It ain't over til it's over. Oh it's over.

Partly due to World Cup fever - other fevers are available - this week's GNN hit a very quiet patch, with only host Joe and myself (Sam) sat across the table from each other when the allotted hour came. Katy was going to join us but she was running a little late, so we kicked things off with a couple of head to heads, starting with Faraway. 

I have never won this game before, but Joe put all his eggs in one huge point-scoring basket, and though he pulled it off my many-cards approach was enough for a narrow victory.

Sam 78
Joe 73

We followed that with Pickonimo/Heck Meck, where Joe got off to a terrible start, getting nothing at all on his first three turns. I hoovered up a whole bunch of tiles, but was concerned that as the game closed out I'd start busting. Joe didn't think I had anything to worry about - but he was wrong. Revenge of the Berge!

Joe 10
Sam 8

Katy now arrived - complete with a new bike - and we debated what to play before settling on Eldritch Horror. We'd flirted with this at the weekend and failed at the hands of the Ancient Ones - could we do any better this time? 

Inspired by the works of HP Lovecraft, this undertaking sees us trying to solve clues, defeat monsters and close gates to horrible netherworlds. It's very Pandemic-like in some ways - a combination of hitting objectives whilst firefighting hordes of diseases (or in this case, ghosts, shoggoths, and the perpetual threat of insanity). Joe played Charlie Kane, a politician with powerful influence. Katy was Jacqueline Fine, who had a strong command of Lore. And I was Lily Chen, who mostly likes kicking the shit out of things. 

We began strongly. Joe used his influence to good effect, and his special power to share the love - or more specifically, some asset cards - with Katy and I, We begin navigating the board in search of clues and gates to close, but round two is our first hairy moment as a Reckoning is triggered and Joe narrowly escapes death. 

Katy is doing some terrible dice-rolling and only her powers and cards are rescuing her. But our biggest problem is the current Mystery: four must be solved to win the game, but we are making absolutely no progress on the first one at all, thanks to the circumstances of the nasty Mythos cards and our poor gate-shutting efforts: we sashay around the planet only to faceplant whenever something important is needed to be done.

Katy twice sacrifices her own health to save Joe and I losing (more of) ours, and although I finally close a gate at the fourth time of asking we still fail on the mystery front, and as time is getting on, elect to pack the game in because after nearly two hours we're no closer to the end than when we started, and completing four mysteries before midnight looks unlikely. We're disappointed. I have loads of lovely kit now thanks to Joe, but am feeling a bit like the all the gear, no idea version of Lily.

Lovecraft was a horrible racist anyway. With all the terrors back in the box there was plenty of time for So Clover. I was quite pleased with my clue of bile for ambulance/mustard, but I hadn't spotted the word body on another card, dammit. We flailed about slightly on our first attempt with Katy and I not in tune with Joe's clever clueing. Our second looked more promising with two sixes but Joe had had a bunch of tricky combos and we fell short again!

Despite us trying to save the world and deciding it was all too much effort, it was still pretty early. But hot and tired from our endeavours we decided to call it a night. Hope to see you all next week.