap a card in your hand for one on the display, and what you're trying to do is create a hand that scores the fewest points possible. All cards of the same number in your hand only score once (i.e. three sevens only costs you seven points) and if you get five of a kind, in number or colour, that's worth zero. The ideal hand is five colours overlapping with five of a number - scoring you zero, at which point you can instantly end the round! If that doesn't happen, the round ends after the second person passes - choosing not to swap at all. I was one card away from a zero hand at one point, but Katy - to my left - claimed it before I could! But no-one could keep up with Martin:

Martin 29
Joe 39
Sam 42
Katy 59
Ian 71

There was now a game of guilt-tripping Joe into giving people a lift, which got very confusing when it overlapped with the game of Katy wanting to go home, as well as the game of everyone being interested in playing The Mind. I did point out Joe wasn't obliged to give anyone a lift, but by then Katy had her coat on and Martin had sensed Joe's defences crumbling.

Appropriately, we then played The Mind.

The artwork is interesting, and when Joe asked if the game was about electrocuting rabbits, Martin said Yes, and throwing shurrikins at them. "Just like my youth" reminisced Ian.

The Mind shares a lot in common with The Game, if anyone remembers that. In The Game players co-operatively try and shed all their cards (numbered 1-100) by dumping them onto piles that either ascend or descend. There was a nice little twist about 're-setting' the piles but it was otherwise kind of forgettable. In The Mind, players have the same challenge of shedding cards, but there's one pile, no shared knowledge, and no communication once the round begins. Instead it's all about waiting, and deciding when the right moment has arrived for you to play your card so you're not rushing ahead of someone who may have a lower card, but getting in there before someone with a higher one.

Level One is easy - each player has only one card each. But in subsequent levels the card count climbs, and it gets much easier to mis-time your interventions. When you get a series of close numbers out in the right order, there's a palpable sense of joyous relief.

We lost three times in a row,  and I can understand how multiple earlier attempts also ended in failure. Ian's increasing inebriation added an extra dimension, but as far as our success rate went, it was pretty much irrelevant. Great game. And a great night! I love Heaven and Ale. I think The Mind is a work of genius.