The Magnificent Seven (hour game)

If a games weekend is a rare treat then two in the space of a week must be the height of decadence. But there we were, Sam and I, just six days since we returned from the last one, back in a car full of board games heading for the countryside. This weekend centred around the fast-aging quartet of gamers who used to gather and play when they lived in London. We'd booked the same cottage that we had two years ago, near Wool in Dorset. And our first impressions were that it hadn't changed at all (except the outside had been painted).

2016

2018

We had, though. After a brief spell of greetings and unpacking, we sat down for our first game, only to all get up again and get our spectacles.

This game was Decrypto. How strange it was to play this in daylight and sober. It was the Coffee Drinkers (me and Sam) against the Tea Drinkers (Paul and Chris) and they got two interceptions for a quick win. “Lucky we’re good at guessing random numbers,” remarked Paul.

The next game was Auztralia, Martin Wallace's genre bending game, part Steam, part Hit Z Road. Sam quickly got stuck in a corner and had to repeatedly recycle his cubes in an unproductive way. I built up a network of farms and railways, hoping my defences would hold firm.

Paul, as ever with a new game, was in an experimental mood. When he picked a card that allowed two enemy tiles to be revealed, he actioned it immediately. I thought it was a bit too early in the game but the tiles he chose to flip over weren't near me, so I didn't caution him against it.

I wish I had since one of them was a shoggoth and in this particular game those buggers just wouldn't sit still. The first made mincemeat of Chris's farms, a second one piled into Sam's and a third had a pop at me. Finally the first one, bored with Chris, turned its attention to neighbouring Paul and worked its way through that network until he was at Paul's port. If he lost that, we were doomed. The shoggoth moved next turn. It had 6 hit points and Paul whittled it down to one left when it struck the fatal blow. Paul's port was destroyed and the game was done. A resounding win for Cthulu.

Cthulu 64
Sam 10
Andrew 8
Paul 6
Chris 1

Chris didn't seem too keen on a game where he scored just one point in ninety minutes.

Chris then made food while Paul, Sam and I played Take It Easy. Another late-night game brought several hours forwards. We all used “Memories of Maidstone” (where we studied) as our theme when calling tiles. How nice to revisit moments like “Me and Mike on the sofa in the Rising Sun” or “Dave Pearce playing guitar during a power cut.”

Sam 460
Andrew 406
Paul 337

After this was risotto from Chris, which was a huge success.

By now it was almost seven, so we got out a nice fun evening game: Lords of Vegas. It was Paul’s first game, but he took to it very quickly, with his $15m bets and he came up with old folksy sayings like “I don’t want to leave all my fish in a barrel.” Chris played a very focused game, in that almost all his property was in one block of the city. Sam had two unassailable casinos of four and five which neatly propelled him up the scoretrack. He was in such a strong position that a mid-game wobble (when a re-organisation of a three-tile casino went all wrong) couldn’t stop his march to the top.

Sam 54
Andrew 36
Chris 26
Paul 23

Then we played Face Cards, the game that allows you to say things like “No, that Rockhopper Penguin is not Abraham Lincoln,” without seeming mad.

Andrew 11
Sam 9
Chris 8
Paul 4

Next we had a break, sat back and worked our way through a WHSmith’s box of trivia questions we’d found in the cabin, before following that up with a game of Sausage and Mash.

But as for real games, our next one was Texas Showdown. I did have Beef Jerky in my bag, but I’d forgotten my promise to bring it out if we play a Western-themed game.

Paul 5
Sam 8
Chris 13
Andrew 19

And after this was Letter Tycoon, with occasional forays into obscenity. I mean, it was eleven in the evening. Chris, the Scrabble player, won.

Chris 43
Sam 40
Paul 31
Andrew 27

By now there was no stopping us. Raj hit the table and Chris nabbed another win, holding off my late surge.

Chris 64
Andrew 61
Sam 37
Paul 27

Finally, Decrypto came back to the table. Now it was The Barchester Chronicles (Sam & Chris) against The Tess Of The D’Urbervilles (me & Paul). The Barchester Chronicles won, although Chris did use a couple of punning clues (ie, “A book” pointed to the word “red”). Also, Paul’s stomach was extremely vocal for much of the game.

Finally, it was time for bed.

Saturday dawned, I was up first and I spent some time reading the Quick Start rule book to Twilight Imperium, the giant box of game that had been staring at us since we got here. As people emerged, we turned our attention to the crossword.

During this time, Chris and I banged out a quick Biblios, which I won thanks to remembering the final card in the auction deck was a “move two dice up” card.

Andrew 9
Chris 7

Next we continued our theme of playing games-usually-only- played-when-drunk by playing The Mind! We didn’t do well, only getting to Round Five. Paul lost us a life when he was distracted by Chris’ story about buying a record by Tiffany from Woolworth's.

After this was the first big game of the day: Keyflower. It has been a while since I last played (three and a half years!) so I needed a rule refresher. I wish I could remember my strategy but, apart from making sure I upgraded my upgrading ability first, I don’t remember much.

Andrew 53
Paul 49
Chris 48
Sam 41

Then we went outside for a walk. As far as I can tell, exactly the same walk as last time we were here.

Having returned, we settled down for a game of Spheres Of Influence the Risk-y game of global domination. I got stuck on the sides of the board, with Canada and Japan not making great partners. Sam cut a swathe across Russia to China and then down into India. Paul set up camp, Risk style, in Australasia and then pottered about in South Africa and Malaysia. Chris took South and Mid America and the US as well as North Africa.

Tension mounted in the final round as an enormous flotilla of Sam’s ships left India, headed for the Mediterranean to do mischeive with Chris’ troops that had recently set up camp in Europe. But, shock, they turned their attention to North Africa, while Sam’s ex-Soviet troops try to unsettle the EU. It was the right thing to do, and it nabbed him an extra capital city for the win.

Sam 2 spheres, 3 cities
Paul 2 spheres, 2 cities
Andrew 2 spheres, 2 cities
Chris 1 sphere, 2 cities

Paul wasn’t keen, pointing out that he’d made no real progress in the final three rounds of the game.

After this, with a request from Paul to avoid dice-dependant combat games, we chose Kingdom Builder. Sam sat down with his laptop to do some work while the three of us battled it out.

Paul 54
Chris 53
Andrew 38

Now it was my turn to cook, and people rested and tried the crossword again. After my pizzas, we set up a game of Rajas of the Ganges, reassuring Paul that these were good dice.

Sam went big on cash while Paul went big on fame. Chris and I didn’t really do either although whenever any of us rolled two ones, we always put them on the chest area of the dice statue as sort of dice nipples. I’m pretty sure Chris started that.

It couldn’t have been closer in the final reckoning, with Sam and Paul ending with their two tokens barely past each other, and Paul winning on a tie-breaker.

Paul
Sam
Andrew
Chris

Then we played the Book Game, in which a book is chosen from the bookshelf by one player, and the blurb on the back is read out aloud. All the other players have to come up with a potential opening line, and all these are read out together by the Book-Chooser. The idea is to spot the correct opening line, and you get points for people guessing yours.

Our source for The Book Game

Sam fooled me completely with an opening line for a book based around youth in the 1970s, which he put down as “Pip, pip, pip.” I thought no one would reference the sound of an old public telephone except a paid writer, so I chose it, forgetting that Sam is a paid writer.

Paul threw us all with his first choice of book, whose opening line referenced sweating “down to her sensible cotton underwear.”

It ended with another dead heat between Paul and Sam.

Paul 7
Sam 7
Andrew 6
Chris 4

During this we discussed how David Bowie’s taste in games might have changed as he approached death, going from big, epic games to trick-takers. And talking of short games, we ended with Fuji Flush, the seemingly random card game that I am somehow good at.

Andrew 0
Paul 1
Sam 2
Chris 2

Once more to bed.

With the sound of distant quad bikes, we slowly stirred on Sunday morning until we were all up by nine. At first, we didn’t mention games at all. Were we all ignoring the elephant in the room? The elephant in question being the large game box containing Twilight Imperium.

Chris gave us every opportunity to reject it, but I was curious and, besides, this would be the only opportunity for us to actually play it. We agreed, with the proviso of a 6pm cut-off point. We set it up, somewhat surprised that Chris had added a little whiteboard to the package. I wondered just how complicated this was going to be. After a rules explanation, we set off into the universe at 11.45am.

There were, inevitably, some issues with the rules. I think the term “production value” of a planet caused some confusion and what happens to it when the planet is exhausted. Sam was first to score a point, and it was still only round one!

Apart from Paul’s mad dash to the centre, it was quite a genteel game. When trading tokens, we actually swapped them instead of simply moving them from one part of our player board to another. And we broke for lunch during round two, with Paul providing sliced malt loaf.

Paul upgraded his cannons in round three, and seemed very keen to use them on anything that came close. With his control of the central planet of Mercatol Rex, he found himself in a lead at the end of round three: Paul 4, Sam 2, Chris 2, Andrew 1.

View from the window as round four begins

Chris and Sam got into some “friendly” invasions as they realised they needed each others’ planets to score points before Chris started to worry about Sam’s close proximity to his home planet, and had a pop at him anyway. Chris won that space battle, but couldn’t land troops to retake the any territory.

As we began round five, it was clear that this would be the final act of the game. Paul and Sam engage in a decidedly un-epic space battle with no hits on either side until Paul announced his retreat, and then he started getting some hits like someone walking away from an argument they weren’t going to win while still shouting insults.

At the end of the round, Sam tried to attack Paul in Mercator Rex as a fitting finale to the game. Sam was wiped out by Paul’s not inconsiderable amount of ships and cannons on that previously peaceful planet. A fun spectacle to end the game, at least.

View from the window as round five ends

Sam 8
Chris 7
Paul 7
Andrew 7

I enjoyed it. It was pretty intense, and it certainly didn’t feel like seven hours. Each player is always involved and I certainly never had to wait 17 minutes for something to do like I did on Spheres Of Influence (yes, I timed it).

Paul and I went out in the dark to take out some recycling at the end of the dirt road that lead to the cottage and when we’d come back, Chris was still packing away the game! An epic in every sense.

After Sam’s salmon supper, we played Calimala. Chris won this game while achieving either (a) a piece of brilliant misdirection from him or (b) a massive lack of visual comprehension by us. Troyes was the publicly-known end of scoring card, but everyone had forgotten about it. In he final scoring, Chris won it with only one cube in there. None of us had even registered it. It was worse for me, since I had a trading house already built there and could’ve shipped to Troyes at any time! Afterwards, Chris told us he didn’t want to ship any more there in case that alerted us to how important it was. Marvellous play.

Chris 35
Sam 29
Andrew 27
Paul 24

And what better way to end a weekend in an isolated cabin than a game about zombies? Hit Z Road hit z table (see what I did there?) and we all diced with death. Sam went big on survivors, having seven at one point. Paul used his many resources to get out of a tight scrape while I bid high to get first choice of the paths to safety, naming my four meeples Andrew, Paul, Chris and Sam to make it more interesting.

The four of us, in meeple form

Chris, by now looking a bit like a zombie himself, never bid for starting player and relied on luck to get him through. And he got it. His second to last battle was his three survivors against six zombies, followed by another six zombies. He got past the first with six ranged shots and then took out two of the next bunch at long range. He then managed to kill off the final four, but not before they’d finished another of his survivors. In the next round, his luck held out (beating four zombies in a defiant last stand) and he made it to the end, alive but clearly ready for bed.

Sensible Paul picked up all the bonuses for resources, and ran out a clear winner.

Paul 13
Chris 10
Sam 8
Andrew 7

And so we were done for the day. And for the weekend. Back to reality tomorrow and I remarked that this must be how Superman feels when he changes back into Clark Kent. No more amazing battles or incredible stories.

At least, not until next time.