(Mince) Spies Like Us

The last games night before Christmas was a special night, not just for the festive season, but mostly because Adam and Hannah were hosting, meaning a rare trip past the M32 for many GNN regulars. We met in their newly Guinea-pig-free living room which now looked very grown up with a sofa in the corner and a coffee table.

There were seven of us which was, once again, one short of the eight needed for the optimal game of Captain Sonar. We texted Martin, who had said he'd be popping in later, to see if he could make the magic happen but he replied saying it would only be a fleeting visit. Once again Captain Sonar narrowly missed out.

We (Adam, Hannah, Sam, Katy, Ian, Joe and me) began with a big seven player game: Top Secret Spies. In this game, everyone has their piece, but no one knows which one is yours. You roll a die and then you can share out its value among any pieces. If you roll a six, you can move one piece six spaces, or six pieces one space or anything in between (that adds up to six). The trick is to disguise which piece is yours. You score points by being on certain squares when someone reaches the safe. Then there’s a scoring round and the safe is moved. You can also score points by guessing at the end of the game which player had which colour.

Adam won thanks to passing the game ending 41 points and guessing a couple of players right. But Hannah won everyone’s admiration by correctly guessing the colour of four of us. If we had been playing by official rules, she’d have got 5 points for each guess (which we'd lowered to 2) and would’ve been joint third with Katy.

Adam 56
Sam 49
Katy 47
Ian 38
Andrew 37
Hannah 35
Joe 35

Then there was a brief interlude for mulled wine and mince pies before we split into two groups.

Adam's blue table made my camera think everything was yellow

Ian, Katy, Joe and Hannah played Isle of Skye while Sam taught Adam and me Coal Baron: The Great Card Game. As in: The Great Big Card Game. It’s a set-collecting game at heart, but one where you use workers (a hand of cards numbered between 1 and 4) to pay for actions or to pick up cards which hopefully will work together to allow you to make deliveries. There are other point-scoring opportunities sprinkled on top, but the general jist is to gather cards of a certain type to meet certain criteria for points.

For what it is, it’s a very big game, covering most of Adam’s coffee table. Halfway through the game, Sam was checking the rules and realised that some cards we had in our hands should be on the table for everyone to see. It was hard to find a space.

Sam won, after predicting throughout the game that he wouldn’t, using his end-game bonuses to push him past Adam by a single point.

Sasm 56
Adam 55
Andrew 46

Around this time Martin came in to wish us all a Merry Christmas and to watch Coal Baron long enough to decide he wouldn’t enjoy it.

Isle of Skye ended at the same time. Not sure of the in and outs of the game itself, but Katy took quite a lot of delight in seeing Joe go from second to last at the very end of the game due to money bonuses.

Katy 84
Hannah 69 + money
Ian 69
Joe 66

After this, despite talk of a big game of 6nimmt, we split up again. Ian, Sam and I went for Heck Meck. The version was the one with the extra bits (a raven, a hen, a weasel etc) which I don’t think add to the game at all. It falls foul of the problem of taking a simple game and “improving” it by making it more complicated. Like how Red Dward got worse when they introduced more characters. Same principle.

Sam 14
Ian 8
Andrew 5

On the other table, Adam, Hannah, Katy and Joe played Land Unter. Katy expressed dissatisfaction with Joe’s use of a phone app to keep track of the scores, preferring the old-fashioned ways of pen and paper. At this point, Sam and I left since Sam had an early morning the next day so Adam texted me the scores. In a lovely, family-centric, Christmassy finale, Adam and Hannah came joint first.

Adam 11
Hannah 11
Katy 7
Joe 1

I asked Adam if Katy had been upset at losing, and Adam told me she said she wasn’t but he annoyance could’ve been offset by watching Joe struggle.

All of this ends the season. Nothing changes from last week, with Katy and Martin taking their titles as predicted.

Kiesling is leaving the station

My recent sell-to-buy policy has meant an influx of new games whilst saying goodbye to old ones. Having already put Ian through the mill with Ulm and Katy with SuperVampires - she hated it so much, now Andrew won't even try it - I thought maybe I should playtest the next on the list in the comparative safety (for everyone else) of solitude. So that's what I did tonight, cracking open Coal Baron: The Great Card Game (or Glück Auf: Das Grosse Kartenspiel, as my copy would have it).

It's a game about loading trains with coal and delivering said coal to various destinations, so thematically it perhaps suffers from euro-fatigue. But on the other hand, it's a Kramer/Kiesling combo, so, ya know.

The cards are set up as follows:

Top row, L-R: lorries, wagons, engines, orders.

Bottom row, L-R: four actions; objectives, innovations, shares.

Each player has a hand of worker cards, with a value of between 1 and 5. In my two-player game (with Dirk) you remove the 4 and 5 value workers and make do with several ones, a couple of twos and a three.  In front of you you also have a loading bay, where the action takes place.

On a turn you play a worker card or cards: you can go to an already-occupied space as long as the value of your card/s are exactly one more than the previous workers. Pick up lorries of coal, or place wagons or engines on the three loading bays in your personal board. Grab an order to fulfil later, an objective card to benefit from at the end of the game, or an innovation card to help you while you play.

me just visible eft, Dirk right

The action cards are the juicy bit though: that's where you can move coal from the lorries into the wagons - but, because these coal producers are the most fastidious deliverypeople in all coaldom, the lorry's crest has to match both the crest on the loading bay itself (there are two crests per bay) and the crest on the wagon itself. And that is the rub in an otherwise straightforward game of loading and delivering: not only are you negotiating the fact other players may take an action before you do, essentially forcing up the price, you're also worried about them nabbing the lorry or wagon you desperately need: when you move coal, you always do it in a certain order so there's no getting around the whole surrender-to-the-crest thing.

Going to Newcastle

The other action cards are about delivering, or grabbing a card from a stack regardless of how many workers are there. Finally; the share cards get you bonuses when they match up with your deliveries, as coal can be taken to a variety of destinations.

Although I was playing for Dirk I was still hoping to win, and grabbed a variety of shares hoping they would boost my efficiency, as they say. Dirk grabbed a couple objective cards. We both made one big delivery and several small ones.

Come the end-game count up, I found I had been so even-handed it took a tie-breaker to separate us: that of the last player to grab the shift token (the starting player marker)

Dirk 50 (wins on tie-breaker)
Sam 50

Damn his soot-stained eyes!

A surprisingly feisty game then, and one where you have to tread carefully when taking risks: it's possible to end up with a lorry that basically stops production until the matching wagon appears - at which point, some other player takes it. Oh, and set-up is practically instantaneous too, thanks to the insert: