Socially Distanced Thrashings

Friday night Martin rocked up at Talgarth Towers for a few face to face games, beginning with Spies and Lies. From the mind of Don Eskridge (The Resistance) and the format of Stratego, this is a two-player battle of getting the Spy through the door of your opponent's castle - or, if you prefer, to their end of the track, whilst they're attempting to push it up the path towards you. 

It's pretty simple - you 'program' four cards out of nine (you have ten cards total, but one is always removed) face down, and they're then revealed. Catch one: they must be laid in ascending order (outside of the rogue '4' card, which can go anywhere). Catch two: if your opponent successfully guesses what your next card is, it doesn't activate.

On a first play I was utterly bamboozled as Martin seemed to read my mind - I felt like a toddler lying about eating the chocolate while it was smeared over my face. In the second, I managed a win. It was the last win of the night for me! 

Next up was My City, Reiner Knizia's surprisingly unKniziary take on legacy gaming with a Take it Easy style placement of tetris pieces on your own board - try to cover up rocks, but not trees. The first game is really that simple, but subsequent games give a slight escalation in complexity as now your buildings want to be grouped by colour, and now you have a well you want to surround with a different building on each side. Though I won game 2, Martin emerged 2-1 winner overall as his third city was marginally less ramshackle than mine. 

Then we played Glasgow. Martin is the third person I have introduced the game to, and the third person to beat me, this time in spectacular fashion. I thought his focus on factories was going to be misguided, but it was most certainly guided. By whom I'm not sure, but Martin kept his factories working hard and by the end - the 20th building built in the titular city - I think he'd constructed about fifteen of them. It was a total shitshow from me. Good game though. 

We finished the night with Watergate, and Martin - the Washington Post - looking for revenge on my last victory as Nixon. I played a suitably dirty campaign, but Nixon, possibly mildly inebriated by this point, which is no way to see off a combative investigation from two or more sharp-minded journalists, took his eye off the ball. Martin won and I never saw it coming. 

Glasgow... two

Only one day after our weekly gaming fix, I got a text from Sam to see if I was around for a sneaky game. I was, and this is how I came to be introduced to Glasgow, a 2 player game that came in a small box but still took up most of the table space.

It involves two meeples going around a rondel, a circle of possible actions, with the usual rule of the player in last goes next. If I thought it would be just a Tokaido esque experience of just choosing the next available space, moving as little as possible, it soon opened out. Once you're happy with your resources, certain tiles become more attractive and it's a case of balancing the benefits of racing ahead with the pitfalls of giving your opponent too many free turns.

The motive behind all this is the chance to build Glasgow, in a 4x5 grid of factories, shops, banks, etc. Different things have different abilities or point scoring options. It seemed fairly familiar and nicely put together. I won by about ten points, forty-something to Sam's thirty-something.

Next we finished with a two-player game of Codenames. One round each of being the codemaster and we did pretty well each time. I can’t remember our best clues, but some of the more tenuous ones were me cluing “Resistance” for “France” (obv) and “Parachute” (less obv) and Sam offering “Orion” for “belt” (easy) and “vacuum” (tricky).

And so, after barely an hour, I set off home. Early nights are the new late nights, it seems.