Trick-taking with a maggot

A rare Saturday night games foray last night, courtesy of Laura and Lucy, and latterly Katy who turned up after an extravagant meal for sixteen people out somewhere in the city. 

While Lucy was putting the kids to bed, I taught Laura - bedecked in reindeer antlers - the game of the moment, Rebirth. Ryker joined us briefly to watch as I explained that in a semi-green post-apocalyptic future, we'll be building castles and cathedrals. Ryker built a tower of them whilst Laura patiently listened, and then we embarked on a pretty speedy 2-player game of the easy-to-grok Scotland side of the board. I won, Ryker went to bed (-not as a result of me winning) and we flipped the board over to play Ireland instead. In the midst of this, Katy turned up and cheerleaded for Laura as she snaffled castles from me at a rate of what seemed like one a minute. Our positions from game one - where I leapfrogged Laura in final scoring - were reversed, as we both broke 200 points, but Laura by a more impressive margin for a debut 'complex' win. I forgot to take pics but here's Ashley Down Road after the storm, covered in bed and bins.

Then Lucy arrived too, and we played So Clover. At first Lucy was super-tired and suggested bowing out, but with a bit of encouragement she contributed a solid six. In the first game the only letdown was my clover, when for some reason everyone started talking about donkey dicks just because I'd written the clue 'long'. But eventually nobody tripped over on the ghostly phallus and it was Leftovers that harpooned the opener. Feeling enervated we went again and picked up a perfect 24/24:

Then it was time for Misfits! We played twice. 

I think Katy won one and Lucy won one. There was a lot of coffeehousing, with Katy realising at one point that's why she enjoys the game so much. We reminisced about Ian's brilliance at it - his ears may have been burning - and basically had the best fun you can have sabotaging each other with offcuts. But all good things come to and end, and so Lucy eventually retired to bed. 

The three of us debated what to play, although mostly this was Laura and I discussing whilst Katy made little 'hmph' noises from her chair. Having initially ruled it out as potentially too long to start on at 11pm, we ended up playing Fishing. I forgot to take photos of everything except the box, earlier in the day...

This is a pretty bonkers must-follow trick-taker where the tricks you win are both points (one per card) and also your hand for the subsequent round. The catch is that if you don't have enough cards in your won tricks for the next hand, you take them from a communal deck instead, and it's this deck that adds increasingly powerful cards to the game: higher numbers in the basic suits, a trump suit, and some special powers. 

Katy got off to a solid start and she was concerned - and Laura and I hopeful - that her personal deck was stacked with enough chaff that we could build much stronger hands: the game has a kind of ebb and flow of winning/not winning, where you want to shed crappy cards into tricks you're not winning. However though we only played six rounds of the official eight, neither Laura or I could catch Katy up and she may well have had a big enough lead to survive any comebacks. 

Something like:
Katy 80
Laura and Sam - back in the 50s

It was gone 11.30 now so even though it was a Saturday, we called it a night. A very fun night!