Some kind of Bala

A summer games weekend. On Friday night Ian and Katy were first to arrive, and after some uncertain naming hesitation on my part - Gambala? Gambola? - loosely inspired by Shambala, which was the reason my house was empty in the first place, Katy insisted it would be Sambala, in honour of me - or at least my email pushiness. I overcame my initial reluctance to use it as excuse for my excesses as the evening progressed - an evening that began with 5 Towers. 

This was new to both Katy and Ian but it's a simple game: we're all building the titular towers and each round we bid on how many cards we'll take to do so, adding them in descending numerical order. You can 'tear down' a previous card, but doing so costs points. Katy kept her powder dry here as Ian and I built, and cleaned up thanks to Ian's shortage of tower tops that increase your score. 

Katy 31
Sam 23
Ian 21

Adam arrived in time to watch the count-up and was intrigued to try it, but we realised with an hour until Anja got here we could do something chunkier, and settled on The Quest for El Dorado, mixing in some of the expansion options I picked up on a recent jaunt to Norway. We added Dangers (though this morning I realise I forgot one of the boards for it) - which are the same as normal spots except you can't end your turn on them - and some crocodiles, which can only be navigated with an exact-number card (the suit doesn't matter) and the Muisca, a local tribe who'll help you, but potentially opponents as well, for reasons I won't explain here as it never happened in the game. 

Adam warned everyone that in the last game I blocked him from card-shedding spots and I began with a similar strategy, trapping Katy behind a mountain as everyone was slightly appalled at me. "It's Sambala" I said. She and I lagged behind and constructed decks as Ian and Adam journeyed forward and Adam went back and forth between a dangerous valley so much that he got his deck down to just four cards. "But three of them are shit" he said. We didn't believe him but it turned out to be true: he was caught and overhauled. I sailed off into a healthy lead with a streamlined seven cards, and felt optimistic that El Dorado was calling my name. But then I stalled at a watery barrier and was caught by everyone. 

It was suddenly tense. Adam removed the barrier but blocked one way. I went the other but for two turns running didn't draw the cards I needed. Katy and Ian were blocked by the pair of us - but not for long, because suddenly Adam - now with some powerful cards - sped off to the end and won. Katy wanted to play for second place until she realised she couldn't get to El Dorado, but I could.

Adam wins
Sam sort of second

Anja still hadn't arrived so we set about playing Poison, still with its Joe-infused Dwarves of the Twilight Galaxy box cover. Katy didn't remember (or know?) the rules, but insisted on not learning them and that she'd get it as we went. This made for a slightly staccato game as apparently brewing poison is not as simple as it sounds. 

Unless you're Adam. We only played one round but he squeaked a narrow win over Quiet Ian, who had gone about his business attracting less opprobrium. 

Adam 2

Ian 3

Katy 8

Sam 17

We stopped after the single round because Anja was now here! After a brief catch-up we returned to business with co-operative Wavelength, with my first spectrum being good superpower/bad superpower. I felt my clue of being able to nap at a moment's notice was not a bad guide, but Katy had to be talked down by the others from seeing it on a par with flying, invisibility and time-travel. We hauled in a three points, but then went off the rails somewhat with our next few clues - we undervalued Ian's A4 writing pad and Anja's perception of country music - only to stage a late-game recovery and come oh-so-close with 13 points - two shy of the official victory condition. 

Not that it matters, as Katy rightly pointed out. Next up was Fun Facts, new to Anja but an easy teach and not a million miles from Wavelength. It transpired that desires to go to space was split along gender lines, with Anja and Katy willing to spend zero pounds on getting there and the boys more sympathetic, although Ian thought he'd get bored and Adam thought he'd get sick. I was more keen: I liked the idea of zero gravity and peeing in my pants.

We didn't do too badly, although the rulebook was hardly effusive about our score of 26. Next up was the little-recently-seen Perudo! What a cracker this game is. 

Adam and Anja took the early hits as Anja kept calling dudo, with mixed results. She was first out, followed by her neighbourly nemesis, as Katy insisted everyone target me as I still had my full complement of dice. It sort of worked: Ian fell next leaving Katy and I on a single die each. Despite her insistence that I had a huge advantage, I've been here before: like poker, my game is only solid until a showdown and then it disintegrates. 

1 Katy wins

2 Sam

3 Ian

4 Adam 

5 Anja

There are no pictures of So Clover, because Katy was so appalled at the outcome of her clover that she flipped it face down. We hadn't figured out what she'd meant with the clue shit, and it's now lost to memory. Mine anyway. Comments are available. 

So Clover: 22/30

There were some good clues, but I've forgotten them too. I was slightly drunk and reading Adam's clue of enrobed as enro-bed for some reason set me off, so while everyone else solved his clover - 6 points! - I had my head on the table. Possibly informed by this, but hopefully the late hour, Ian and Adam took their leave and the remaining trio played Misfits. 

Several collapses later, I took the win and Friday was done. 

On Saturday the games began a little before midday, as Katy and I had a Clans of Caledonia rematch. She had extra order-fulfilment options, I knew how to sail. The last time we played this Katy obliterated me, but on this occasion she struggled to get going and told me that she hated the game in rounds 2 through 5. It was closer than we thought though, and whilst I won my score did not eclipse Katy's in the last game.  

We moved on to another medium-euro: Rajas of the Ganges. 

Here there were very divergent tactics: I built markets and Katy buildings. Buildings race you around the track faster than markets - but they're a score-once-and-done option. Without any trade in her province Katy had no incentive to score markets, and so I took another win here - again, a close one though. 

Katy's province: lacks cornershops

By this time we'd eaten lunch and other gamers were looming. We bashed out a year of Cozy Stickerville as we waited: a game you famously cannot lose, as it mostly consists of putting stickers on the board and regretting your decisions. 

As we ended a mostly-fallow year of having not enough wood to do anything, Anja, Steve, Lennon and Louie all arrived, and hot on their heels Pete, Laura and Ryker. 

We split into two groups. I joined the Dalton-Dales for Forbidden Desert and the remaining quartet began playing The Mind, with hilarious results. I think in the time we set up and reminded me of the rules they'd failed on level 1 three times, then triumphed and called it a win.

Meanwhile in the desert I was being reminded of how much sand there was. 

So much in fact that I took it upon myself to spend most of my turns removing it, as it bothered me. Lennon did lots of excavating to find things, Steve employed his magical powers of movement and Anja had a knack of finding tonnes of equipment. Louie generously sacrificed a lot of actions to stop Storm cards being drawn and basically save our asses. Despite this, it didn't help: we ran out of sand and lost. 

Meantime the others had played Magical Athlete, which was won by Ryker on his GNN debut...

And they'd also played Misfits, the winner of which I totally missed as I was buried in a dune at the time. I heard a big crash at one stage though, and there were the usual alarms about elbows on the table.

We now lost Katy to Weekend Plans and shuffled ourselves into a big group for a revisit to Louie's Game Off, last seen when Martin harrowingly sang Happy Birthday to Steve on a games weekend. 

In this game you go around the table and roll dice to see who you challenge on your turn, then choose what sort of challenge it'll be. Louie and I had to moonwalk, and Lennon saw me off easily in the slowest-press-up face-off. Anja and Lennon both had to sing their highest pitch, and she lost to Louie in the rhyme-off of words that sound like 'right'. The kids dominated here: Louie won with the 5 cards needed to end the game, Lennon runner-up with 4. Whilst Pete and Steve also scored, Anja and I were left with nothing but a vestige of our Game Off worthlessness. SAD. 

Lennon and Louie had a game of Crokinole but decided one round was enough. I'm not sure who won.

Then Lennon, Pete and I began a game of Ticket to Ride: Berlin but there was now an interval for fish and chips, of which there are no pictures. Thanks to Steve for making the run to the chippy (and let me know what I owe!). After the meal Anja thrashed Steve at Trickarious whilst Pete took a narrow win in Berlin. 

There was time for one last family game before the curtain fell, so we played In Vino Morte. Twice actually. Anja ousted Steve in the final round in game one, but in game two Lennon poisoned everyone but himself! I've never seen that before. Extra points for the face of an arch poisoner too. 

Steve now ran the family back to the house whilst Pete and I fretted about what he might like to play, going around the houses circa games night 2012 until we realised we all liked Root. So we set it up and happily his eyes lit up on seeing it. 

He was the industrious Marquis, Pete the expansionist Eyrie and I the sneaky Woodland Alliance. We all forgot some minor elements: Steve the hand limit and I a faction specific thing. Pete managed to forget he was charismatic, which Steve pointed out takes some special kind of charisma. But Steve's eyes, so bright before, were increasingly dark as I dicked everyone over with my sneaky ways. 

As is the way with Root, knowing someone is an asshole and stopping them are two different things. Probably my more recent experiences told - Steve hadn't played in years. 

Sam 30

Pete 16

Steve 12

Steve took revenge in The Quest for El Dorado, which we were surprised to learn he had never played before. No expansions then, just a lot of card shedding: early for me, later for the others. I felt I'd put myself into a good position and reached El Dorado first - but Steve's collection of cave tokens saw him sashay in behind me, and his collection of barriers trounced my one.

1 Steve - Indiana Jones

2 Sam - Small Round

3 Pete - Rene Belloq

After all the excitement of the day I was fading a bit but we squeezed in one last dice-chucker in Pickomino. 

I had just finished telling them about my brother-in-law taking a worm and then rolling seven ones when Steve did something remarkably similar. There's more to it than that but I'm not sure the anecdote will survive the transition to print. He won this too: my huge early lead collapsed into nothing and Pete couldn't get what he needed to deprive Steve of another victory. 

Steve 6

Pete 3

Sam 0

Sunday arrived, bright but not particularly early. Pete was still asleep in the front room when I went out for food supplies, but joined me shortly after my return. We had coffee and a chat and then thought what the hell, we'd play a game. This was Babylonia. 

It's not a game that tells much of a story but my two-player training versus Martin possibly helped here as I took a decent victory. 

Sam 125

Pete 85

We pottered a bit and ate lunch before gamers arrived: Jo was first, and we swiftly set up a trick-taking game called Power Vacuum, where we are trying to be top appliance. 

It was bananas: each trick the winner can take a point or reserve a card for the next round. More alluring is playing the lowest value card, where you can manipulate the energy supply to the appliance of your choice, or away from an appliance of your choice, or maybe both: each player has an area they score because it's themselves, but also bids you can make about which appliances will be most/least energetic. Despite the appliance theme, you also build statues of yourselves. I'm never going to look at the Nutribullet the same way again. 

We didn't manage a whole game but Pete was leading Jo 28-20 and I was back on 17 when Katy arrived, and we switched to another tricktaker Jo had brought with them: Daytime Minutes. 

Back in the world of sentient beings, we're now avid phone users in the early 2000s struggling to manage our minutes. I found this easier to parse than Power Vacuum but I'm not sure I can explain it coherently: each card has a time value and the winner takes all the cards of the led suit. Each round has a maximum time anyone can have and you want to not go bust, and also have not spent the least time: in either case, you lose one of your precious SIM cards. 

Also, there's potentially (in fact, always in our game) two suits in each trick, so with it two winners. Although you don't always want to win, obviously, because Minutes.

Adam H arrived in time for the finale, as Jo and Pete both went bust and Katy, who still had two SIMs, took a win. It's a great game, allowing room for lots of jokes about phone calls to your mum. Katy did one of these and then realised she had to call her mum later. 

Now a five, we introduced Jo to dnup, the spiritual sister of Scout. 

It was a funny game, with a lot of enforced busts and the odd reluctant rotation. I'd like to say my convincing win was because I know what I'm doing, but I think we all know better.

Sam 4

Adam 1

Everyone else 0

Katy demanded Misfits next. We mentioned to Jo that we didn't play the official rule of 'if half the pieces fall, you must take the entire tower' and inevitably bumped into two situations where it suddenly made sense.

By Misfits standards it was a bit of an epic: probably well over half an hour, and Katy ran out of time and had to leave, graciously taking the shitty base for herself before she did so. She wanted to claim a win - she had fewest blocks - but we wanted to keep playing.

As I write now I can't actually remember who won though, although my sources tell me it was definitely Pete (sorry Katy). Mel was now imminent and Adam suggested she would love Steam Power, so we set up and talked both she and Jo - and me, to some extent - through Wallace's Light Railways. (at this point Blogger's labelling runs out of space)

My recollection of the game is one of mild bamboozlement: I do find it - as I repeatedly told everyone (sorry) a very hard game to read, and forgetting a key connections rule meant I inadvertently cheated as well. Thankfully I wasn't in contention though. It looked very much like it might be Pete, who seemed to be scoring contracts almost every turn from about 20 minutes into the game. 

But one should never write off Adam in these scenarios, and when Pete triggered the end game the one turn the Creeping Custard still had in him was enough to hoist him to victory! At least that's what I thought. As it turned out I was simply innumerate (and used to Adam winning). 

Pete 39

Adam and Jo 33 each

Mel 26

Sam 22

Pete had one more game in him and after a surprisingly short debate we settled on The Shipwreck Arcana, something I last played probably nine years ago and had mixed up with Bemused I think. Fortunately it's Jo's favourite game and they knew it inside out, nursing us through the baffling confection of possibilities, often as much about choices you don't make as ones you do. 

We are collectively trying to get seven right answers, the question being a slightly Bilbosque what have I got in my pockets. Although we work together, the active player must keep schtum as everyone tries to figure out as much as they can about a numbered tile in their hand, by examining what tile they aren't hiding - and where it is. The discarded tile goes next to a clue, which hopefully leads everyone to identify what you're hiding.

That's a very loose description anyway. Guessing wrong - or having the card 'fade away' by having too many tiles beside it - causes Despair: reach seven despair and you instantly lose. 

This was fun: we won but not without help: we did a relatively easy setting and had some considerable luck when my first hand was the same as Adam's, so I just copied what he did. It's very clever. 

We now lost Pete and Mel and were down to the last game of the night - and the weekend. I mentioned Hanami and Adam and Jo were both amenable, so we started out on the game that should surely be called Picnics for Dicks, as we serially shenaniganed and caused even the usually-zen Jo to cry out in despair several times.

I thought if Adam had only won lamps, I might have an outside shout of beating him on the tie-breaker. But he didn't and I wouldn't have. A convincing victory for Mr H, vanquishing the ghost of Steam Power. 

Adam 2

Jo 1

Sam 0

And finally, after around twenty-three weekend hours of gaming, your insert-festival-name-of-choice-bala was over. What a lovely weekend, thank you everyone!

Helmet by moonlight

 This week’s games night was heralded in the sky by a full moon veiled behind gossamer thin clouds, giving my walk to Sam’s the air of an 18th century oil painting. Ignoring all the traffic, of course.

At Sam’s it turned out we were five in number: Sam, Joe, Adam, Katy and myself. When I arrived, they were in the middle of Destination X, and Adam was hiding somewhere among 6 locations. We had cards in our hand, allowing us to ask certain questions while Adam looked up the answers in a book.

Of the 6 locations, Sweden was very much the odd one out, with the rest being islands or archipelagos in the Southern hemisphere. 

We soon outed Adam from his hideaway in Mauritania. Katy wanted to try another round but the overall consensus was to love on to something that was a bit more like a game.

We chose Vegas Strip. A recent arrival to these shores, it's similar to Las Vegas in that players are trying to control casinos but instead of the vagaries of dice, you can chose what value you place on your turn.

You also have a colleague who is aware that you have deemed two casinos “rigged” or “secure”. In a rigged casino, only the highest valued player wins the $15m bonus, whereas in a secure, everyone except the winner gets the money equal to the value they had in that casino. The way that the two team mates share knowledge is by an exchange of cards, being told “this is rigged,” and “this is secure. “

Since there were five of us, one of the three teams was made up of a single player. I round one, this was Katy who couldn't get a grip on the game and, with no team mate to work with, felt quite frustrated. She ended round one with 6 points while the rest of us were in the mid-20s.

In round two, I was the solo player and, initially I also felt out of my depth, just putting down figures at a whim. But soon I thought I saw some patterns and by the end I had won one casino and done well in a couple of others.

Round three, I was one of the players given two casinos and had to decide which was rigged and which was secure. I was actually given the same two casinos that I’d had in the previous round so I just gave them the opposite role as before and gave the two cards to Sam saying “this is rigged” and “this is secure.”

Except I hadn’t swapped them. I didn’t realise until the end, when the round was scored, that we’d been playing with different priorities. It didn’t benefit either of us, so no harm done, but I was disappointed I’d messed up, especially since I’d spent most of round three thinking that Sam was the best bluffer in the world.

Adam 76

Andrew 67

Sam 63

Joe 51

Katy 43

Next Katy was in the mood for So Clover, but Sam thought it too early. Instead we played Fun Facts where we have to answer questions like “How well dressed are you, on a scale of 0-100.” Our answers were meant to be secret but Katy complained that she could see mine quite easily. I told her not to look and she likened that to someone putting their cock on the table and then saying “guys, stop looking at my penis!”

Katy and Adam had two rounds in which they chose 43 and 44 for their answers, one of which being how much you’d pay for a really high-class meal in a restaurant. We got 5 out of 5 in one round which was “How much do you enjoy abstract art”

Final score 29 “nice score, you’re hitting your stride.”

Hitting our stride.

After 15 years, we’re hitting our stride. Because, as Sam pointed out to me later, Friday marks this blog’s fifteenth birthday. That’s insane. That means I was in my thirties when we started, and that can’t be right. But anyway, here we are. Well done everyone.

After I left, they had a game of So Clover which contained the word “helmet” three times! Crazy days. 

Oh, and Sam and Joe had kicked off the evening with a two-player game of Can’t Stop. Just as well they played before Katy got there, since it’s almost prompted a seizure before, due to her literal inability to stop.

Another lovely evening. Thanks all.

That's a Fact

With Laura and Andrew bowing out on the day, there were still seven of us clustered at Joe's house come 7.30: myself, the host, Katy, Ian, Martin, and 'the Adams' which kicked off an evening of confusion when, on arrival, I thought Adam T and Joe were talking about calling everyone Adam would be a 'great system' but it transpired they were speaking of other things. I should have known. I got even more confused by whose birthday it was. Katy brought cake.

Everyone threw their games on the table. Adam T's included one he'd forgotten how to play and the rules were in Russian. Martin's included Orbit, which immediately had plenty of volunteers - he began setting that up as Adam H and I explained Looot to Joe. 

Despite Looot's quirky name and simple rules, it's quite a thinker, packing that puzzly euro game feel into a fast-moving half-hour or so. As Vikings, we raid the central board to take things home to our homelands, and then score them depending on configurations: you surround buildings or longships with the resources they need to flip them: once flipped, they make said resources worth more points. It's a take-and-make style game reminiscent in one sense of Cascadia/Calico, but competition on the shared board makes it far more cut-throat, as Joe serially discovered at the hands of Adam. 

Meantime Orbit was being played out in teams, with Katy and Ian suffering the slings and arrows of Adam T and Martin. And vice versa. 

I didn't get all the details but I did catch, I think, some reminiscing over when or how the term 'space cunt' originated a discussion about Katy calling someone a cunt (again). It's probably nice being a team though, as you are c**t-side of everyone in this game. Meanwhile on hexagonal Earth, I was losing my way despite playing Looot a few times already this week. My vikings lacked coherency, gathering gold boosters when I severely lacked any gold to boost. Adam - having been the most dastardly - took a clean win here, with Joe coming a solid second on debut. 

Adam 99

Joe 91

Sam 76

Orbit was still in full-dick, so we set up A Message from the Stars. This melted my head when I was a human being, but thankfully I was now an alien, with far less cognitive load, as Joe and Adam took up the role of cryptographers.  

They did very well. It was fascinating to watch them make so much hay from a single word, but my brain contains about as much logical deduction power as a conference pear. I just needed to give them enough clues to work with, which is a comparatively simple undertaking. They cracked the code, and after a near-miss with Royalty, we deciphered each other's messages!

Adam, Joe and Sam: joint winners.

Orbit hadn't quite finished so we set up Misfits. Adam got us off to a brutal start with horrible bit of foundational sabotage, but we managed to build it quite high up before it finally fell over on Joe. 

While that was happening, Katy and Ian triumphed in Orbit! I don't have Andrew's powers of dual-focus and (more) diligent note-taking, so I know very little about it. I did hear Martin hurrying Ian along at one stage, saying he had so many cards to choose from. "And they're all crap" Ian said. But they won anyway. I think around now we had cake. But it may have been later. 

They began playing Saer - I missed this too, apologies - as Misfits continued to implode on all three of us at different stages. Joe did his best with an enormous stack of pieces, but he couldn't quite do enough. During several late-game half-collapses, it was Joe who took the hit again when the entire tower fell over. 

The others finished Saer, with Martin taking a win despite Ian's huge array of cards in Ragnarok!

Martin 10

Katy 9

Ian 8

Adam T 4

They paused to watch the Misfits finale - I took the win - then we debated what to play next. There was a general move towards Fun Facts, which Martin protested, but he was overwhelmed by the amenability of others to it, and we set it up in the face of his ongoing chagrin when no suitable alternative could be decided on. 

My notes here just record the questions. Water! Birthday! Dancing! Lists! Old People! Fixing Things! Museums! Musicals! With the question in each instance being more or less how much we like them all (the exception was museums, where we were queried on how many we'd visited in the last 12 months). The numbers often surprised us and we didn't manage a single perfect round. I was surprised with how much everyone allegedly enjoys dancing, as it's never featured in the years of GNN, but I guess it's very context-specific. We were right in assuming Adam H and I love <the idea of> fixing things, and everyone was more amenable to old people than they are musicals. "I was thinking film musicals" Katy admitted afterwards, her brain perhaps marginally scrambled by all those museum visits (one a month!).  Adam was ashamed of his zero museums, saying this was highly atypical of him. We scored 44, to the rulebook's slightly snooty indifference, and Martin told us he didn't think much of Fun Facts at this point, in case we hadn't realised. 

Adam T left us and as a six we migrated to So Clover. Our first stab was a decent affair, with Katy's Hunger for Diet/Pine one of the high spots. I thought it might relate to the Alt-J song, but Joe realised the 'pining' logic Katy intended. 30/36

Adam and Ian now headed off too, but the four of us had one more game to play. We still had the So Clover itch and set up again.  Martin's Sifting for Flour/Fishing was particularly nice, and though there were a couple of hairy moments we navigated them successfully to join the record of legends or whatever it's called, with a perfect 24/24!

And so to bed. Just one more GNN until Novocon, everybody!