A Pink Month

 A small gathering at Anja and Steve's this week - Martin, Gareth, Ian and I (Joe) joined our gracious hosts, and Louie joined in while Anja settled Lennon. 

We kicked off with Just One, and didn't fare brilliantly. "Baseball" was Steve's reasonable assumption from seeing the clues "Catcher" and "First". When he was shown the three "Rolands" he was none the wiser. Mind you, there are at least two Rolands familiar to those of us of a certain age - Grange Hill's perennial patsy and the Rat, which is what we were trying to clue. I guess there's also Kevin Roland. And when I say "a certain age", I realise I'm mostly referring to myself.

Anja joined us towards the end of the round, and we split into two groups - Ian, Gareth, Steve and Louie tackling Star Realms at one end of the table, whild Martin, Anja and I played Martin's new (old) gem-in-a-box Harvest. Harvest is a clever little game of making rows of vegetables, stiffing your opponents with damaged ones whilst reaping the ripest yourself. We all three played fairly unpleasantly towards one another, and as the endgame approached, I tossed out all three tornado cards so as not to be stuck with them at the end, which was relatively satisfying but not very consequential, and martin romped way with the win, with my score something like half his, and Anja's half mine again. It's a very elegant little design, and I was astonished when Martin told us it was designed in the early '90s.

Star Realms was still in full geo-stationary orbit at the other end of the table; I don't know anything about what was going on or even who won it, but I think I recall hearing Steve whispering malevolently about Stealth Needles at one point... or did I dream that? In any case, we bust out Keltis, Das Orakel at our end - one of Dr Knizia's innumerable iterations of his Lost Cities card game. I've played Lost Cities and one or two of the Keltis suite, but the central mechanic of playing each of the suits either low to high or high to low was new to Anja. In the Orakel, we use these cards to race our pawns up a spiral punctuated with randomised rewards, and the game ends when a certain number reach the end zone. But it's less a race than a smorgasbord of point-scoring and turn-optimising opportunities; so many, in fact, that we mostly forgot about the priestess, who you can move instead of your pawns. As we totted up the scores, and Martin ended a single point behind me, he rued his neglect of the priestess, which would have put him just ahead of me. Anja's lack of familiarity with the restrictions of the card play meant her early lead was stymied by not being able to play much at all on the last few turns.

I enjoyed it - of course I did, I beat Martin at a Knizia! (Hold that thought). I dislike the visuals of the Keltis games - all amorphous shapes and Photoshoppy Celtic symbols on a greeeeeeeen board; and I don't think they help players parse the myriad options each turn. But it's got that Knizia magic nonetheless, and feels similar to much more recent games like Mille Fiore with it's pinging bonus actions and neat little side-scoring opportunities. 

As we finished this, Star Realms was finally drawing to a close too, so Louie was dispatched to bed, and the 6 of us played Phantom Ink, staying in the same groups of three to make two teams, with Gareth and I the spirits. We didn't like our first word 'towel', so we picked another card. It was, I think, the most interesting game of Phantom Ink so far.

I should mention here that it wasn't until the very end of the evening that Ian uttered the word 'blog', and that since I was writing the scores down I was assuming blogging duties. None of this had occurred to me, and I hadn't taken any photos! So this morning I took a photo of the Phantom Ink clues from last night. I offer it here, along with the clues for the Sun side and Martin and Anja's winning guess removed, if anyone wants to try and guess.

Sun side clues were: 1) The feeling it gives you 2) A game it appears in 3) Your favourite kind of it 4) A fairy tale or nursery rhyme it appears in...

Gareth bid us farewell after this, and the remaining five rounded out the evening with another Knizia dick-fest in the form of Art Robbery. It was fun and chaotic, and the final round ended with Martin having a choice of playing 3, 3, 3, sneaky thief or sneaky thief, all of which could only end the round by taking the remaining token from the middle (I guess because he had the other 3's?). These scores I did note down:

Joe 20
Ian 19
Martin 18
Anja 17
Steve FALL GUY

In Steve's defence, he was very distracted for the whole game by having eaten a mouthful of Szechuan spicy peanuts. The ZING got to him. It gets to us all.

We packed up ready to go, and were momentarily distracted by some odd relics from Martin's bag - Tabula Rasa and Muscat. Tabula Rasa boasted box art that looked like it had been hastily assembled from clip art with a smattering of dingbats (Comic Sans had presumably yet to be invented, otherwise that would have been the natural choice of font). Muscat also looked like it had been visualised by a late-eighties computer programmer, who'd then though it was lacking something and had plastered a teeny-tiny Photoshop brick wall effect over the whole thing.  I started to feel almost fondly about Keltis.

We wandered off in to the night, after a very jolly evening that had been punctuated every now and then by the threat of imminent disaster every time Ian opened a can of combustible stout.