Party to Something

GNN started 2020 in celebratory mode, with an open-door policy at mine and Sally's house, and as well as the usual massively-unhealthy snacks there was also the marginally-safer ones of crostini and tapenade, courtesy of Sally. There was also mackerel pate, a variety of cheeses, cloudy lemonade, and a bowl of salad that - as Martin noted nine hours later, slowly turned into a bowl of wilted leaves.

still lurking this morning

But before that could happen, Adam T and Celena were first to arrive, promptly joined by Martin, Sarah and Effie. After summing up the options, Effie left the adults to it and went to chill with Stan and Joe. Arthur joined her when he rocked up with Hannah (who came by bus), and then shortly after that Adam H arrived on two wheels. Then Joe walked in too.

But for a long time - literally, hours! - people talked. It almost reached the point where the blog would need to be renamed, but fortunately Andy Mosse arrived with his boy Finn, and brought Team 3 with him. After it sat glowing radioactively for long enough on the table, the collective curiosity of myself, Martin, the Adams and Joe couldn't be resisted any more and with Andy's help we cracked out a quick couple of plays.

The game takes the concept of see/hear/speak no evil and parcels out those communicative restrictions on three team-mates, one of whom must describe the structure they have to build (from tetris-type blocks) whilst not speaking. The second must communicate the message verbally to the third, who can't see anything. It can be played co-operatively or competitively, and our second game was the latter, with Andy, Joe and Adam H beating Martin, Adam T and myself. Maybe it was the combination of hosting, or too much cloudy lemonade, but I found it very stressful.

Later - I think it was later - Ian arrived, and as the daylight began to fail, so did Steve and Anja with Louie and Lennon. Whilst the older kids disappeared to the loft to watch Pixels, the younger crew stayed in the front room with more suitable viewing, as we were all charmed by Lennon distributing snacks, often directly into our mouths. By this point there were two rooms full of potential gamers. In the front room, Sally and I joined Adam, Hannah, Steve, Anja for what turned out to be a triumphant crack at Just One - not only scoring the maximum 13 but 2 bonus points as well. which is even more impressive considering the game probably took about an hour all told.

Meanwhile in the kitchen there was an epic game of Facecards playing out. It took even longer than Just One, so God knows what took place. Everyone seemed very happy with it though.

As the day faded away, so did the 'non-gamers' with various children and relieved parents making their way home so the regular GNNers could go full-nerd. Sally had nowhere to go, but seemed happy to stay. To be frank the order of events gets extremely hazy here, I think due to all the cheese I was eating, but I think this was when a huge game of 7 Wonders got played.

Andy Mosse had only played 7 Wonders Duel, but was otherwise new to things, and initially had Joe beside him as his trusty assistant. But then I stole Joe away to play two games of Blitzkrieg! which we won one apiece and celebrated in our joint mutual destruction. I think Martin won 7 Wonders, after which Adam and Celena departed... in the front room, Sally taught Steve and Anja Yokai. I'm not sure how they got on, but after the first game Sally was ashen-faced in the kitchen, muttering something about rules.

Somewhere around here Res Arcana got played.

I think it was while Adam, Katy - freshly arrived - Ian and I played Flamme Rouge. As we were setting it up, Chris walked in the door - passing Steve and Anja en famille on the way out - and happily sat down to join us. A while ago Flamme Rouge was a regular at the GNN tables, and it was nice to play it again even if the card system initially seems slightly counter-intuitive. I've personally found that the backs of all cards are the same colour a little bewildering, even if it's necessary to hide those exhaustion cards...

While we were pedalling through the Alps, a boisterous Medium was played out at the other end of the table, with much roaring of disbelief and approbation. I've no idea which team won, but they wrapped things up the same time as Adam H sailed over the line in Flamme Rouge.

I'm now exceedingly hazy on things but I think it was towards the end of these games that Andrew and Anna arrived to find a scene of game-related debauchery in full swing. Stan and Joe were so screened out they were taken for a walk by Sally, Andy and Finn departed, and a game of PUSH was initiated by Joe that Anna was shanghai-ed into, whilst at the other end of the table something else occurred. I'm not sure what. It may have just been wild consumption of cheese. EDIT: looking at photos I see we played Tiny Towns. This was after Adam and I tried to play Ecos: First Continent, only to have Martin rule it out by repeatedly barking "no!" even though he wasn't playing.

I think I blanked it out because of my awful building-site finale - Adam won this, followed by Chris and Ian.

However around mid-evening seat-changing occurred with Just One back on the table in the kitchen while Ian, Adam and Chris suffered the indignity of finding out a crucial rule I'd missed in Word Domination: the game of allegedly taking over the world but actually just spelling things.

It's a neat little system of claiming cards by using the letters on them, the catch being you need to claim them in subsequent turns, and may be bumped off in the meantime by other players. I'd not realised the board actually grows during play, however, and we hurriedly implemented the rule when I found it in round 5. Despite Chris' vocabulary and my alleged (by Adam) always-winning at word games, it was Adam's shrewd strategic brain and claimed another win.

In Just One, meanwhile, four people clued gatherer, leaving poor Katy to try and guess Hunter from Joe's clue Orion. There was a substantial bout of cheating here, none of which sadly helped.

Sally couldn't be persuaded to stay up for another game, and so we were reduced to eight - Joe, Martin, Katy, Adam, Anna, Andrew, Ian and myself - for what would turn out to be the last game of an epic session - Pairs. Although I was barely drinking, my cheese and sugar intake had reached gargantuan proportions and I don't know what happened here at all, although I do recall Martin serially going bust on his first card flip and Katy doing well. I think she won - I went to the toilet, and when I returned, it was all over.

And so was the night!

Although our incongruous - for GNN - start of prolonged chat was rather sweetly mirrored at the end, as we sat around the table almost like normal people before we realised the time was 11pm and Ian and I were starting to yawn.

I'm pretty sure I've missed out some games as well as plenty of high points. A big bundle of fun and lovely to have so many of us under one roof at the same time! Thanks to everyone for coming and look forward to seeing some/all of you very soon... Tuesday?

Felonious Monk

On Saturday night Andrew and I converged at my table for some gentle pre-Christmas fare. With Sally busy baking in the kitchen, we repaired to the table in the front room, however, and what with the Christmas tree and the speakers that don't cut out, it made for a nice festive surrounds.

Possibly we sabotaged the genteel appearance by eating crisps like demented seagulls, but you can't have everything.

We began with a four-player game of Facecards with the boys. Stan and Joe's faces were now mixed into the cards too (the game comes with blanks) and Stan successfully identified himself as a Squirrel. Joe turned up as a bird. The bird seemed to always know what my pair was, but rarely guessed them; content to point them out to other people. The Squirrel ran away with it:

Stanley 14
Andrew 10
Joe 7
Sam 7

As the boys retired to bed, Andrew chose our two-player starter, Rajas of the Ganges. For the uninitiated, this involves using workers and dice to build palaces and markets. The former bring you fame, the latter money, and both fame and money have markers moving in opposite directions around the outside of the board - your aim is to make them meet, and ideally, hurtle past each other at speed.

We chose very distinct paths - Andrew eschewing markets and me building a solitary palace the whole game. At various times it seemed like we'd both made mistakes - Andrew was spending actions picking up a single die, whilst I went from having heaps to none at all. My markets were churning out cash, but Andrew's seemingly unproductive turns would suddenly coalesce into huge leaps along the fame track. And as my dice ran out again, Andrew built two palaces to end the game:

Andrew: Raja!
Sam: Not Raja.

my markers (yellow) stare balefully at each other; 

Andrew's (on the far side) have passed

Our Euro glands pumping endorphins now, we went straight from Rajas to Heaven and Ale. With two players there's only three rounds to play, so the sense of time-running-out loomed up at us at the start of the second round. Like Rajas, there was a sense of maniacal racing. Unlike Rajas, getting ahead on the track wasn't necessarily the right thing to do. I kept taking things Andrew wanted - inadvertently, mostly - but struggled to make ends meet whilst Andrew set sail for the final round in a cash-rich position. However Andrew's genial allowance of me having a do-over (I scored the wrong monk, only realising on my next turn) may have been the difference between winning and losing:

Sam - 34
Andrew - 22

The last game of the night was NMBR9. Maybe it's not knocked Take It Easy off the top spot of the Cries Of Despair table, but it's still a wonderful game. It looked like I'd perhaps put all my eggs in a doomed basket...

really need that 1

But fortunately for me the 1 came out, and my literal platform proved to be a figurative one as well...

Sam 92
Andrew 71

A most delightful evening.

Fünf for all the Family

Tuesday rolled around again and despite the inevitable post-weekend (see Andrew's odysseyian previous post) drop in numbers from the regulars, the lesser-spotted GNNers were out in force, at one point bumping up the numbers to nine around my (Sam's) table!

First to arrive was Joe, and the embryonic hour of 6pm. Sadly he was just dropping off things I'd left at Novocon, so after a chat, he left again.

Then at the allotted hour of 7.30, Laura Izzard was first through the door, followed by Matt, Martin, and Ian. With Anja and Andy Mosse both running late, we cracked into our games. Or to clarify, Martin heaped disdain on me for buying another game (abetted by Stanley, and then even Ian joining in) before getting out the game he'd just bought. Whilst Stanley, Ian and Matt began contesting Love Letter at the other end of the table, he talked Laura and I through the rules.

The game in question was Blue Lagoon, Reiner Knizia's latest offering. Arriving into the eponymous lagoon as settlers, you discover there are eight islands, and over two rounds you score points for having a presence on each one, for making connections between them, for having majority presence and for collecting resources. If it sounds like rote gaming circa-2018 (or earlier) the implementation is very Knizian - on their turn, everyone simply places one piece on the board and watches in agony as all the things you want slip away from you. It's part race, part bunfight, part mental torture.

After one round, all pieces bar your five villages are removed, and a second round begins with placement having to spread from your villages. I won our first game (I didn't note down the scores) but I mentioned that now I knew how it all worked, I wouldn't win next time - which proved to be true.

Meanwhile Stanley had won Love Letter, after successfully outing Ian's hidden cards four times:

Stanley 3
Matt 2
Ian 0

And with Anja now present, they began explaining Heck Meck to her. At our end of the table, meanwhile, Andy had also arrived, and as Blue Lagoon was already on the table, we set it up again for four. Little Joe turned up to watch for a bit, as people briefly outnumbered seats.

With Martin now familiar with the games' overlapping scoring criteria, it was a tougher proposition. He scored the bonus for being on all eight islands in the first round, collected a big resource bonus and then in the second harvested up lots of statues. The game played quite staccato though; lots of rapid turns occasionally broken by a long, cognitive-heavy one. I'd say it was close, but it wasn't:

Martin 192
Laura 127
Sam 126
Andy 124

Martin was flush with new love for another Reinerssance masterpiece, and we all liked it, albeit it hurt my brain. I struggle judging the need to further your own advances (in multiple criteria) with the overlapping/competing need to stop others (also multiple criteria!) is hard. From one angle, it's very very simple, but from another - it's not.

Meanwhile Heck Meck was continuing, with Anja rolling a spectacular set of worms:

Laura made moves to go, but the three dads present showed their paternal understanding by harassing her into playing one more game - Face Cards, the game that needs almost no introduction - make pairs of faces, and hope somebody spots your pair in the melee. Andy took the win despite our failure to see his Coati/Parking Meter combination.

Andy 12
Martin 8
Sam 7
Laura 5

And I forgot to take photos. Laura bid her adieus and disappeared into the night - the next time we see her she'll be with (actual) child, so good luck Laura!

Stanley also disappeared around this time, off to bed, as Heck Meck finally concluded:

Matt 15
Stanley 8
Ian 5
Anja 1

As Ian brought in a collection of games to choose from, he tripped over Andy's growing pile of rubbish on the floor, which he announced he'd left there on purpose. He gazed at the mess with a glow of pride, before I tidied it away. Now a pair of trios. Ian found himself explaining Istanbul to one, whilst Martin explained Kingdoms, my birthday present to him (also a Knizia) to the other.

Kingdoms was not massively dissimilar to Blue Lagoon, only slightly simpler, and slightly screwier. Tiles are played on a 6x6 grid, and you can pick up and place a points tile (there are positive and negative) or place one of your castles, which will score for both the row and column it's on. As soon as someone places a castle, of course, everyone else tries to put negative tiles next to it.

Mix in the mountains (block rows and columns) the gold (doubles everything) and the dragon (cancels the good stuff) and you have a game brimming with evil - so evil that you start with fifty points, just to give everyone the opportunity to lose them all in the first round. Andy made a great start, but Martin overhauled him. I played badly and got what I deserved:

Martin 249
Andy 239
Sam 212

Fun. Whilst that was going on, Matt won Istabul:

Matt 5 gems
Ian and Anja 3 gems each (Ian second on tie-breaker)

And they'd also played NMBR9, which Anja didn't like at all. Ian did, though:

Ian 86
Matt 79
Anja 49

Considering how brief Kingdoms was, I've probably got the timeline of events all muddled up, but whatever had gone on previously, Anja certainly left at this point because we found ourselves a quintet, and began playing Five Cucumbers - or to give it it's German title, Fünf Gurken. Tricks are played (there's only one suit) and you must either match or beat the previous card, or lay your lowest card. The winner of the final trick picks up cucumbers, which are bad - collect five, and you lose the game.

The youngest player starts, but that took some time to establish, as Matt discovered he was younger than he realised, and Ian didn't even know what year we were living in. After that bombshell, Andy took an instant dislike to Fünf Gurken, openly scathing of the choice of vegetable and the fact there was only one. He critiqued the wooden cucumbers, which he claimed didn't resemble a cucumber - more on that later - and mimicked Martin and I throughout the game as we hissed at our cards. If it was a strategy, it paid dividends, as he ended with the fewest cucumbers. But unfortunately for Matt, we all won apart from him:

Matt: Five cucumbers.

or are they?

He actually ended with six cucumbers, which - by now we'd all conceded the cucumbers did have a scrotal quality to them - I said in a way, made him the winner. We speculated as to how much fun (or fünf ) one could have with six ball sacs; needlework, say, or artisan baking. Ian suggesting skiing. Martin and I got the giggles and I'm ashamed to say it was all rather immature. Especially considering we'd just played a game about not wanting five cucumbers.

Anyway, the witching hour was now upon us, so Martin and Ian put on their coats for the walk home. Andy said he wasn't going anywhere though, and Matt was tempted to stay as well, so we played Dice Heist - rob museums, collect artwork, gems and artifacts!

But owing to ancient heist-related traditions, only score paintings if you have the most combined value of them. Also if you have two gems, the second one is worth twice as much as the first! Matt and I celebrated our shared victory:

Matt and Sam - 27
Andy - 15

But we weren't done yet, with Ganz Schon Clever next to hit the table.

To be honest, I don't remember a huge amount about it now, except I recall Matt had to police my crossings off because I was pretty haphazard at this point and kept cheating. But I somehow managed to add up the scores correctly, to my surprise. We checked with a calculator.

Sam 236
Matt 228
Andy 200

With Tuesday now behind us and Wednesday begun, we bade each other good night, the end of a doozy of an evening: the return of Laura and Matt, some very feisty games, and a protracted schoolboy riff on dark green scrotums. What more can one ask of a Tuesday night?

Luxory Goods

On Thursday I took the kids to Chris' house for a sleepover and screen-based tomfoolery whilst Chris' Chippenham gang and I took advantage of a big empty table.

Before Paul and Stuart arrived, the two of us had a couple of head to head plays. First up was Luxor, the 'third' game to be nominated for this year's Spiel Des Jahres after the favourites Azul and The Mind. Luxor seemed to have a question mark following it around as to the validity of the nomination, and having played it three times now I'd agree it's not in the class of the others.

But - it's a decent family game with an interesting twist on movement. Each player moves adventurers through the tunnel to the centre of a pyramid, collecting artifact tiles as they go. But some tiles need more than one adventurer to be collected, and some have a special ability associated with them. As you move you trigger further adventurers to do more stuff, and the final scoring is a slightly Euro-y five categories, including a set collection bonus that informs your planning during play. However the movement itself is managed by cards in your hand - you always have five, but can only use a card from the edge of your hand (either end) before adding a new card to the middle. This gives an otherwise basic move-and-collect game a nice twist, as you can plan some nice moves and - with more players especially - have someone else get there first.

I planned very badly though, and only my late game rallying made the scores respectable:

Chris 95
Sam 92

Then we played Boomerang, a card-drafting game about visiting Australia and crossing off destinations, animals, plants and tourist spots on a sheet.

As each card contains most elements of each set, there's a sense of juggling what you keep v what you give away. The cards look nice and I guess the overlapping sets give you lots of decisions. But for me it was like a bland 7 Wonders. Chris found it reminded him most of Sushi Go (I found that bland as well!)

Chris - won handsomely
Sam - didn't

Then Paul and Stuart walked through the door at the same time and after a brief catch-up, we were straight into the main event, which was Rajas of the Ganges. (Big thanks to Jacquie at this point for taking point on the ongoing Kids To Bed project which finally wrapped up an hour and a half later)

Chris went through the rules and we were up and running, with the rounds clicking by pretty rapidly. I stumbled on a huge advantage when I spotted that moving my boat up the river was going to trigger me two extra workers, and for 3 or 4 rounds I had more options than the others. Paul swiftly caught up followed by Chris and then Stuart, but that mid-game salvo had given me enough momentum for a convincing win.

Chris was rampaging his way around the fame track, but was cash-poor throughout the game, meaning he never triggered his various bonuses for a more balanced approach.

Sam
Paul
Chris
Stuart

With hour still reasonably early we had time for some short silly stuff, beginning with Face Cards. Chris seemed to be least-chosen when it came to matches and suffered as a result. I thought I might be up for a win, but Paul's canny ability to spot almost everyone's choices ensured that was not the case!

Paul 22
Stuart/Sam 17
Chris 11

After which we played the always-classic Raj. Over four rounds there was some brutal ties and much appalled hilarity as everyone, I think, took at least one unexpected hit. I don't recall the final scores but Paul certainly won, taking the first and final rounds with aplomb.

Then it was Chris and I v Paul and Stuart at team Push It, which we won. Much more to do with Chris than me, though. I couldn't get the hang of the tablecloth's time-bending properties as the discs would suddenly grind to a halt, as if remembering something they'd left at home.

And we finished the night with Rhino Hero - new to Stuart and Paul but not a heavy rule-set, obviously. Paul got himself down to a single card so we all started picking on him by swinging the turn order away or handing him extra cards.

But when the end came it was via a spectacular collapse at the unfortunate hands of Stuart.

Eleven-thirty had been reached, and with all of us the wrong side of forty (I think, apologies if not) our hedonism batteries had now run dry. But lots of fun, thanks all! Hope to see you again soon for that game of Twilight Imperium...

- Oh, and Chris and I played gaming bete noir Kingdom Builder the next morning and I won. Now I never have to play it again!

Circus with a smile

This week's GNN turned out to be a dry run of the games weekend in November since, allowing for a couple of absentees, exactly the same people were there tonight as are going on the 9th. Namely, Joe (the host), Sam, Ian, Steve, Anja, Adam and myself.

We split into two groups. Ian, Sam and Steve played Meeple Circus while the rest of us chose good old Azul. Meeple Circus is a stacking game in which you try to make a tower out of chunky wooden meeple, elephants, horse etc while obeying several rules in order to score points. It comes with its own app, that plays music while the stacking part of the game is underway.

It looked like fun but a bit fiddly. Of course, that's probably the whole point. It also wins the award for Most Entertaining Catch Up Mechanism because, in round three, whenever there was applause on the soundtrack, the player in first place had to stand up, bow and say "thank you" before continuing with the game. It ended

Sam 54
Ian 42
Steve 34

Steve was up for another attempt, but Ian preferred to play something different. And so they played Cryptid. Another new game and it's a deduction game in which you are cryptozoologists searching for some mythical creature. Each player has a clue (ie, one space away from water) which are cleverly designed such that only one space on the board satisfies them all. On their turn, a player chooses a space and asks one of others if it is possible that the creature is there. If the space obeys their rule they place a circular disk. If not, they put down a cube.

Steve won the first game in little time, so they played again, this time using the expert clues. At first it looked like they'd cracked it early on when Sam cheered in victory before he realised he'd put his "yes" disk in the wrong place. They struggled and started to run out of cubes. They checked the rules to see what they should do and, in terms implying that the game designers couldn't believe anyone could be that stupid, they found they could simply use the cubes from an unused player.

Finally, Sam found the right spot and the game was complete. Ian still had to explain what his rule was, though, since neither Sam nor Steve had worked it out. But a win is a win.

But what about us on the other table? We ended up in a bit of a bun fight. Adam insisted that he wasn't trying to stop me (at least, not always) so I suppose it was just his innate ability at spoiling any rival plans that left me frustrated.

Not a great formation

I tried to stop Joe, since I still had unfinished business from our last game. Meanwhile, at one point Joe was trying to work out how he could screw over two players at once. I tell you, Azul has gone from gentle entry-level game for newbies to the kind of game that the mafia would play to settle old scores. Talking of which...

Joe 69
Anja 64
Adam 58
Andrew 54


After Azul, they were a long way from finished, so we banged out a quick Team Play.

I feel like I should apologise since I was hugely distracted by the neighbouring game of Cryptid, since it's the kind of game you can play even if you aren't playing.

Still trying to work out Ian's rule

On the other hand, I was half of the winning team, even if Joe completed most of our tricks.

Joe and Andrew 28
Anja and Adam 24

Since we were all back together again, we ended on a couple of rousing seven player games. First was Word Slam; Adam, Joe and Steve against Anja, Ian, Sam and me. I discovered a borderline psychic ability as my team raced into an early lead. I correctly guessed Sam's clue of "in turn hot eat" was "microwave" (Joe's clue for the same word, "zero metal science container eat in," is poetic enough for a mention ) and then I got "Bill Gates" from Ian's "name man technology". Then Ian guessed that my clue of "water drink movie" was "cocktail" to put us ahead 3-0. The other team came back into it, but never closed the gap. I expect Joe is still kicking himself for saying "funeral director" instead of "undertaker" which Ian then guessed.

Sam, Andrew, Anja, Ian 6
Adam, Steve, Joe 2

We ended with Face Cards. It may seem churlish to complain about your cards in a game as silly as Face Cards, but that's what we did. And, in fairness to us, luck was in short supply this night. We thought long and hard about our choices, best illustrated by Ian's lengthy silence followed by a doubtful "... No." in round two.

But it's not a game that rewards deep thought. Joe did his best to play obvious pairs, declaring that "slow and steady wins the day" or something. Meanwhile, in round four Anja tried to pair Martin Luther with two fried eggs. That was the level of desperation we had reached. In fact, there was only one correct guess in the final seventh round, when Adam paired the thermometer with my skier (because skiers want to know the temperature. That was honestly the best I had).

Sam 15
Joe 14
Adam 13
Anja 11
Ian 11
Andrew 10
Steve 6

A lovely evening and one that bodes well for the games weekend early November (not to be confused with the games weekend in mid November, but more on that some other time). And also for next Tuesday, of course.

And so it gheos

This week's games event was at Sam's place, and it began with six avid gamers huddled around the kitchen table. Sam was joined by Stanley, Joe (the grown up version, not Stanley's brother), Ian, Martin and me.

On one half of the table sat Sam, Stanley and Joe, getting ready for a game of Root, the new craze that swept the world of Sam and Stanley. At this end of the table, Martin had a new game to try, Gheos.

It had an interesting way of choosing the starting player; the one who can refrain from laughing the longest.

This game involves building a the playing area using triangular pieces with water and land, to create continents to put civilisations on. We don't control these civilisations in any way but, as gods, we can share in their success by picking up cubes of the same colour. We can also force the them to fight or migrate, by replacing parts of the world with new land masses, thus connecting or separating previously established continents.

This aspect of joining civilisations to make them fight reminded me of Tigris and Euphrates, and the game got a similarly cold reception from me. Ian said he enjoyed it and that he was expecting it to be more combative. I had to remind him that both he and Martin had killed off civilisations that I had a large stake in, in consecutive moves. Martin liked it, despite having to pay a cube if you want to be a dick to someone and change their continent.

Ian 70
Martin 69
Andrew 53

Meanwhile, in Root, after some debate whether Joe should choose an easier faction to play, the game was well under way. Stanley caused early upheaval by being hostile towards his dad, and wanting to hit Joe with a hammer. Added to this were strange discussions about battles in rabbit land or something. It looked nice but was all very opaque to an uniformed spectator.
Stanley won with what was, apparently, his favourite faction, while Joe managed to get into second and afterwards had nothing but praise for it.

Stanley 31
Joe 19
Sam 15

While we waiting for them to finish, we whipped off a quick round of Divinare. This game of psychic divination is rarely seen (because I never bring it) but is usually well received when it is.

We began with Martin saying he could hardly remember how to play. Suffice to say, it all came back to him.

Martin 10
Andrew - 1
Ian - 2

Afterwards, Martin explained his winning strategy, which is to remember what cards you hand your neighbour, because you'll see everything else. Not psychic powers, then. How disappointing.

Now, after so much ponderous gaming, we were in the mood for something riotous. We chose Decrypto, with our teams being Knackers All (Martin and Joe) against The Angry Stoics (Ian, Sam and I).

By round four, we had one error each, but then Knackers All got an interception. As we entered round five, I was in a fix, since we were sure that they had worked out three of our secret code words. Luckily, the combination I had to communicate to my fellow spies had the one word they knew least about. I entered a significant reverie that was long enough to be called a Joe Turn, and for reference to be made to Paul's epic contemplation on round nine of Lords Of Waterdeep.

In the end, it was all for nought, as they guessed it anyway. However, they failed to communicate their final clue, giving us hope that we might win on fewest mistakes. We didn't. Ian showed some talent by working out two of Joe and Martin's words, but those were just consolation goals in the football game of espionage.

Knackers All, loud and clear
The Angry Stoics, too much noise on the line.

Next was every quantity surveyor's favourite party game, Illusion. Last time we played, we were amazing in our accuracy. Today, not so much. Martin was distracted by a video of Huddersfield's wonder goal from the half-way line (into their own net, unfortunately) while I had a game where I neither challenged nor was challenged. Eagle eyed Ian took first place.

Ian 3
Martin 2
Joe 1
Sam 1
Andrew 0

Next was Face Cards, another new favourite. Just like Gheos, this game also had an ingenious way of choosing starting player: draw a card and the person who most resembles it begins. Apparently, I most resemble the Mona Lisa.

This game saw an audacious strategy by Joe. In his first round, he attempted to get us to match Mozart with Bach and he was amazed when no one chose it.

Then, in the next round he hoped that by playing Beethoven into the middle, that we would remember his fondness for dead composers and assume that was his card, despite the completely dissimilar card (a sheik) he had in front of him.

This plan was foiled when he accidentally put the Sheik in the middle and kept Beethoven in front of him. There was no way any of us could put those two together in those circumstances, especially since the author Goethe was among the six choices (which was my guess). But, to be honest, even if he'd got it right, I still don't think that it would have worked. Still, as I said, an audacious idea.

Joe also wondered if the game might be improved by betting real money on whether or not your pair is guessed. Maybe there's a variant on the Geek.

Martin 11
Ian 10
Joe 10
Sam 10
Andrew 9

Then we played a new very simple roll 'n' write, Kriss Kross. Roll two dice and write them (next to each other) in a five by five grid. Points are given for two, three, four or five in a row horizontally and vertically.

I omitted to pay much attention to the verticals, but luckily my horizontals scored so high, they didn't matter.

Andrew 29
Martin 28
Ian 26
Joe 25
Sam 25

Finally, with a win under my belt, I set off for home. Ian, despite flagging, was tempted to stay for a game of continuous Pairs. Joe lost the first game (since there are only losers in this variant, no winners) and Sam lost the second game on the last card in the deck.

Nice to be back at Sam's, and thanks to all for another fun time.