Babalabalonia

Saturday night games at Steve and Anja's house began with a visit from Louie, who came downstairs to see what was what. At that point there was no games on the table however, so in the absence of exciting wooden bits it was merely three middle-aged men nursing their alcohol.

Martin's Yeastie Boys beer was the stand-out. "I can see why they did it" he said, "But it does smack a bit of fungal infections" Anja then appeared and after a brief catch-up, the first game onto the table was Babylonia, GNN's recentest Knizia hit.

Martin went through the rules - which thankfully take about five minutes - and we were off. I began scoring ziggurats and claiming bonus cards whilst Martin chained tokens together. Anja started claiming cities and Steve fretted over his tiles; forgetting that a hand full of Farmers can all be played at the same time.

Despite the simple rules, there are always a multitude of things you'd like to do on your turn, and though I think I'm reasonably competent at what's best for me personally, I struggle with the idea that I need to compute other players' options as well. Martin has no such issues, and as the game wore on he surged to the front of the scores and stretched out his lead. I had told Steve and Anja we'd have to watch Martin, but we didn't watch him closely enough.

Martin 147
Sam 128
Anja 105
Steve 88

Everyone liked Babylonia so much, when Anja suggested we play again straight away, they were no demurring voices. This time things played out very differently: both Steve and Anja began very strongly on the ziggurat front, and Steve in particular putting together a juicy group of tiles on one side of the board. With me doing something similar on the other, Martin effected a kind of spoiling officer role, making sacrificial moves to stop us both scoring big.

While that was happening, Anja collected bonus tiles and put them to good use, harvesting a bunch of fields and accelerating into a large lead. My beards did what they could to keep pace, despite Martin's sabotage, but Anja's canny tactical plays kept pushing her forwards. "How the fuck did I end up here?" Martin cried, pointing to his marker some sixty points behind Anjas...

And as the game closed out, my desperate last move was enough to get me past her. "Knowing what you're doing really helps" Anja reflected. Hats off to Martin though; he came fourth, but after a considerable recovery:

Anja 144
Sam 140
Steve 125
Martin 123

Anja's observation about knowing the game was just about slap us all repeatedly about the face though when I innocently suggested Azul: Summer Pavilion. Because everyone had played the original I thought it would be fairly straightforward, but I'd not really registered how thinky this version is. In the original, options on your board are limited, and the game - as Martin observed - really takes place on the factory tiles: what you leave behind almost as much as what you take. With Pavilion, there's much more flexibility (you can even save four tiles for subsequent rounds) and there are also wild colours each round.

The bubbling fun we'd had with Babylonia slowed to a ponderous stodgy grind as Steve and Anja stared accusingly at their boards and Martin launched into various monologues about the games' failings. I also began to flag. I didn't get rules sweats; instead I had game guilt the like of which I've not felt since I made my family play... Azul: Summer Pavilion. I only remembered today that that didn't go well either!

For all of us it felt comparatively fiddly. For Martin it simply wasn't interactive enough. Although I'm not sure Anja shared that opinion when I claimed the last purple tile and bust her potential 20 points. Sorry Anja. Sorry everyone! It looks a beautiful game and I still think it's lovely for two, but last night it felt less a Pavilion in summer, more a shed in winter.

Martin 102
Sam 87
Steve 81
Anja 49

"Don't worry" Martin assured me, "I love to have things to rant about on BGG!"

We'll always have Babylonia though. Literally. 

A night on the tiles

This week we (Sam, Joe, Martin, newcomer Steve, Katy, Ian, latecomer Adam H and me) converged around Sam’s kitchen table for more board game shenanigans. With a new gamer joining us, we explained that we usually start with a communal game and then promptly split into two groups (using the logic that we can all play together when Adam gets here).

Katy, Martin, Joe and Steve played QE. As Steve’s introduction to modern board gaming, it’s a bit of a curve ball. It’s just as easy to be bamboozled by it’s charms as entertained. It began with Martin and Katy taking all the early spoils before Joe and Steve came into it a little more. In the last round, Joe was screwed by everyone else bidding low, giving him a share that he really didn’t want, and pushing his cash expenditure high enough that it meant he automatically came last.

Martin 44
Katy 29
Steve 28
Joe 0

Ian, Sam and I played new Azul, where the famous square tiles have been replaced by diamond shapes that fit into flower-shaped areas for points and prestige. The method is the same, with players collecting one colour at a time from a set of seven “factories” in the centre. Except that this time, to place a tile, you have to pay for it: a tile the yellow space “6” costs six yellow tiles: the one you actually put down and five more you discard. Add to this the fact that each round one of the colours can be used as a Wild Tile, and you can use them to pay for any colour.

It was okay. Not an instant classic but maybe, with familiarity, certain strategies will become obvious. This time, with three relative newbies, it was like three single-player games with little attempt as spoiling other people’s plans. I completed three of the flower shape things, and was rewarded handsomely.

Andrew 124
Sam 104
Ian 78

At this point we gave Joe a present, cake and card for his 50th birthday (which, as he pointed out, isn’t just yet) and sang “Happy Birthday” to him. Hopefully we were making a great impression on our debutante.

Next we chose again: Sam, Martin, Ian and I went for Babylonia and Katy, keen to impress the newbie, wanted to play Biblios and asked “What’s that game where you have to eat shit?” (referencing our by-now legendary variant: Extreme Biblios) but instead the Katy, Steve and Joe played L.A.M.A. until Adam arrived.

Steve 18
Joe 34
Katy 38


After that Joe, Katy, Steve and Adam chose Down Force, the exciting racing and betting game. Joe picked up his card for a single pound, and then bet on no one but himself. And he then came first. With these circumstances, a distant win is assured.

Joe 29
Adam 9
Katy 8
Steve 3

In Babylonia, we had an odd map, with a swathe of agricultural land splitting two groups of cities apart. I grabbed an early ziggurat and went from five available tiles to seven. Sam went big on cities, swooping in with his “two turns” power to pick up three in one go and, hence, and therefore was raking it in whenever someone triggered the city scoring.

Sam 133
Martin 122
Andrew 110
Ian 107

And as Down Force ended, we broke out Hurlyburly and spent a few happy minutes twanging small wooden cubes at each other's tower of cards. Ian and Sam went super defensive, with Sam's sandbag defences slightly taller than his one-storey tower.

But it was I who sprang up to four floors on my turn and avoided any hits from Sam (had no blocks), Martin (too far away) and Ian (blocks didn't bounce straight). Victory!

Finally we finished with Wavelength. After explaining it to Steve, Sam then went off piste with an audacious clue. For "Fantasy / Sci Fi" he said "High Fidelity by Nick Hornby."Ii scoffed that it was neither fantasy nor science fiction but, you see, that was the whole point. He was aiming for the middle. How smart.

I misunderstood my spectrum of "Good / Bad superpower." I thought it meant political superpower and not, as everyone else thought when they saw it, a special ability. As such my clue of "The British Empire" caused some surprise. We still got close enough to score, though. And a quick nod towards Ian’s clue of “vacuum cleaners” for the spectrum “un/reasonable phobia” in that the more we discussed it,the more reasonable it seemed.

It was a close game. We'd agreed to play until everyone had a go. The score was 10 - 7 as we entered our final turn. We needed a direct hit to win. It was all down to clue-giver Adam. The spectrum was “Has a bad/good reputation” and he chose Barack Obama. Amazingly, we got it spot on for the full four points.

Adam, Joe, Ian, Andrew 11
Steve, Martin, Sam, Katy 10

And so we ended. We were getting ready to go when Sam shushed everyone quiet while he recorded the farty sound of the lid being slid onto the Wavelength box. "Not in front of the new guy," said Katy despairingly. What an evening.