Blue or Green

 I was in Easton with a plan to walk through some of Bristol’s more country-ish lanes to Sam’s house. Imagine my surprise when I stepped out of an off-licence and saw Jo and Martin walking by with, apparently, the same idea.

We arrived at the venue and Sam let us in. Joe, Ian and Katy were there and Katy told us of her recent gaming activities, playing a lot of Snakes & Ladders with a five-year-old nephew. “Snakes & Ladders can last a long time,” she assured us.

We began with a homegrown game from Jo - I’m the Chump. A word game where people are randomly split into two teams - champs or chumps - by dealing a card. People don’t know what team they’re in, but everyone else does. And then everyone is dealt a word. Again - they don’t know it but everyone else does. The idea is to give clues to people about their word in such a way that a Champ can guess their word before a Chump realises they’re a Chump. So you have to give bad clues to Chumps but not so bad that they work out their true nature.

Katy got the clues “nought,” “Jesus,” and “angry” and thought it was a bunch of nonsense and declared herself a Chump. She wasn’t: we’d all been cluing “cross” but she took solace in her defeat in the fact that she’d ended the game.

Katy made notes

But we actually played two more rounds. Joe correctly guessed he was a Chump because everyone else was a Champ. And then Jo guessed they were a chump after correctly surmising that “taxi” and “shop” were probably red herrings.

It was an interesting game. There was a little discussion afterwards about how it played which got diverted into which words also followed the “ch_mp” form.

After this we split into a four and a three. Katy decided to forgo her usual distaste for plastic-heavy games and chose Manhattan, joined by me, Ian and Sam. Joe, Jo and Martin went deep into thoughtful logical deduction with Message From The Stars.

In Manhattan, we are four property developers building skyscrapers not just in the titular Manhattan but also in Hong Kong, Kairo (sp?), Frankfurt, Sydney, and San Paolo (spoken in an Australian accent). We can build on top of each others skyscrapers and we often do since the uppermost floors score.

We are putting up tower blocks all over the world when the words “Z has to be trusted” drift across the table mid-game as those playing Message From The Stars seem to be reciting dialogue from a spy movie.

But Manhattan collapses into a late-game dilemma. Not for Katy, though. Me, Sam and Ian battle over the area-control points of four of the areas while Katy quietly builds in the remaining two, unchallenged. While she won’t improve on her 2-points for area-control, every new building she puts down gets her another point and her final round tally of 17 is immense.

Katy 45

Sam 40

Andrew 39

Ian 39

We finish just as Message From The Stars finishes too. “Fully successful” was the summary from Martin of their efforts.Sam told us about a dream he’d had in which Martin had a game that came in a pencil case. The idea was to take turquoise  pencils out one by one and decide if they were blue or green.

We rearrange ourselves for the next game. Katy, Martin and Jo play L’oaf while Ian, Sam, Joe and I play For Sale in a little burst of nostalgia. Since it’s not Joe’s pimped out deluxe version, we need to remind ourselves about what value cards are actually in play but otherwise it’s all very familiar. Although maybe I had forgotten how much to bid for cards as the first hand of the game contained the highest card and I went big.

Joe 59

Sam 59

Andrew 55

Ian 45

L’oaf, after Martin declared “they picked the same card four times running,” ended:

Katy 29

Jo 24

Martin 18

And with that, I bowed out. The remaining sextet played So Clover once. Sam sent me pics and remarked that Martin put ‘tearjerker’ for Napkin/Movie and Katy was disappointed in him for not being filthier even though Martin pointed out it did have jerker in the clue.

Thanks all, it was lush.

Losing ones marbles

Joe, Martin and I rolled up to Steve and Anja's last night at the allotted hour of 8pm and whilst we waited for our final member Pete, I took the liberty of setting up Whirly Derby, which I'd brought with Louie in mind - but also myself, as I find coloured marbles spinning in ever-decreasing circles somewhat hypnotic. 

Pete arrived and without further ado we began racing. The rules are simple: each player has a 'paddock' of five marbles and over eight races you secretly choose how many to enter. Any raced marbles are lost - maybe they use the opportunity to escape captivity - but twice a game you can re-up and refill your paddock again. The basic game offers points prizes for first, second and third, but we played the advanced where some prizes combine (for example. the player with the most 1pt cards scores 15pts). 

There's some fuzzy edge cases that the brief rules don't cover, so we house-ruled them. The 'Slowness' bonus of the last marble to finish returning to its owner was a good rule, almost raising more drama than the winners did. But the game - or my copy - we found somewhat flawed as both our 8 races and several experiments we did after proved that Martin's green marbles were marginally smaller, and Joe and Louie's black and orange marbles seemed destined to finish last. Steve's blues were also quite innocuous.

Martin 54

Sam 29

Pete 15

Joe 11

Louie 6

Steve 5

Anja returned from packing Lennon off to bed just as we packed up, and split into two groups, Joe talking our hosts through the delights of Into the Blue as Martin explained Tower Up to Pete. 

Pete took to the game rather well. I think I got my best score ever as I decided to forego my usual flippant moves for a marginally more considered approach. This kept me competitive and elicited the odd satisfying noise from a chagrined Martin. But it wasn't enough to stop Pete, who nabbed first place on two objectives and took the laurels. 

Pete 56

Sam 54

Martin 48

We took a stroll to the impressive front room, where the contrast between the decor (floridly resplendent) and the activity (a Knizia dice-chucker) made for an enticing spectacle. Molly felt there was room for a final touch, however, and she sat on the activity to prove it. 

Steve took this one, pipping Anja by the narrowest of margins.

Steve 20

Anja 19

Louie 17

Joe 13

Louie now made his way to bed too, leaving six of us. We plumped for For Sale, which - I seem to say this a lot - was more fun than my photo makes it look. 

We actually played twice. In the first game Joe ran out of money and ended up with two very high property cards and three rather low ones. In the second he changed strategy but suffered a similar fate. Steve forgot that money was also points in the second game, and a recount boosted him into runner-up position. I managed to win both; I'm still not sure how. 

It was getting late-ish now so we pulled out those green plastic clovers and set about it. Oddly the clue 'marble' came up here, on Anja's clover, and we debated how likely a marble cup might be, although this gave way to Martin saying 'a jar of marbles' several times. Martin's 'Ramadan' for moon/fast was a highlight, and we successfully matched marble with dream/hearth. Despite some stumbles over Steve's clue of Argos (our mythology was a bit foggy) this was a broad success, racking up four sixes and two fours for 32/36.

And that was that for another Tuesday. I'm not around next week, have fun!

Flip off

Tonight was my first games night for a while, and I was keen to get back around the table after a stressful day which included an interview for my own job. I managed to crowbar board games into one of my answers so we'll see how that turns out. 

Assembled at Joe’s house was Sam, Ian, Adam T, Joe, Martin and newcomer Jo, making their introduction to the group thanks to Martin.

The seven of us sat and pondered our options: A jovial seven player game, or “a real game.” In the end we chose Flip 7. “It's the greatest card game in the world,” insisted Joe. “If you like pairs,” countered Adam, “prepare to be disappointed.”

It is basically Pairs but with numbers instead of fruit (1 to 12 cards of value 1 to 12) and a few special cards to spice things up: you can give a Freeze card to an opponent to stop them in their tracks, or there’s the Take Three card that you can give away or use on yourself.

Despite the photo, pointing at opponents isn't an integral part of the game

As for the game, I scored sensibly on every round whereas Ian, for whatever reason, scored nothing at all. Martin came painfully close to winning the whole game (we set a target of 100 points) with only his second hand, going bust with a hand that could have scored 110 if he’d survived. Jo, on the first card of their first game in their first games night, went bust immediately. “Welcome to Games Night!” said Martin. If that weren’t enough, Jo crashed out early again with a pair of fours. But Adam took the win, with only three scoring hands in the five rounds that we played. Nice work.

Adam 101

Andrew 88

Joe 80

Martin 39

Jo 24

Ian 0

As the game ended, with the verdict of the game decidedly split, we rearranged ourselves into two groups. Four of us (Joe, Jo, Martin and Sam) played Ride the Rails. Ian, Adam and I played Impusle. This was Ian’s first game in ages. In fact, the three of us last played each other on 25 September 2019. Amazingly, we even chose the same colours.

I built a lot: actually having every available ship on the board at one point, but I was stymied by the complete lack of move commands, meaning my deadly fleet mostly floated menacingly just out of reach.

Adam built a little points engine of Draw, Mine and Trade and then Ian attacked Adam, until Adam only had one ship left. With this lone cruiser, Adam retaliated and won - allowing himself to re-establish his fleet on the board.

I reach 14 points and, with my mega-fleet, should be in a winning position but I am stranded in space, picking up peanuts for my lone ship on the Sector Core. Ian attacked me while Adam got his factory working again and was able to go from last to first.

Adam 20

Andrew 16

Ian 15

Ride the Rails was still underway. I had listened in only long enough to hear Martin persuade Joe to join him by investing in yellow while Jo and Sam teamed up with orange shares.

We played Misfits, but I was already flagging after a stressful day. Ian began the game in a feisty mood, placing a triangle painting upwards on the table. After that, gravity did the rest. None of us escaped with at least one collapse and by the time Ride The Rails had ended, we were nowhere near finding a winner.

Scores on Ride The Rails

Jo 285

Martin 259

Sam 252

Joe 219

At this point I left, too tired to continue.

*Sam takes over narration

Joe and I were both mildly bamboozled by Ride the Rails' impressive opacity, but I think everyone enjoyed it. Now down to a six in Andrew's absence, we broke out some silly card games Jo had brought, the first of which was the wonderfully named Galaxy Cat Extension. 

Here we simply take turns to flip cards, before assigning them to anyone (including yourself) around the table, with goal to have matching cat cards making cats, and maybe some cat bodies in-between them if you're really lucky. And luck plays a definite part, as outside of Short Cats and Buddha Cats in the mix, that's pretty much the entire game. There was a lot of giving of unwanted feline gifts until the final count-up (I think when the deck ran out) at which point I found myself galaxy-bound:

Sam 16

Joe 6

Adam 4

Ian 3

Martin and Jo: both zero

Next up was the even sillier, although it may not seem immediately possible, Wanted Wombats. We also take turns to flip cards here, but now only for our own benefit. The deck is made up of £1k, £3k, £5k and £10k cards and before you flip you announce what you predict you'll get. If you're wrong, your turn is instantly over. If you're right, you can either bank it or push your luck with another card, and so on. 

This game prompted a lot of laughter, as it seemed 90% of the experience was going 'Oh shit' or variants thereof. If I recall correctly someone actually called a £10k (there are only two in the deck) and Jo rallied from their explainer's curse in Galaxy Cat Extension to take a win here. We played again and almost-namesake Joe took the win. At some point my son Joe was texting me as well and it got a bit confusing. 

Then Adam T departed as well and as a quintet we busted out way through For Sale. I'm not sure how but I took a win here - not like me - and then I departed as well. Not sure if the others played anything at the end?

Dark Web Gogglebox

 7.30 Tuesday evening. Joe let me in and I walked down the stairs into his kitchen, noting Tom Waits on the speaker, finding a group of gamers sitting around Joe’s table: Ian, Katy, Sam, and Martin. Adam H had been expected at 8.15 but then he email to say he’d be here at 7.50. This left us with a quandary. Find something short to play or talk to each other for twenty minutes.

Happily, reason prevailed and we got out For Sale. Katy began with her usual insistence that she’s terrible at this game which, for once, is justified. Sam, too, never seemed to get going while Ian picked up a last round $15k cheque with only a 15-value house. Not enough to win, but very satisfying. For him.

Martin 54

Ian 53

Andrew 49

Joe 46

Sam 36

Katy 33

Adam arrived mid game and so we split into two. At one end Adam, Katy, Joe and Martin played one of the many games called Orbit. It’s so new that it’s listed as a 2025 game on Board Game Geek! Martin explained the rules and they set off in this dickish game of intergalactic high-jinks. How they laughed when Martin complained “I’m absolutely in the middle of fucking nowhere,” which is, I suppose, a valid criticism of most of outer space.

Ian, Sam and I played Around the World in 80 Days. There was a lot of detective work this time, as we kept trying to upset our opponents with not-so-chance encounters with the law. Ian tried to use a balloon - a transport that uses a dice instead of the value on a card to tell you how long a journey took. He rolled a 5 and stating that statistically he would probably get a lower number, he paid a coin and rolled again. A six. Of course.

Thanks to a lucky last-minute purchase of a card from the deck, I get back to London in double-quick time, arriving at the door of the Reform Club after only 69 days. Sam cursed his luck as, once again, he finished stuck in New York.

Andrew 69 days

Ian 78 days

Sam dnf

While we waited for Orbit to finish, we played Push. A simple card game, build up three columns of cards but no duplicates of numbers or colours. Then you take one column and your opponents take the others. Ian’s lack of luck with a die in Around the World was compensated as he dodged having to discard cards when rolling the dice in this game.

Ian 81

Sam 77

Andrew 72

Meanwhile Orbit ended with Martin’s green planet being moved out of his reach and then Katy swooping down towards her own home planet, clearly relieved that people hadn’t noticed that she was about to win. One of the first people to win at Orbit, she told herself.

Katy wins!

The others don’t.

They packed away, with Katy remarking that Martin’s player mat was covered in crisps, and as a septet again, it was time to change things up again.

At one end of the table Martin, Sam and Ian played Saer while Joe, myself, Katy and Adam played Sunrise Lane. Two rules explanation hummed around the room at the same time, and even seemed to synchronized/interfered with each other.

Martin: You have 3 cards.

Joe: You have 3 cards.

Martin: Face down.

Joe: Not face down, in your hand.

Martin: In your array.

I know nothing about Saer except that I thought I’d played it when I saw it. It didn’t have the most original visual aspect.

Martin 12

Sam 9

Ian 4

As for Sunrise Lane, I quickly got a long chain of buildings and then got tall buildings in both blue sectors. But I ignored the red quarters, which could’ve been my downfall.

Joe 87

Andrew 83

Katy 74

Adam 69

Again, we were all together. So Clover doesn’t play seven, so we dug out Hitster, that game of putting random songs in chronological order thanks to an app that links to Spotify.

Or, rather doesn’t link to Spotify. After only a few songs (one of which, You Can’t Hurry Love, was wrongly identified as The Jam by Katy and, in fairness, A Town Called Malice does have a very similar opening) the app gave up. Instead we changed to just singing the song for the other people to guess. 

Of course, this meant that most songs after 2005 were discarded because we didn’t know them. But otherwise it worked fine. For certain obscure definitions of “fine”. Imagine the scene where half of us are singing a hit from the late 20th century while the other half are arguing about it. “Like a Dark Web Gogglebox,” observed Sam, giving this blog post it’s title.

I had to leave just as our row of guesses stretched across the whole table, with only a few mistakes here and there. The rest of the blog is courtesy of a few messages from Sam.

After I left, they played So Clover twice: 24/30 and 26/30 (so someone else must have left too).

And Sam also told me that at the very start of the evening he and Joe played Landmarks, a word association game that involved getting across an island.

What an evening! See you all soon.

10cc on a plane ordering snacks

 This week’s GNN started unusually early for two lucky gamers, with Ian joining Sam at around half six for a two player game of Quantum before Joe and Katy arrived and enjoyed a rousing game of Perudo.

When I finally did get there, the table was set up for a five player game of Free Ride, with Joe, Katy and Ian the newcomers on board.

Compared to the only other time I played it, we started much more centrally, which meant a lot more blocking and nationalising of routes. Ian barely moved at all, preferring to stay in Napoli and make lots of money with his sensibly placed routes.

Katy went through a smorgasbord of emotions, at one point saying she was pleased and angry at the same time. She also said she enjoyed it. Joe was the other moneybags, as he almost monopolised East Europe and the Urals. My track in the UK was totally ignored for the entire game.

Sam zipped around the map, only briefly distracted by a wine spillage which dampened an Oslo card and some coins but not his enthusiasm for the game. At the end, as we counted up our scores, he revealed he had no duplicate cities in his stack of cards. Professional level gaming.

Sam 100

Joe 92

Ian 86

Katy 82

Andrew 81

After this the next (and my last) game was a co-op game of Wavelength. In this variant you score points for being in the Segment of Correctitude (possibly not it's official name) but only a perfect hit will get you another card and the chance to increase the score further.

It was fun as always. Katy wanted to know how long a clue could be; could it be a sentence? And that's when Sam uttered the blog title by means of an example of how long a clue could reasonably be. Trying to ignore the image of Kevin Godley and Lol Creme arguing over peanuts or olives, we began.

There were a few duds. I can't remember if we thought Katy's example of "buying your mother imported flowers" was more or less ethical than she did, but we were definitely wide of the mark.

Sam's clue of "day old bread" for "smelly in a good way/smelly in a bad way" seemed very specific but a bullseye eluded us. My clue "beer" for "guilty pleasure/openly love" was the shortest of the evening and was close but still no cigar.

Ian's clue for "normal greeting/weird greeting" was to say "helloooo" in a high pitched slightly Irish accent. Our mistake was misjudging the frame of reference, thinking it only slightly weird especially compared to a punch in the face as a greeting, and we put the Indicator of Opinion in the normal half. But Ian thought that slightly weird meant it should go in the weird half. 

I think we scored 11. And Katy discovered that you could run on custard.

By now it was 10.00 and my choice was a sensible early night or risk a late one, so I took the easy option and went home. Sam messaged me the late results.

The rest of them played For Sale twice.

Joe 62

Sam 61

Ian 51

Katy 40

And...

Sam 79

Ian 59

Katy 49

Joe 37

Then they ended with good old Tsuro.

Joe and Ian die in first 

2 Sam

3 Katy

Thanks all. Special as always.

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!

Bugged out

Another week of games online, albeit one with an end to the isolation in sight. The promise of a six household get together is only a couple of weeks away, but with the addition of some online activities for those unwilling to come out just yet.

But that is all conjecture for the future. This week, six of us rolled onto BGA. I was too late for Raj, which ended in a cruel tie for Ian and Andy.

Martin 11
Katy 5
Ian -99
Andy -99

Soon after I arrived, Joe logged on and the six of us played That's Life (or Verflixt, or Fucksticks as it has alternatively been called). It worked well online although twice I clicked on the tile I wanted to go to instead of the piece I wanted to move, thus moving a guard by mistake.

We all admired the new die rolling animation. All except Joe who insisted it was broken and that you could see the final number during the animation. We disagreed and there then followed a lengthy demonstration of possibly the worst psychic in the world. Joe guessed correctly but always said the number just after the die finished rolling. "Well, you have to expect some lag," he explained.

He continued a few more times, looking like someone just reading a die and expecting people to be impressed. Eventually, he switched from Safari to Chrome and the bug no longer occurred - his ability to see into the future was over. I wonder if the story of Samson and Delilah would have been so popular if, instead of cutting off his hair to remove his strength, Delilah had just changed his default browser.

"Two!"

As for the game, I did terribly while Katy attributed her success to her laid back nature while she branded Martin a "Skippy wotsit" who never stayed still long enough to pick up a tile.

Katy 27
Ian 11
Andy 9
Martin 2
Joe -7
Andrew -8

Then another old favourite had made a recent debut online, Hugo. Despite technically being banned in a couple of houses we were playing in, we carried on regardless. It was the familiar mix of chants and cheers as Hugo chased our hapless party guests (although we were slightly disappointed to see the same dice animation as we'd seen in That's Life.)

"We all self-Hugo," said Katy, "nothing to be ashamed of." "And anyone who says they don't self-Hugo is lying," added Joe.

Andy -17
Ian -18
Joe -24
Andrew -24
Katy -25
Martin -31

Then we squeezed in one last game before Joe left. He can't resist For Sale. It was a typical game. Andy picked up a zero dispite bidding 17 and Martin got $15 with only a 22. But it was slow, steady me that finished in first place.

Andrew 53
Katy 52
Martin 45
Ian 38 plus tie breaker
Joe 38
Andy 34

So Joe left and Katy and Ian were teetering on the brink. They both agreed to stay on for one last game of No Thanks, but things quickly became unstuck when Katy lost her connection on her first turn. Or was it something more serious than that? She kept getting a lengthy error message from BGA, something about some module not working.
She tried refreshing, and refreshing again and then refreshing in another language before finally deciding that the problem was beyond help. Then we had the difficulty of working out how to cancel the game if Katy couldn't access it to say she was fine to abandon it.

In the end, we left it, since there wasn't a time limit on it. And, as far as I know, it's still there. I hope we have the chance to finish it next week. I'd love to see what Katy's thinking time is.

And so that was that. A bit of a damp squib to end on but still a fun evening. See you all next week.

Flower Power

I logged on at 8 , just in time to interrupt the early stages of a game of Skull so they (Sam, Joe, Ian Martin and Adam H) simply abandoned the game and began anew with me on board.

There's a general consensus that bluffing games like this lose something when translated onto the internet. The opportunity to read people is gone and, since that's pretty much what this game is about, it's a kind of hollow experience.

Not that it wasn't fun. Adam never bid, so everyone assumed he always played a skull. Although, I seem to remember Ian ruining many attempts at guesses with a cheeky skull of his own. It took us twenty minutes for someone (Sam) to score a point and then ten minutes more for Martin to draw level.

In the end, Adam won after all.

Then we played Raj. Joe was in full dark mode, with only a faint grey light illuminating half his face. It seemed to help as he won a game where luck was mean to Sam who picked up negative points despite going high. Fun, but over too fast.

Joe 18

Ian 17

Andrew 6

Martin 3

Sam -4

Then we played For Sale, while Adam vanished for a while. It began with a lot of the most attractive cards coming out early. Martin made some comment about being prepared for "when the shit comes out", to which Joe remarked that you don't want your trousers down when the shit comes out. Slightly counterintuitive advice, there.

After a game where Ian seemed to be in pole position, Joe took his second victory in a row. His response was an airy, disinterested "oh, did I win?" Sam, at least, was comforted that he had the most accurate prediction of his final standing.

Joe 59

Ian 57

Andrew 54

Martin 44

Sam 35

Then came 6nimmt. Constantly frustrating but with always the hope that someone else will be less lucky than you. In Andy's absence, someone mentioned that professional variant, just to keep the tradition alive. I was first to dip into negative points, but then saw Sam whizz past me in a last round death spiral. In terms of actually playing well, it was Martin versus Joe, with Martin leading by four points in the last round, but Joe just couldn't close that gap, even with a hand as even distributed as this...

Martin 37

Joe 35

Adam 29

Ian -4

Andrew -10

Sam -18

I had to dash off, as culinary duties called and it looks like Sam and Joe left too. The remaining three played Conspiracy. It literally could not have been closer.

Martin 57

Joe 57

Ian 47

Thanks all, see you next week.

From six nimmt to nein danke

After last week's hiatus, six of us returned for another week of virtually having fun. Initially Sam, Martin, Ian and Andy were present for an opening game of Skull. I had arrived too but needed to dash off and buy tin foil so couldn't participate.

Andy 2
Ian 1
Martin 1
Sam 1

Joe arrived and I sorted myself out, kitchen-wise. Then we played Railroad Ink, new on the geek, and it's a neat implementation of the roll and write original. I found it quite relaxing, although Andy couldn't see where a potential score for a particular move would be displayed. "I guess you just have to work it out yourself," replied Martin. How very old school.

Andrew 49

Martin 47
Andy 43
Sam 38
Ian 37
Joe 37

Then we played For Sale. Sam went aggressive right from the start, saying he wouldn’t do his usual timid strategy and finish in fourth. I said I was fine with fourth, and picked up the first free card I could. In a sense, we both got exactly what we wanted.

Joe 59
Martin 49
Ian 48
Andrew 45
Sam 41
Andy 28

Next up was 6nimmt. Now, I didn’t make many notes but I think at this point Joe sung a bass line and invited people to guess. Only Sam tried before Joe admitted it was the middle eight from “Boys of summer” by Don Henley.

6nimmt was as 6nimmt does. I was cruising in first until I hit a death spiral. “It was pretty close in the middle of the pack,” observed Martin from the safe distance of a convincing win.

Martin 40
Andy 25
Sam 24
Andrew 23
Ian 23
Joe -4

Sam bowed out and the five of us knocked out a quick game of No Thanks, which Martin won thanks to the final card which wasn't 29 like I wanted and it certainly wasn't 18 and 19 as Joe needed.

Martin 23
Andrew 27
Ian 32
Joe 42
Andy 44

Then Ian  left and as a foursome we played Conspiracy. This has a similar card drafting mechanism to Abyss, but is simpler. Put your cards in a pyramid shape, and score points for collecting things, putting things next to other similar things and getting locations. I had very little idea about what was going on.

Joe 54

Andy 53
Martin 48
Andrew 44

And with that, we were done for another evening. Thanks and see you next Tuesday.