Steaming Mad

At one stage it looked like last night's GNN would be just Martin and myself, so decimated were we by festive colds, but then Pete put up his hand, my friend Vincent said he could join us and at the last moment Adam H materialised as well. Whilst this drama was playing out its finale, Martin and I were playing Bombastic. 

the worst ever pic of bombastic

This is basically an evolved tic-tac-toe, as one player is noughts and the other crosses. On your turn you can either utilise a card - which lets you peek at/reveal/swap/shuffle the face-down tiles - or, if you're confident/optimistic enough, you can Go For It, which means flipping three in a row and hoping they'll all be your symbol. If they are, you win. If they're not, the game continues. Unless you reveal a bomb, in which case you instantly lose.  Martin won two of our three games, with my second-act triumph as bombastic as I ever got. 

boom

Pete and Adam now arrived and we debated what to play. Martin and I had already gotten halfway through setting up EGO before realising neither of us knew it well enough to teach coherently. We settled on Steam Power, and Vincent arrived to greet three new faces and take on an instant rules-teach. 

Fortunately, there are basically three actions in Steam Power (well, there are five, but only three get used with any regularity). Build track, build factories to produce cubes, fulfil contracts to 'deliver' said cubes along links in the network. It's Railways but condensed down into an hour or so. 

After we'd all taken two turns, Martin remembered that each turn gives you two actions rather than the paltry one we'd had, so we defaulted to the game's suggested method and sped up a little. I speculated that maybe early factories on other player's networks could be viable, but I bottled actually trying it. Adam took the plunge and later regretted it, as he and Martin built competing networks down through industrial-age Germany. Vincent focused on the collection of red-cube towns in the east, and I skirted the south, but it was Pete who played the most coherent game, as he began completing contracts and seemed to have all the cubes he needed in his own cities. Visually, the game - already busy with three - reaches overwhelm at five players. It's hard to see what the hell is going on anywhere. 

As the game closed out I'd been assuming that Pete was going to take a debut win. But it was the green trains of dickishness that took the laurels after all. At least the first player in turn order didn't win again - although as the first player was me, maybe that doesn't say that much. 

Martin 37

Sam 35

Vincent/Pete 33 each

Adam 27

We moved on to Texas Showdown as Vincent and Pete took on another learning of rules. The opening round was tight, with all of us taking enough hits to keep the scores close. 

Then in round two Vincent went into an orange-flavoured death spiral, and I almost outdid this in the final round with a spiral of my own, ending the game with a flourish, albeit an unplanned one - like falling down the church steps on your wedding day. 

Adam wins!

Martin 2nd

Sam can't remember the other scores, but was last behind Pete/Vincent

It wasn't horrendously late but after the main course of Steam Power and the combative tricks-are-bad vibes of Texas Showdown, Adam took his leave. Vincent almost followed him out the door, but we persuaded him to stay and try So Clover. Then Adam returned! "It's pouring down out there" he said, sitting back down. I poured the non-drivers all a whisky and Martin talked Vincent through the So Clover silliness. 

I really struggled with my combos, scratching my head at quilt/revolver (eventually plumping for maid) and then taking an age to finally invent a word - inkists - for tattoo/branch. Unsurprisingly, my clover did not merit a 6. 

We began rather well though, with Martin and Vincent's leaves both harvesting maximum points (I particularly liked Vincent's neck for pigeon/blue) but as the whisky glasses grew lower in content, so did our success rate, following my 4 with Adam's 3 (we somehow missed fairy/hero for Puck) and then being bamboozled by Pete's clover, which seemed to have multiple options for three sides and none at all for the fourth (what does one write for boxing/crossroads?)

Nevertheless it was a great way to end the night, as always. Not a marathon session, but a lovely confection of games and people. Hope we'll have the absentees back next week!