Blue or Green

 I was in Easton with a plan to walk through some of Bristol’s more country-ish lanes to Sam’s house. Imagine my surprise when I stepped out of an off-licence and saw Jo and Martin walking by with, apparently, the same idea.

We arrived at the venue and Sam let us in. Joe, Ian and Katy were there and Katy told us of her recent gaming activities, playing a lot of Snakes & Ladders with a five-year-old nephew. “Snakes & Ladders can last a long time,” she assured us.

We began with a homegrown game from Jo - I’m the Chump. A word game where people are randomly split into two teams - champs or chumps - by dealing a card. People don’t know what team they’re in, but everyone else does. And then everyone is dealt a word. Again - they don’t know it but everyone else does. The idea is to give clues to people about their word in such a way that a Champ can guess their word before a Chump realises they’re a Chump. So you have to give bad clues to Chumps but not so bad that they work out their true nature.

Katy got the clues “nought,” “Jesus,” and “angry” and thought it was a bunch of nonsense and declared herself a Chump. She wasn’t: we’d all been cluing “cross” but she took solace in her defeat in the fact that she’d ended the game.

Katy made notes

But we actually played two more rounds. Joe correctly guessed he was a Chump because everyone else was a Champ. And then Jo guessed they were a chump after correctly surmising that “taxi” and “shop” were probably red herrings.

It was an interesting game. There was a little discussion afterwards about how it played which got diverted into which words also followed the “ch_mp” form.

After this we split into a four and a three. Katy decided to forgo her usual distaste for plastic-heavy games and chose Manhattan, joined by me, Ian and Sam. Joe, Jo and Martin went deep into thoughtful logical deduction with Message From The Stars.

In Manhattan, we are four property developers building skyscrapers not just in the titular Manhattan but also in Hong Kong, Kairo (sp?), Frankfurt, Sydney, and San Paolo (spoken in an Australian accent). We can build on top of each others skyscrapers and we often do since the uppermost floors score.

We are putting up tower blocks all over the world when the words “Z has to be trusted” drift across the table mid-game as those playing Message From The Stars seem to be reciting dialogue from a spy movie.

But Manhattan collapses into a late-game dilemma. Not for Katy, though. Me, Sam and Ian battle over the area-control points of four of the areas while Katy quietly builds in the remaining two, unchallenged. While she won’t improve on her 2-points for area-control, every new building she puts down gets her another point and her final round tally of 17 is immense.

Katy 45

Sam 40

Andrew 39

Ian 39

We finish just as Message From The Stars finishes too. “Fully successful” was the summary from Martin of their efforts.Sam told us about a dream he’d had in which Martin had a game that came in a pencil case. The idea was to take turquoise  pencils out one by one and decide if they were blue or green.

We rearrange ourselves for the next game. Katy, Martin and Jo play L’oaf while Ian, Sam, Joe and I play For Sale in a little burst of nostalgia. Since it’s not Joe’s pimped out deluxe version, we need to remind ourselves about what value cards are actually in play but otherwise it’s all very familiar. Although maybe I had forgotten how much to bid for cards as the first hand of the game contained the highest card and I went big.

Joe 59

Sam 59

Andrew 55

Ian 45

L’oaf, after Martin declared “they picked the same card four times running,” ended:

Katy 29

Jo 24

Martin 18

And with that, I bowed out. The remaining sextet played So Clover once. Sam sent me pics and remarked that Martin put ‘tearjerker’ for Napkin/Movie and Katy was disappointed in him for not being filthier even though Martin pointed out it did have jerker in the clue.

Thanks all, it was lush.

That's a Fact

With Laura and Andrew bowing out on the day, there were still seven of us clustered at Joe's house come 7.30: myself, the host, Katy, Ian, Martin, and 'the Adams' which kicked off an evening of confusion when, on arrival, I thought Adam T and Joe were talking about calling everyone Adam would be a 'great system' but it transpired they were speaking of other things. I should have known. I got even more confused by whose birthday it was. Katy brought cake.

Everyone threw their games on the table. Adam T's included one he'd forgotten how to play and the rules were in Russian. Martin's included Orbit, which immediately had plenty of volunteers - he began setting that up as Adam H and I explained Looot to Joe. 

Despite Looot's quirky name and simple rules, it's quite a thinker, packing that puzzly euro game feel into a fast-moving half-hour or so. As Vikings, we raid the central board to take things home to our homelands, and then score them depending on configurations: you surround buildings or longships with the resources they need to flip them: once flipped, they make said resources worth more points. It's a take-and-make style game reminiscent in one sense of Cascadia/Calico, but competition on the shared board makes it far more cut-throat, as Joe serially discovered at the hands of Adam. 

Meantime Orbit was being played out in teams, with Katy and Ian suffering the slings and arrows of Adam T and Martin. And vice versa. 

I didn't get all the details but I did catch, I think, some reminiscing over when or how the term 'space cunt' originated a discussion about Katy calling someone a cunt (again). It's probably nice being a team though, as you are c**t-side of everyone in this game. Meanwhile on hexagonal Earth, I was losing my way despite playing Looot a few times already this week. My vikings lacked coherency, gathering gold boosters when I severely lacked any gold to boost. Adam - having been the most dastardly - took a clean win here, with Joe coming a solid second on debut. 

Adam 99

Joe 91

Sam 76

Orbit was still in full-dick, so we set up A Message from the Stars. This melted my head when I was a human being, but thankfully I was now an alien, with far less cognitive load, as Joe and Adam took up the role of cryptographers.  

They did very well. It was fascinating to watch them make so much hay from a single word, but my brain contains about as much logical deduction power as a conference pear. I just needed to give them enough clues to work with, which is a comparatively simple undertaking. They cracked the code, and after a near-miss with Royalty, we deciphered each other's messages!

Adam, Joe and Sam: joint winners.

Orbit hadn't quite finished so we set up Misfits. Adam got us off to a brutal start with horrible bit of foundational sabotage, but we managed to build it quite high up before it finally fell over on Joe. 

While that was happening, Katy and Ian triumphed in Orbit! I don't have Andrew's powers of dual-focus and (more) diligent note-taking, so I know very little about it. I did hear Martin hurrying Ian along at one stage, saying he had so many cards to choose from. "And they're all crap" Ian said. But they won anyway. I think around now we had cake. But it may have been later. 

They began playing Saer - I missed this too, apologies - as Misfits continued to implode on all three of us at different stages. Joe did his best with an enormous stack of pieces, but he couldn't quite do enough. During several late-game half-collapses, it was Joe who took the hit again when the entire tower fell over. 

The others finished Saer, with Martin taking a win despite Ian's huge array of cards in Ragnarok!

Martin 10

Katy 9

Ian 8

Adam T 4

They paused to watch the Misfits finale - I took the win - then we debated what to play next. There was a general move towards Fun Facts, which Martin protested, but he was overwhelmed by the amenability of others to it, and we set it up in the face of his ongoing chagrin when no suitable alternative could be decided on. 

My notes here just record the questions. Water! Birthday! Dancing! Lists! Old People! Fixing Things! Museums! Musicals! With the question in each instance being more or less how much we like them all (the exception was museums, where we were queried on how many we'd visited in the last 12 months). The numbers often surprised us and we didn't manage a single perfect round. I was surprised with how much everyone allegedly enjoys dancing, as it's never featured in the years of GNN, but I guess it's very context-specific. We were right in assuming Adam H and I love <the idea of> fixing things, and everyone was more amenable to old people than they are musicals. "I was thinking film musicals" Katy admitted afterwards, her brain perhaps marginally scrambled by all those museum visits (one a month!).  Adam was ashamed of his zero museums, saying this was highly atypical of him. We scored 44, to the rulebook's slightly snooty indifference, and Martin told us he didn't think much of Fun Facts at this point, in case we hadn't realised. 

Adam T left us and as a six we migrated to So Clover. Our first stab was a decent affair, with Katy's Hunger for Diet/Pine one of the high spots. I thought it might relate to the Alt-J song, but Joe realised the 'pining' logic Katy intended. 30/36

Adam and Ian now headed off too, but the four of us had one more game to play. We still had the So Clover itch and set up again.  Martin's Sifting for Flour/Fishing was particularly nice, and though there were a couple of hairy moments we navigated them successfully to join the record of legends or whatever it's called, with a perfect 24/24!

And so to bed. Just one more GNN until Novocon, everybody! 

Synonyms from the Stars

Just the four of us last night at Joe's - as well as the host it was Ian, Martin and myself (Sam) just mobile enough after an ankle sprain to make up the quartet. An unusually sparse evening kicked off with A Message From the Stars, new to me and to be frank even more bamboozling than I found Hooky. I'd read Andrew's report on Message but for whatever reason neither that nor Joe's careful explanation or Martin's interjections stopped me spending the game feeling like a doofus, which I was. 

Martin was an alien trying to clue us a desperate message (although in fact, only three words) and we had our words we needed to convey to him. But it's kind of two-games in one because as well as supplying synonyms and/or related words to the secret ones, we also have to deduce some letters behind the alien's board which have - unless I'm still confused - zero relationship to the words he's trying to make us guess. I think. 

our three words

The 'message' thing is by the by - perhaps that's what threw me - although it does stitch in a seam of comedy. Both sides clued semi-synonyms for their words on the first three rounds then threw in a bonus clue that confused everybody. Martin's 'Trump' we discovered seemed to dovetail with anything remotely negative: tiny, weak, arrogant. But despite this we decoded everything triumphantly, and moved on to Foundations of Metropolis. 

New to Joe and Ian but simple to teach: take cash, buy deeds, or build. But both the deed-buying and the building have a snarky interactive element, as you can cockblock your way around the board with the deeds (©Martin) and leach other's constructions with the civic buildings, which score points depending what they're built next to. Retail buildings score points just for existing and residential buildings provide another parasitic quirk: you score the position of the person ahead of you on the population track. 

Ian's early lead after round one was pegged back as we jostled for position, and my final turn in round two nabbed the population bonus to give me a narrow lead. But in round three Martin's decision to stop giving a shit about citizens and focus on banks proved 'constructive':

Martin 101

Sam 92

Ian 82

Joe 69

Martin suggested Gang of Dice and we all swiftly agreed. I elected to roll all my dice on the very first turn which Martin was appalled at, citing my blithe disregard for probabilities. He was right and Ian won. In fact Ian seemed to win most of the rounds, although Joe popped up now and again to maintain the illusion Ian might possibly not be the victor. 

I kept rolling with an idiotic optimism that did at one point pay off, when I needed to not roll any odd numbers came up with 4-4-2-2 on my final attempt. A stopped clock and all that. 

However Martin's more scientific - or less moronic - approach wasn't serving him well either: he picked up a single win when the rest of us busted. And when he finally ignored his head and went with his gut, that let him down too. Ian picked us off like dice-rolling fish in a casino barrel.

Ian 101

Joe 55

Sam 6

Martin 0

My foot was telling me to go home but I stayed for a quick bash at So Clover, although all of us were stumped by our combos initially. I think Ian was first to finish and we deduced his words with relative ease before stumbling on my clover (Electric/Demon: I'm sure there's a better clue than Lightning but I couldn't think of it). 

I didn't take any photos, sadly, but we managed 22/24 with just my clover falling at the deduction hurdle. It was 10.40 though and pumpkin time for me - I hobbled off whilst they played another So Clover, with a not-dissimilar result after Joe's clue of sharpen for cactus/file a particular highlight. Martin's clover was apparently the shortfall this time, with a lot of possible solutions, but overall a solid 16/18 regardless.

And that was apparently that. 

First contact

 After a week dealing with Bengin Proxymal Positional Vertigo and then, after that, a cold, I was keen to get back into my weekly gaming habit.

When I arrived at Joe’s I found Adam T and Ian there ahead of me. We were expecting Adam H at some as yet undefined point in the future so we decided that, while we waited, we could play at least one hand of The Crew: Deep Space Mission. However, it is gaming lore that when a game is set up to fill a gap before another arrival, a knock on the door will herald said arrival the moment you’re about to begin. And so it proved to be, which Adam T was pleased about as he admitted he’d misdealt the cards.

As a five we chose a new game: A Message From The Stars. It’s a co-op game, where one player is an alien and you have to guess what words they’re trying to communicate. Nothing like that game where two players are ghosts and are trying to communicate words to the others, Joe assured us.

Both the alien and the rest (scientists) have messages containing three random words chosen by die from a card. We can only come up with four words to clue each other to the three mystery words, and not only that but the alien has six letters from the alphabet chosen at random hidden behind a screen that we have to guess.

How do we do that? Well, the alien gives every word (theirs and ours) a score, worked out accordingly: the six secret letters are grouped thus: three “trust” letters. If these appear in a word, then they score 1 point for each appearance. Then there’s a group of two letters (whose collective name escapes me) and they double the score each time they appear in a word. Finally one letter on it’s own – the suspicious letter and this converts the score into a negative number, no matter how often it appears in the word.

As such, we have to chose our words according to which letters we want to know more about. Not only that, but we often stared at the words, trying to work out which letters scored what, leading Adam T to remark that he’d been lead to believe this was a word game, but now he had to do maths!

It was fun, in a very brain-burny way. At one point we were interested in A, N and M so I suggested (in secret) Bananaman, since it had 4 As, 3 Ns and an M. It would have told us exactly what we needed, but wasn’t a great clue to the words in our message.

During this, Adam H commented on how much he was enjoying the mix of chocolates, beer and cashew nuts. Such decadence must have sparked a memory since he then told us that he used to melt twixes onto his chips.

As for the game, we finished with 11 out of 12. Joe correctly guessed our message and we gueesed the six hidden letters, but we were one word off on Joe’s message since his clue of “Pump” could’ve have meant water or air. Or fuel.

11 out of 12

Then I announced the next game would be my last, since it was only 8.30 but I was starting to feel tired. Mlem was brought out. We played with the extra tiles, which everyone agreed made getting to deep space much more likely. 

With this in mind, I started off by landing on the lower planets expecting them to be ignored. I looked to have misread the game when, early on, Joe and Ian got into deep space with their deep space doubling cats. But then everyone fell back into typical form and ship after ship exploded after I’d left. And once, memorably, after Joe had declared “I like these odds.”

In fact, by the time I was going to place my final cat, having got the two trophies for planet-landings, Ian had still only placed one cat. I successfully landed my cat, triggering the end of the game, leaving Ian with no choice but to get as high as he could. And what a stroke of luck as he landed his planet doubler on the biggest planet of all. With only two cats used, he came a very respectable third.

Andrew 39

Adam H 28

Ian 24

Joe 23

Adam T 18

I left at this point, sadly missing Adam T’s first ever game of Take It Easy. 

Joe 198

Adam T 148

Adam H 145

Ian 144

I didn’t hear about any other results so I suppose that was it for the night. Thanks everyone. See you all soon.