Some games

With the worldwide insanity right now being crystallised in the most heinous ways in the US and UK, maybe it wasn't a huge surprise that only four of us were in the mood for gaming. Maybe other GNNers were morbidly fixated on the news, as I (Sam) had been for what seemed like the last two or three weeks. Even more than before. Anyway with the absentees too numerous to list already, we also lost Joe to a late drop-out and began as a four: Ian, Martin, Andy, and myself.

Martin was keen to play American Bookstore, and with an introduction that the game was so named as a revenge on a haughty bookstore paymaster, I was intrigued. Plus - it's a trick-taker, so there was that. However neither of these things rubbed Andy the right way, as he announced early on he wasn't keen, even with the smut-inviting sabotagey delights of playingcards.io as a sideline in entertainment. The game itself was interesting: four suits 0-15 11, standard trick-taking rules apply, and there's no trump suit. Like Poison, having the most cards won in a suit is good, and having any less than the most is bad. The extra twist here is that if you play a card that takes the collective value of all-played-cards to 15 or higher, you take all the cards, no matter the value or suit of what you played. This can be helpful, or sometimes a big pain in the ass. It also means players sometimes don't get to play in a trick! And it gets harder to predict what will happen as the cards run out...

Andy may have warmed to it. One thing that was easy to predict from early on was that he was going to rinse us - and he did.



Andy 40
Martin -2
Sam -3
Ian -19

From there, we headed into space for around four or five missions of The Crew. Even though it's only 24 hours later, I now can't remember very much about them at all! Except I think we took three turns to complete the first mission and did the second mission first time of asking? Second time? I'm not sure. Sorry.



I was doing my Classic Boris and bowing out of any responsibility at this point, barring some wafflingly vague recollection a bit later, but the others headed off into the night to play Red7, which Martin won by some distance apparently! If you don't remember Red7 it's the one where the rules keep changing all the time depending on what card you play.

Maybe next week the world will be different.