President Hickman

A week might be a long time in politics, but 20 minutes gave Ian and I (Sam) time to play a couple of games of Love Letter while we waited for Adam to arrive. This was notable mainly for Ian thrice playing barons when I had the princess, the third time saying "this has to work at some point" before his countess went down in flames. We played with the new 6-player version, which adds two new characters in the spy (potential point if you played the only spy and make it to the end of the round) and chancellor (draw two cards, place two of your three cards at the bottom of the deck).

Then Adam arrived through the rain, and we sat down to a game of SHASN, which tells the story of an election: the regions, the voters, the underhand tactics (my copy is the Indian version; there's also a USA edition). The board is broken into nine regions that the players contest: simply put, voters are the currency of victory - or not. The currency of progress is down to four political resources: funds, media, trust and the somewhat nebulous clout. Basically, you gather resource tokens representing the public's faith in you and 'spend' them to influence (or buy) voters, which you then add to the map. Having the most voters in a region means you can gerrymander: dicking about with voters in your own or adjacent region to swing things in your favour. Having a majority (-not just the most, but over half all the possible voters) means - if you hang on to it - you'll score points at the end of the game, which arrives when all majorities are claimed. 

But although it sounds, and broadly is, an extremely swingy take-that affair of screwing each other over on a regular basis, SHASN's theme comes through clearly in part because of how you get these resources: at the start of your turn you're asked an interview-style question on policy from a deck of Ideology cards, and you're permitted one of two binary answers. In either case, you take the card and collect the tokens on it: if you answer in the style of an idealist, say, you're going to improve the public trust in you. If you take a more populist view, you'll be a hit with the media. As well as gaining resources, you keep the card itself, and the gathering of cards builds an impression of your political identity, as sets of cards spark first bonus resources (for every two matching cards you have) and then additional abilities - usually of the nasty, interfering kind. Five matching cards endow the players with the really brutal stuff: I, predominantly playing the role of the Trump-esque supremo, could steal resources from other players on every turn and force their voters away from the polls. Adam - a more idealist identity - could get voters at less expense and convert others to his cause. But Ian's extra voters and ability to gerrymander not one, but two voters for every region he controlled was brutal. 

When you hear the question, you don't actually know the ideologue identities of the answers you're offered, and must instead work on your hunches. The idealist and capitalist are usually easy to spot, but the lines between the supremo and showstopper are a bit more murky. They both sound like twats, and oftentimes you feel like each question deserves a bit more nuance as to how they are answered. But the fun of SHASN is in the humour of these moments, and the fact that in order to win this election, you can't take a consistent position: simply having loads of the same type of card is ultimately unproductive, so the idealist is forced to tax sanitary towels, the capitalist must make concessions to healthcare and the populist might decide to be anti-capital punishment. 

As a game it feels like an inelegant punch-up, foregoing the control you might enjoy for round after round of face-slapping and shin-kicking, with interesting seams of luck, trading and pact-making running through it. But that's what we signed up for, and we all enjoyed it as a sort of event: particularly Ian, seeing as how he closed out the game in one fell swoop - suddenly polling day was upon us, and Adam and I didn't have time to form a coalition against him.

Ian 34 / Adam 23 / Sam 12

If a week is a long time in politics though (sorry), SHASN only took a couple of hours so there was plenty of evening left to fill, and we began with Fae, or Land of the Old Men's Penises as I immaturely insisted on calling it. 

I love Fae's simplicity of simply pushing old men's penises druids around on your turn in order for them to throw a party once no-one's looking; the catch being each player's colour is secret. Adam's afternoon siesta perhaps came back to haunt him, or maybe he was fatigued from all that canvassing. I snuck a win despite gifting Ian multiple points for getting the parties started.

Sam 47 / Ian 41 / Adam 39

Next up was For Sale. This is a copy Joe gifted to me and we found after our online adventures in 2020 that the older version had a slightly different make-up, with both properties and cheques numbering zero to 20. Ultimately, it made little difference to my experience of For Sale, which often ends something like this...

Adam 72 / Ian 68 / Sam 60

we were baffled by how the boring 20 skyscraper is considered 

better than these bonkers abodes

And we rounded off our night as a trio by playing Project L, which I thought I was rather well set to win until Adam revealed his score. Adammmmmm!!!

Adam 23 / Sam 19 / Ian 15

The winner hit the thankfully-dry road, but Ian and I felt we had one more game in us, and it was Wavelength. I wrote down all our spectrums and clues, but somehow this morning they don't seem quite as compelling as they did last night. Still, we overcame our different spheres of knowledge (Star Trek; Pokemon Go) and different paradigms of perception (IKEA furniture) to scrape a win. A fun way to round off a fun evening, thanks chaps!

Gwyneth Paltrow *is* a Person

On Saturday Katy, Ian and I (Sam) met at my place for some extra-curricular gaming. Katy was running slightly late so we set up Project L, but after a couple of turns she arrived, so after the briefest of chats we reset and started again as a trio. As touched on previously, this is the simplest of games to learn - bar perhaps Gold Fever - and all you're doing is gathering tetris-type shapes to complete puzzles, which equal points. The juice is really in the bits, which are gorgeous, and that tactility (along with the satisfaction of completing each puzzle) counters any shortcomings. Although I'd won very few of the previous 25 times I'd played it, 26th was a charm:

Sam 25

Katy/Ian 19 each

After a brief discussion we moved on to The Quest for El Dorado, Knizia's always pleasurable deck-building racing game. I couldn't recall if you were allowed to buy more than one card on your turn, and as my rules were in German I texted Martin, assuring Katy that this would probably be quicker than looking up the rules online. Sure enough it took only a few moments for Martin to reply with not only a clarifier, but in the form of a screengrab of the relevant rule. This astonished Katy, who became convinced Martin is a robot. Maybe that's why she didn't win. 

I know why I didn't - I loaded up with money to buy good cards, then kept finding I was just buying good cards with handfuls of money. Until I arrived at the place where I needed money, only to find I had a hand full of machetes. Ian meanwhile sashayed to an extremely convincing win:

Ian - El Dorado!

Katy/Sam - El Stupido

Then we played a new game called Cabo: each player is dealt four face-down cards from a deck numbered 0-13, and the goal is to have the four lowest-numbered cards collectively. Everyone looks at just two of their cards before play begins, then on a turn you can draw the top card from either the deck or the discards. 

If it's the discards, you simply exchange it with a card in your tableau. If it's the deck, you can either a. do the same b. simply discard it or c. discard it and take the action on the card (if there is one). There's only three actions: Peek at one of your own cards, Spy at one of someone else's and Swap with someone else. Or, if you think you're in a good position numerically-speaking, you can forego drawing at all and call 'Cabo'. Now everyone else has one final turn before cards are revealed and scored. Points are bad, so a successful cabo scores zero. Everyone else scores the number value of their cards. An unsuccessful cabo scores the number value plus ten, and as soon as someone goes over 100 points the player with the fewest points wins.

There's two twists: if you manage to hit 100 points exactly, your score gets halved to 50. And if when cards are revealed you have the 'kamikaze' hand - two 12s and two 13s - you score zero and everyone else scores 50!

(There's a rule I missed as well: you're allowed to swap a card you pick up for multiple cards, but the catch is they must be the same number. If you flip them over and they don't match, you have to keep them and the card you drew - I'm not sure any of us were ever quite aware enough of what we had to attempt this though!)

Ian sailed through this game as he had through El Dorado: calmly, drinking strong beer. Katy and I regularly imploded, both of us calling cabo more often than was sensible and suffering as a result. Poised on 97 points Katy needed either a 3 point hand or a kamikaze to save her, but I called cabo before she could engineer either of those things. Inevitably, Ian won. 

Ian 57

Sam 112

Katy 121

Next up was Fae, or the Land of Old Men's Penises as we fondly christened it. 

Turns couldn't be simpler: move a penis, or a group of penises, from one region to another. They will refuse to go into an empty region, and instantly throw a party if the region they gather in is (somewhat topically) isolated: if there's no penises in adjacent regions, they score points. The catch in this game is all colours score and nobody is can be totally sure what colour anyone else is until the end of the game, when identities are revealed. My gray penises - don't say anything - triumphed, though I didn't write down the scores:

Sam 

Ian

Katy

"We need something fun after that" said Katy, who had found arranging all the plastic pieces into a socially-isolating party on her side of the table more entertaining than the actual game, although I like Fae quite a lot myself. And so we played the most abysmal game of Wavelength ever: very fun, and funny, but a point-scoring catastrophe: we finished with two points. Ian's clues were probably the most logical, but at this point I was a little drunk and forgot, for instance, that there are many thousand tv programmes that are inarguably lower-brow than You've Been Framed. Not able to take that result lying down, we tried again, appalling Katy with our guess that Gwyneth Paltrow looks 'somewhat' like a person. "Gwyneth Paltrow is a person!" she cried in despair, revealing that the target was very much in the person zone and accusing us of guessing a place that would be occupied by a potato. Another mostly-inarguable truth, but Ian and I were factoring in Katy's recent candle-related disdain, that had threatened to turn into a late night rant about "the system". 

I didn't take photos, we were having too much fun/scorn. 

Then we played Push It, which Ian won. My memory of this is mostly about Katy trying to cheat. I think it was before or after this game that we had a long cereal-based tangent that took in kitchen size, milk type, relationship status and the joys of living alone. Katy also insisted she knew "nothing" about us, as we all conceded games nights were mostly "business". I told Katy I have one kidney. Ian stayed enigmatically silent. Who knows how many internal organs he possesses?

And finally we midnight looming we broke out Gold Fever, the simplest bag-builder/deconstructor there is, where you're trying to be first to draw four gold out a bag made of mostly rubble. With Ian having won El Dorado, Cabo and Push It and my name on the Project L and Fae cups, Katy finally picked up the win she craved, with Ian poised on three gold and myself a pitiful one. 

A fantastic night of games and silly fun, thanks guys!

Don't let the sun tile go down on me

Today, Joe's new (unfinished) games room held three gamers: Joe, Sam and I. This new room is right next to the front door and so is much more amenable to gamers entering and leaving surreptiously. Now Joe's house just needs a peephole in the front door and a secret knock and the speakeasy will be complete!

I got to Joe's at about 7.45 and Sam let me in while Joe was downstairs finishing supper. He came up after a while drinking champagne. "What's the occasion?" I asked. "It's my 25th wedding anniversary," said Joe, airily. Surprised, Sam and I asked if we should go, so he could celebrate it, but Joe reassured us that they'd only just remembered yesterday.

And what better way to celebrate marital bliss than a game of Luzon Rails, the Philippines based game of stocks and railway building.

Only Sam had played it before, coming last against the two Adams, and he explained the rules which were pretty clear and straightforward. We did the usual vague dalliance with cheap double entendres (extending my pink, get cracking on the brown track) and we were slightly distracted by the cries of delight from elsewhere in the house when England scored. Simply put, it was standard eurogaming fare.

Sam 94

Andrew 79

Joe 55

Joe said he wished he was better at train based share games while Sam admitted he had little Idea what he did right.

Next up was an old favourite: Ra. Only this time it was a super deluxe version with large shiny tiles, a huge cloth bag to hold them all and Joe’s very own green baize playing area. It took a while for me and Sam to remember the rules, especially Sam who said he hadn’t played in years.

Round one was notable for lots of disaster tiles threatening to ruin civilizations and monuments. At the end of round two, Joe pushed his luck and failed as the Ra track filled up. “It wasn’t worth that much,” he rationalised. The round three ended with me bailing out early and Sam and Joe still unfinished when that last Ra tile was pulled from the bag. This turned out to be very lucky indeed. For me, that is

Andrew 37

Joe 36

Sam 35

Then we played Fae, which involves tiny pastel-coloured wizards who like to congregate, moving from one area to the neighbouring one until they are in an area with no one in any adjacent area. Once they’re sure they’re alone, they perform a ritual and score points. It’s an abstract puzzle game and pleasant enough.

Joe 59

Sam 55

Andrew 54

Thanks for the evening, gentlemen, and sorry for the late posting. See everyone in a few days.