Two agents are better than three

My first games night in weeks and I arrived after 8pm, having driven around the block three times in search of a parking space. I was in time to watch Ian, Joe, Sam and Martin finish a game of Hit, with Joe doing so badly I (cruelly) asked him if he’d joined in halfway through.

Ian 112

Sam 91

Martin 84

Joe 31

Then Sam and Martin told me the night had begun with a game of Schnipp & Weg. Apparently it was very closed and they sounded like a couple of New York Jews reminiscing over an old argument. “I schnipped, he wegged.”

Then we had a protracted discussion about what to play but the five-player options weren’t really exciting us. Charioteer? Hansa Teutonica? Decrypto? Not even Railways of the World got much support. In the end, we spilt into two groups. Ian, Joe and I played Dune Imperium, a rematch from the Novocon days. Sam and Martin decided on a smorgasbord of two-player options, beginning with San Francisco.

Sam tried to play mean by taking things just so Martin couldn’t but by the end of the game, his over-emphasis on foundations had left him adrift on a number of point scoring possibilities and Martin took a handsome win.

Martin 16

Sam 4

Then they played Caesar! Battle raged across the Mediterranean until Sam cried “End it!” and so Martin did, and he won. I believe Sam ended with only three tokens and an unhealthy fixation on Rome.

As for Dune, I was first to score a point and Joe got his extra agent early on, but it was Ian who became the man to beat after a move mid-game when he chained together several intrigue cards and leapt into a commanding three-point lead. Conflict was often fierce, with Joe picking up third place reward with a single unit, saying he was “just dropping a dog” into the battle. This lead to a lengthy rumination between us about what kind of dog and what the actual consequences of such a strategy might be. “He looked at me as he fell!” I wailed in character as the soldier given the task of pushing a sausage dog out of a plane.

Sam and Martin had moved on to Spots, a dice-based luck-pushing game where you have to match your dice rolls to the spots on some dalmatians on cards dealt out to you, using a range of six possible options when rolling (thematically called Fetch, Beg, Stay etc). They played three rounds and Martin won 2-1, ending by saying “Anything low would be fine,” and then rolling a six, but then rolling the winning die the very next moment.

Back on the distant planet of Dune, despite his numerical agent advantage, Joe was lagging in third as I’d won a two-point battle and was right on Ian’s tail. Ian triggered the game end. I managed to drag him back one point but couldn’t overtake him. It was down to Joe, who needed water to do what he wanted. But his last move drew him level with me and it really couldn’t have been much closer.

Ian 9

Andrew 8

Joe 8

And Ian won this using only two agents for the whole game. Impressive.

As we closed out Dune, Sam and Martin played a game of Set and Match which I admit was quite distracting as they flicked a yellow puck back and forth across a tennis court. They exclaimed admiration for cross-court drop shots and made remarks about using “Hawkeye” when they scrutinised the puck sitting fractionally on the white lines of the court.

Sam 2

Martin 1

Then it was 10.15 and I was thinking about doing a Malmesbury but So Clover was mentioned as a nice way to bring the group all back together.

My heart sank when I saw my words. I was especially frustrated by “First/Salad.” For a long time I considered “Eden,” since the garden of Eden is, I supposed, where the first salad was made but it seemed a stretch too far. Then “Starter” popped into my head which was a much better fit so I wrote it down and finally finished my clover.

Dreams of a perfect start didn’t last long as we failed on both Sam’s and Martin’s. Sam’s clue of Garagin was an easy match for “Astronaut” but what kind of astronaut was he? We should’ve done better with Martin too. He’d written “Shooting” as one of his clues and we couldn’t bring ourselves to believe he’d be so tasteless as to pair that with “School/Bang” but our good intentions were misplaced. “I can’t believe you thought I wouldn’t be tasteless,” Martin remarked afterwards, almost offended at our high opinion of him.

We got Joe’s and Ian’s perfectly, although Ian’s clue of “Jedward” caused some debate. We got “pair” easily enough but then Joe wanted to add “old” because they were out of date. But surely “old/pair” would suggest something more ancient than two Eurovision entrants. Then we thought it might be “recent/pair” with Martin vetoing this idea because Jedward really weren’t that current. In the end he was overruled and the guess turned out to be correct.  Finally, I was surprised that my clover of torture was solved in maybe under a minute. All that hard work was worth it.

26 out of 30

Then I had to leave, despite murmurings of a second attempt and shots of whiskey.

Later I discovered that they’d completed the game with a score of 24 out of 24!

Then I was surprised at how long the Whatsapp messages kept coming as the whiskey flowed and Strike! Was played three times. No four... hang on, f- no, six times. Martin won games 1-3 and then Ian acted as combo breaker and won game four. Sam nabbed the fifth and the sixth was Martin again, and it was his 50th play of the game! 

Thanks all. See you next Tuesday.

This Goose is Raw

Saturday night, and Tin Goose sat on the table awaiting the attentions of Andrew and Ian: the history of American's airways playing out over several decades, as players expand their networks, build their fleets and rid their reputation of the bureaucracy of Regional Management. 

Tin Goose's interesting aspect is that as Fleets become available, everyone bids on them. As the end goal is to be the richest polluting airborne industrialist, the bids both tempt and appall you: the last thing you want to be in the game is cash-poor, as someone - probably Ian - will play an Event card that costs you money you don't have. 

Over seven rounds everyone takes a single turn. This consists of playing a card, either to auction off a fleet (active player bids last) or prompt the event on it. Then you've three actions to spend: pushing up your income, expanding your network, taking Labor chips (in case of a shitty event) or serving the financially alluring (but action-heavy: it costs two actions) international destinations:

Everyone begins with five shitty cards that hamper your airline: Regional Management, Rural Stops, Hazards and so on. If you add a fleet to your airline (as opposed to upgrading an existing fleet) you get to shed one of these cards and get two new planes. But upgrading is also tempting, because improving your planes gets your hazards and oil consumption down: events won't hit you quite as badly.

The planes come with hazards and oil consumption, as well as tiny descriptions: "This fleet is prone to metal fatigue" Ian announced at the start of an auction, perhaps trying to keep prices low. "This one's a bit crashy" said Andrew. Timing of events is everything, and Ian did it well, forcing me to take a bond at the worst moment. I'd managed to establish a lot of overseas connections, but having two bonds was not good news. Ian only had one, and Andrew none at all. In the end, his shrewd frugality made the difference:

Andrew $289
Ian $283
Sam $236

I think we all liked Tin Goose. Outside of a modicum income-track management, it's an accessible set of rules and a deceptively interactive and screwy game. 

It was still early so although Andrew had an early start he suggested Raj, and we played three rounds with winner's reward. Ian won the first convincingly, as Andrew's enormous set of tiles gave him the sum total of one point:

Then I took the second and third rounds as Andrew briefly flirted with negative points!

It ended with some measure of Goosian revenge:

Sam 80
Ian 46
Andrew 12

And we moved swiftly on to the lesser-seen Tsuro, as the second part of Andrew's one-two request of short games to finish. 

It was so short  - Ian won, with me second - we even had time for a three: Dragon's Breath, where players take turns as 'Daddy Dragon' melting the top ring in a tower of ice:

As the ice melts, everyone gets to predict what colour gems will fall on this particular turn, and the player with the most gems wins. Andrew proved Best Dragon by a considerable margin:

Andrew 24

Sam 17

Ian 14

And then with his 5am alarm call looming, Andrew bade us goodnight and headed out the door. Ian and I still had a little gaming in us, though, so I introduced him to Paolo Mori's (of Ethnos fame) CAESAR! Seize Rome in 20 Minutes. Terrible pun, but an excellent game as it turns out, as Caesar and Pompey battle for control of the empire.

The board is a map, and the short-term goal is to control regions of it; the winner is the first player to get all twelve control markers on the board. Turn by turn, players lay influence tokens on the borders of regions: there's a number either side that denotes the influence you're playing into both regions. As soon as all influence markers are played to a particular region, the player with the most influence there gets to place their control marker on it, and a control marker on the border of any adjacent regions they might already control. 

There's a twist in those yellow tokens, though: the player who plays the last token to a region grabs them, even if they don't win the contest there. These are kind of manipulation-manifesting moments, as you get extra turns, extra tokens to choose from, flip an opponent's control marker face-down or - best of all - the Senate tokens let you place extra control markers. 

Ian took the first game with a convincing win: it was so fast we had a rematch, which I - as Pompey - snuck a much tighter victory in a close-fought finale. We'd packed a lot of games into three hours, so although it was only 10.15 (on a Saturday!) we called it a night. Thanks chaps!