Great Balls of Squidge

I arrived at Laura and Lucy's house to find Lucy and Ryker upstairs creating a huge den from magnetic boards. Down the the kitchen, Laura, Maddie, Martin, Sarah and Effie were competing in the first game of the first GNN festive get-togethers: 5 Alive, which is a card game of shedding without taking the collective total over 21. Everyone begins with five lives and a life is lost when you bust (I think). 

Martin and Laura were joint winners with 2 lives left, and Maddie and Effie had one apiece when Sarah bit the dust and lost her last one. Christmas games were officially underway and next up was one of Martin's newbies, Hold Your Ground! Here we are trying to be last-ones standing as the ground literally explodes in camera-defying ways beneath your feet. 

As this only plays up to four, Effie and Maddie teamed up and so did Martin and Sarah. Laura and I both flew solo: each turn you play two cards from a hand of four that define number of your people to move and how far they can go, after which there's a die roll to determine whether the explody-stick will move (one space; your choice) or explode the tile it currently resides beneath, ejecting the plastic people from the game: and if anyone is cut off from the central helipad tile, they are automatically lost as well. The helipad is semi-safe in that it cannot explode - but as each tile has a max limit of six, a seventh entering will push someone off. The die may also trigger a round of area-control too, where dominant factions kick off the outnumbered. It's all pretty arbitrary-feeling, but fun. Especially the explosions. 

Effie was merciless when the opportunity to screw over her parents came - the apple falls not far from the tree, Martin - and having been in a strong position they were forced out of the helipad; and out of the game. Then the girls were ejected and it came down to a straight fight between Laura and I: she just needed to roll an explosion to win: and did!  A triumph, but at what cost? Look at the desolation. 

We moved on to HIT, the lesser-seen (recently) Knizia card-flipper. Sarah and Adam shared a win in game one, then Lucy joined us for game two, which I won. Nice to revisit this one. 

After all the subversion and theft though we needed something healing and went with Cross Clues. It was a triumph: 25/25 with zero cheating. 

There's only so much healing we can take though, so we reverted to type with Prey Another Day. Sarah made short work of us here, correctly reading the table and devouring opponents to take a victory in two short rounds. I struggled into second.

We moved on to Wandering Towers. I got off to a good start with two potions filled and one wizard home within a couple of turns, but after that stagnated a bit as everyone lost track of where their wizards might be in the vast apartment complex we managed to build.

There were shenanigans. Twice I was close to ending it only to be harpooned by the architecture moving around me. Martin plaintively cried "Where the fuck am I" at least twice. Sarah shared his existential despair. Eventually I claimed a win, with Adam second and Martin beating Laura to third on the tiebreaker. We all agreed the game is bonkers and whilst Laura took herself off on pizza duty, the four of us played something much more sensible: Agent Avenue. Adam and I dug a little hole for ourselves early on - getting two daredevils whilst Martin and Sarah claimed two Codebreakers meant we had to be extremely careful about taking any face-down cards. We briefly threatened to catch them on the track, but ended up daredevilled or codebroken (I now don't recall which) into defeat. Fun though! 

Next up was Stomp the Plank, the game of pirate elephants hating on each other. There wasn't a huge amount of busting and in fact my red elephant did no plank-walking at all. That lack of adventurousness was enough to bring me a solid win. 

Then, after a wonderful foodie interlude of pizza and salads, the entire house gathered together for Midnight Party!

Martin and I had disastrous first rounds as we both encouraged Hugo out and had him subsequently eat us. The Laura-Ryker team began well by picking up +3 points, but massive kudos to Maddie who pooh-poohed open doors in favour of running around the board to the plus-three rooms. It didn't get her the win, but she looked like an action hero compared the rest of us scrambling in a sweaty-palmed panic. Mid-game Sarah and Effie had to leave, and as Katy was arriving at the same time she took over control of their team.

Laura + Ryker -14
Martin -23
Sam -27
Maddie -28
Sarah + Effie / Katy -29
Adam -32

Ryker and Maddie were fully invested now and played Block Party with us. Really lovely to have them at the table as we continuously discovered our 'obvious' creations just looked like a bunch of cubes to everyone else.

Adam surged into an early lead here, and Ryker had a handicap of only actually starting in round two. Adam built a wonderful slice of watermelon and I successfully had my orange cube identified as 'an orange' by Maddie. I knew Martin's blocks were meant to be a slide but I wasted my steal on Katy's swirl-of-colours construct, which was "obviously" a donut. Meanwhile Katy insisted Martin's slide looked 'more like Chewbacca'. You be the judge:

Everyone had a little late-game rally and for me it was enough to catch Adam and share the win. Unfortunately that was Adam's last involvement for the day as he had to head off home, so he missed out on the hilarity of what was next: Misfits. We began as a quintet: Katy, Laura, Maddie, Martin and myself. But after Ryker won Pizza Party at the end of the table he joined my team and supplied both advice and some next-level heckling, trilling "Boooooring!" if he felt the placement wasn't ambitious enough. Around here was also Ryker's amazing 'Squidge my balls' routine, which gave all the supposed adults an even harder challenge than Misfits: keeping a straight face. Or trying to.

Somewhere in all this craziness - there were multiple collapses - Katy picked up a win despite her last two pieces being cylinders. There was time for one last game before kids' bedtime and so everyone was dealt into UNO - which today I discover in fifteen years of the blog, has never been tagged here before. Ryker and I stayed as a team, Maddie and Lucy paired up, and Katy, Laura and Martin all went it alone. 

I think it's been about fifteen years since I've played it at least, but if it doesn't scream hall-of-fame it is at least a fast-moving bit of silly good fun. Despite our best efforts to harpoon them, Maddie and Lucy took the win here and the kids were shuffled off to bed as we debated what to play next, settling eventually on Rebirth. 

During our cathedral-centric rebuilding of post-apocalyptic Scotland, the children reappeared and there was a bout of snacks and swinging. Ryker was at the table when I told Martin I hated him, which I had to quickly clarify was only in the context of the game. Laura admonished me for setting a terrible example, and I realised it really was. 

Katy broke out a colossal box of Maltesers and Laura added a bowl of Celebrations. On the board it looked a two-horse race between Katy and her proliferating energy farms and Martin and his spawny card draws: the first two missions he'd picked up rewarded his initial placements. That's my excuse anyway. I tried to balance the needs of farms and missions and castles and just ended up a kind of bland fourth place. Katy looked poised to sneak the win from her arch enemy, but she'd only picked up 4 missions - and only completed three of them. 

Martin 124

Katy 119

Laura 117

Sam 111

While Laura did some further bedtime shenanigans Martin set up his other Christmas present: Bomb Busters! This is a co-op undertaking with the theme of FUSE - we're defusing bombs - and a similar shared-information system to Hanabi.

Each round we successfully 'cut wires' by matching a numbered wire from our (hidden) hand of them with one from another player. At the start we can all share information about a single wire, but because wires are laid out numerically left-to-right, you can also transmit limited info about the tiles around it as well. There's four of each number (on the first mission, the numbers are only 1-6) and if two of a number are already revealed and you have the remaining pair in your own hand, you're allowed to pair 'with yourself' and reveal them. 

After the very easy first mission, the game makes things a bit harder with extra numbers (1-8) and now coloured wires as well (see 3.1 in pic above) that need to be 'cut' in  similar fashion. It gets trickier fast, and if you're not a naturally logical puzzle-solver (ie me) it can start to feel like the only thing you can grok is the fact you know nothing. But it's more intuitive than Wordy or Message From the Stars, and I enjoyed it. Each mission ramps up the difficulty, and gives you more to navigate. To help, you also get single-use tool cards that can get you out of a pickle - I used these more than anyone!

We succeeded our first three missions but lost our last life on Mission 4. Not a bad return for four slightly inebriated cadets, I'd say, even if our alcohol-infused body parts were now scattered around the academy. It's a bit Quirky Circuits too, in the mission-focused escalation - I look forward to playing this again. Laura and I were fading a bit now though - possibly the wire-cutting tension; maybe the post-chocolate sugar-crash - and we elected to make the last game the final one of the night, so it was of course So Clover. Katy got a bastard of a red herring tile, but we managed to call it out and ended the evening on a masterful 24/24! What a great way to sign off 2024. Thank you Laura, Lucy, and all for a cracking session...

Happy new year all. Here's to some great games in 2025 - starting on Saturday!