Indian Plumber

Last night Chris joined Andrew and I for our occasional sorties into Euroland, this time picking Rajas of the Ganges as our main meal. It had been a while, and we needed a quick refresher on set-up before diving into the business, where we construct all manner of buildings like the most exceedingly competent handymen

I like Rajas a lot - there are a multitude of options and combining them in the best possible way shuffles your markers (money, and/or glory) along two opposing tracks - when the twain meet, the game ends. I seem to recall Adam schooling us on how he'd won convincingly, but I couldn't remember what he said. Always have dice, probably, as although there's a worker-placement thing going on there's also dice, dice, and more dice. Just like real Rajas, if you want to build a market, and trigger a glory bonus, you need to roll high. If you want to move your boat, roll low.

I focused my efforts on two dice colours (green and blue) and, though success may have been coincidental, it worked:

Sam - Raja!
Chris - Raja's assistant
Andrew - Raja you than me

Then we overcame Chris' misgivings about Cryptid and set it up again. Chris was as bamboozled as I was on my first play three plays, but now on my fourth outing to Cryptoworld, I finally had enough familiarity with the clue types to forge a sense of what was going on on the board.

I figured out the other clues and actually won the game with a proper deduction, rather than a random guess. Andrew cursed his hesitation, as he was on the trail too and nearly made the same search I did!

Sam - Crypto!
Andrew - Pipt-o
Chris - Transfixt-o

We ended a fine evening with Chris' request of Ganz Schon Clever, Wolfgang Warsch's game of bonus overload. There's no real narrative to describe here, as we are basically parcelling out dice and getting (eventually) a zillion bonuses in return. But it's a fun dice-chucker all the same.

My misspent summer playing solo paid off. it was looking a close-run thing with Chris, until - classic GNN sentence finish coming up - my fox heads came up trumps.

Sam - 271
Chris - 226
Andrew - 158

Chris pointed out I'd won all the games and for a brief moment we speculated as to whether, including Tuesday, I'd won a 'spectacular' (me) or 'smug' (Andrew and Chris) six in a row, but then we remembered that I only won one game on Tuesday. C'est la vie.

Thanks for making the trip, guys, much fun.