Absent for the past three weeks, I arrived at Joe's place at 7.20 but was not cordially invited down to the kitchen. Instead, he and Katy came out and we all got in Joe's car. We picked Sam up from his house and all of us drove across town to Steve and Anja's. Once we had finished catching up with each other’s news, we played a game called “count to 20” where we all have to, collectively, count up to 20 but not say the same number at the same time. We succeeded on our second attempt and Joe rewarded us all with tiny snacks hidden away in his car.
We arrived a little early, so we sat somewhat awkwardly in Joe’s car parked in Steve and Anja’s driveway. After a few minutes, we went inside and were greeted by Anja. We settled ourselves around the games table and, after a few minutes, Ian came in through the door that lead to the kitchen, as if he’d been there all along.
Steve was out with his son, so we began with Blob Party, a game which is like the opposite of Just One. A category is devised using two cards and then people have to think of the word that everyone else will think of. Before we began, Katy asked if the “blob” in Blob Party was a reference to periods. Was this the level of word association we’d have to deal with?
The gimmick in Blob Party is that there is a blob that is initially shared out equally among the players with a single plastic eye stuck on it. As players guess the same word, their blobs are conjoined, complete with eyes, to create a bigger blob.
Sam and I bonded in round one and then Joe and Katy joined together in round two. Eventually, only Anja was alone. She seemed ambivalent about joining the hive mind, comparing it to the Borg, but she wrote Chelsea for “Flower Event” and so did we, and the game was complete.
Next up, now that Pete had arrived, we had another quick and silly game: Qork. In this game one player rolls two large dice under a cup. They lift the cup and if the result is a double or adds to seven, then they have to use the cup to trap as many corks as they can - each cork is tied to a string that, in turn, is being held by a player. These players have to yank their corks as quickly as they can to avoid being caught.
And that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.
Sam wondered aloud who had the quickest reactions, so I filmed one round in slow motion and can say (based on a single data point) that the order, from quickest to slowest, is: Pete, Sam, Katy and me (tie), Joe then Steve (Ian was the dice roller in that round).
It was fun. Pete pushed the laws of probability to extremes by (a) not rolling doubles or sevens for ages and then (b) rolling in such a way that the dice ended up on top of each other. Not to be outdone, Steve then needed several attempts at rolling in a way that both dice finish on the mat. Joe took what was a simple party game and added a dickish aspect. When he was dice-roller, he’d feint to catch corks even when it wasn’t needed, causing people to yank their corks without good reason and pick up a penalty point.
In the end, after all this, the scores were (less points are good)
Sam 3
Joe 5
Andrew 7
Pete 7
Katy 8
Steve 9
Ian 10
Now we decided to set up something more substantial. Joe had brought Lords of Vegas, so me, Katy, him and Ian set up to play. Steve, Pete and Sam set up Five Towers while waiting for Anja to finish domestic duties and watering the neighbours’ flowers.
I know little about Five Towers, except the scores
Steve 41
Sam 29
Pete 20
Then they set up Hanami, Knizia’s reskinning of Samurai, so instead of a game about picking up tokens based on your strength in surrounding areas having a war-theme in Samurai Japan, we have a game with exactly the same aggressive mechanic with a theme about picnics during the blossom-viewing season in Japan. Anja joined them once she’d returned.
Pete won. I wasn’t told the scores except “it was a whitewash.”
As for Lords of Vegas, I started badly as my brilliantly lucky 2-tile silver casino was stolen by Katy who turned it into her 3-tile silver casino. A fantastic move, but it still quite annoyed me. However, Silvers didn’t pay out until the end of the game, by which time it was my 5-tile silver casino once more.
Katy, Ian and Joe constantly fought over a 3-tile casino in the corner of the board where they all had one die. But no matter how often Katy or Ian reorganised, Joe always won.
But Ian had a seemingly strong position at first, with a number of plots on the strip that he couldn’t afford to build on. But mid-game he had some actual buildings there when the Strip paid out and he became the richest player on the board. He used some of that money, though, on the third attempt at unseating Joe from his place at the top of the 3-tile casino. Still no success.
Joe smartly redecorated his small gold casino to green, giving him enough gold tiles to take over a 5-tile casino, turning it into a 7-tile gold casino sitting on the Strip.
Finally, I got the silver casino I lost in round one and it immediately paid out! Any thought that this was my moment was dashed in the next round as Katy’s own 6-tiler pays out and she surges into first.
In fact, it was very close for all players for most of the game. It was only when I turned the 7-tile casino into a 9-tile (with three dice from three players) and then I won the reorganisation that it looked like we had a definite winner. I now had a 6-tile and a 9-tile on the Strip. The next round was Game Over and the Strip paid out one last time.
Andrew 36
Katy 32
Joe 20
Ian 20
Phew, my first LoV in years and what a journey it was. We finished at the same time as Hanami, so we ended with one more communal game: Just One - the opposite game to Blob Party we played at the start! Each player gives clues to a word-guesser, avoiding repetitions.
Katy asked for no high brow clues but the word she chose was “muse” which kind of suggests high brow stuff. Joe went all cryptic on me, cluing “anaethestic” for “number” (as in something that makes you numb) and Steve clued “#” but I read it as “hash” which, with Joe’s clue, made me guess “drug”. Nope.
Sam got lucky as we all clued separate but obvious clues for “buffy”. He got it in two seconds. Amazingly, no one put “vampire”.
Anja’s word was “sleeve” which she failed to get, distracted by Joe’s clue of “Wizard’s”. He later explained to us in the car that “wizard’s sleeve” is in Roger's Profanisaurus. “Ian said he was thinking of writing it,” he added, in his defence.
According to my notes, we got 7 out of 12 with a bonus point for someone guessing the eliminated words.
And that was that! Since I had no work the next day, I was able to stay until the end - a rare treat these days. Thanks all, it was a lovely evening.
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