When we come out of Lockdown

My somewhat decadent coping strategy with this whole thing does at least, I hope, have fringe benefits for a Tuesday night. Over the last 4 months I've played a bunch of new games, a number of which I may trot out hopefully on a Tuesday night, and - here they are.

SHORT AND SILLY

Don't Mess With Cthulu is a hidden-identity team game were you can never be sure who's on which team until the game is over. About 25% of the game is shuffling cards and dealing them, but it's kind of forgivable because there are only 5 cards per player and it's stupidly silly. One team is the agents, trying to reveal four Elder Sign cards to win. The other team only needs to reveal the single Cthulu card - each round begins with every player telling the truth, or lying, about what cards they have, before everyone chooses a single card to reveal from another player. From these simple rules arise multiple layers of deception and reasoning: agents want to fool cultists they have Cthulu when they don't; cultists can lie they have elder signs when they don't. Cultists will admit they have Cthulu to get another team member to pick it... agents will bluff they have Cthulu, but in doing so, may appear to be cultists. It's often clear someone is lying, but rarely who. And you won't even know how many members each team has!

We are the Robots was a Kennerspiel Des Jahres nominee and can be played co-operatively or competitively, in either case using The Mind-type player-perception-reading to figure out how far the active player (the robot) is moving along a line. They 'beep' when they go, and 'beep' when they stop, and they do say if they are going fast, slow, or normal pace. That's pretty much it. Doesn't have the tension of The Mind, but plays in ten minutes and is pretty fun for it.

Mr Face is a face-making game where someone chooses from a hand of facial expression cards and makes the face (with cardboard bits, though using your own face might be an interesting variant) before everyone chooses a card of their own that might - you hope - also correlate to the face made. Then everyone guesses which one it is. It's like a more visual version of the First Line of a Book game, only not quite as fun. The best part is just making the face.

Love Letter. There's a new six-player version that - as well as playing six players - adds two new characters in the Spy (0) and the Chancellor (6). The spy can potentially score you a point even if you don't win the round (potentially if you do, as well) but the Chancellor has a new element to the game - allowing you to know the last two cards in the deck. Joe, Stan and I have been playing this loads.

Nine Tiles Panic. Real-time tile-laying thing with bonkers Oink theme that is ultimately irrelevant. It's got lovely bits but the game is a strange mix - offering a dynamic puzzle that changes from game to game in how it scores, but forcing you to rush through it.

TRICK TAKING

Tournament at Avalon was played once and frankly it was a disaster. But only because it was the wrong game at the wrong time, riding a wave of misplaced optimism. I am really keen to try it again with the trick-taking fans of a Tuesday night. Everyone is in a multi-player punch up at one of Arthur's soirees, and taking tricks is bad because they deal you wounds. When anyone's health reaches zero they are dead, and the game ends with the healthiest player winning. The art is lovely and the combative aspect appeals - to me, anyway. Minor reservation over special-exception type character abilities, but definitely one I'd like to revisit.

Tricks and the Phantom is another Oink game, where you get a point for winning a round - it's not really a trick-taker to be honest - but can also score for correctly deducting who was going to win. We haven't yet played it with four, but I think that's when the game is at its best.

TWO-PLAYER 

Both Nova Luna and Wingspan actually play up to 4 and 5 respectively, but they feel like they're best as head-to-heads to me. Wingspan looks lovely and is a kind of gentle tableau-builder on the theme of birds. I think it's too gentle to be a hit on a Tuesday though; feels more like a Sunday morning-with-coffee thing to me.

Nova Luna is a slightly Patchwork-esque tile-laying game that I find both addictive and bewildering in equal measure. Each tile allows you to place discs on it when the adjacent tiles are what it wants to be next to (and contiguous tiles of the same colour all connect to any tile each one of them is next to) The player to place all their discs first wins.

YINSH is a really clever 2-player abstract of forming rows of your own colour. Like Othello, leaping over pieces on the board causes them to flip over to yours/your opponent's side instead. But it's a far better game than Othello, and has a neat mechanism where winning a round puts you at a slight disadvantage in the next.

Europe Divided is a Twilight Struggle-esque battle for supremacy over contested areas of eastern Europe, post 1990. I don't recall a huge amount about it now - I played it way back in March - but I do remember being impressed!

RACING GAMES

Rallyman GT is a fairly fun dice-chucking game where you can either play cautiously, or push your luck. Although Joe loves it, I prefer...

Gaslands which is just ridiculous. It takes X-Wing's idea of moving things around using templates, but gets you to do it with matchbox cars instead, where you can ram and shoot each other in a Mad Max type scenario. The first rule in the book is the Rule of Carnage - wherever there is doubt over what should happen, choose the most destructive outcome. In our three games, at least one person didn't finish the race on each occasion.

EURO GOODNESS

Not just euros I guess, but games that come with a board and you do stuff on it. The least Euro-y is probably Fast Sloths. Here you're in a race to gather 8 or more leaves, but because each player is a sloth, you never move. Instead you hitch a ride on other animals, who all travel in a variety of ways across a variety of terrain. Minor concern is it seems like it often comes down to a tie-breaker but it's fun, and fast-moving.

In Traintopia everyone is building their own train tracks, and at certain junctures will place passengers on them, who score depending on what landscape your train goes through. Each round the tiles, passengers, and one or two other elements are drafted, so you can play it in a kind of shit-kicking way if you so desire. We tended just to snap up what we wanted. It's pretty decent.

Little Town is lamb dressed as mutton: it looks like a really simple place a guy, get stuff, build things type thing - and in a way it is. But as things are built, the shape of the board changes and the deeper dynamics of the game arise out of that. Dick moves are available.

Tin Goose is an underwhelming looking thing but one I really enjoyed exploring. You're running an airline company between the start of commercial flight right up to the seventies. Build routes both national and international, purchase planes, blah blah. BUT two things make it really appealing to me - first of all, everyone starts with five cards that represent the pain-in-the-ass thing about early air travel, and as the game progresses you are trying to shed them to improve your progress. How that's done is intrinsically linked to the central mechanic, which is bidding. How much is anything worth? The players end up deciding that collectively.

Murano is the most euro-y euro here, but for those who like their euros - this is a goodie. Each player is contributing to the establishment of the glass-blowing industry on the island of Murano, but that vaguely-bland theme is really offset by a number of slightly un-euro-y things, such as how turns progress (moving boats around the island - blocking is available!) how gondoliers score (semi-secretly!) and the super-tight economy, where the best avenue to cash is glass blowing - but glass blowing costs you points, because the inhabitants hate the pollution you produce. On top of all that, a tension over how and when the game actually ends...

EPICS

The Romans sees each player taking their bespoke Roman empire on their individual European map and try to build it across several epochs. There's some easy-to-grasp worker placement oiling the wheels of progress, then a series of dice-rolls potentially undermining it. It's what the Ragnar Brothers call a quantum system of gaming, but I have to be honest and say I really preferred...

History of the World. Despite its venerable age, one of the most fun games I've played during lockdown, even though each play was by myself. Over seven ages various empires rise and fall, and players play a different empire in each age. I thought this who-have-I-got-this-time aspect might dilute your feeling of commitment, but it works really well; not least in part because when you draw an empire you can choose to pass it on to anyone who doesn't yet have one. As the empires vary in strength, there's a sense of built-in policing here between players - but it can backfire spectacularly too. The rules over combat (chuck dice!) and point scoring (control territories) are really simple too, and what arises out of it is a real sense of story. I'm desperate to play this with actual people, albeit it's probably too long for a Tuesday night.

Finally Vindication lands somewhere between epic (a short epic) and euro (with lashings of narrative). I'm not sure who would like it and who would hate it, but I'm definitely in the former camp - I'll even forgive it for having orcs, because there's an explorey sandbox feel to how you move around the island, hoping to vindicate your character by having them go from literal wash-up to a dominant leader of men/gnomes/whatever. And there's a puzzle-feel to how you do it, literally turning the cubes of two basic tenets (eg strength, intelligence) into another (eg courage). It also has a time-running-out endgame mechanic reminiscent of Sol: twice Stan and I have played and enjoyed it so much we just kept going! My main gripe about it is a box full of miniatures that don't even feature in the base game, which feels like a slathering of Kickstarter over something that didn't need it.