Mel Fiori

A bumper pack of gamers on Tuesday kicked off with Adam T and I facing off across the two 'islands' of BORD, the abstract viking punch-up game.

This plays over two seasons (summer and winter) but we ran out of time at the end of summer with Adam in a points lead. Martin, Ian and Gareth now here, we kicked off proper with Hot Lead, another Knizia of devilish properties. It reminded me of 6Nimmt in the all-choose, all-reveal pattern, and how hazarding others choices define your own, in part at least. 

It was a baptism of fire for Gareth and I, as we were both stung with negative points hauls:

Martin 67

Adam 61

Ian 53

Gareth and Sam 35 each

Still a quintet, we busted out my recently-returned copy of Cross Clues and scored a moderately bad 19/25, enough - or not enough - to make us attempt it again. I was stuck on Mars/King for ages until the word came to me unbidden: Apollo! And immediately Martin and Adam agreed it was Mars/King. Then they talked themselves out of it with two qualities my own brain lacks - knowledge, and logic. Still, we got 22/25 and were emboldened to go one more time (I forgot to take photos) this time with the presence of Mel assisting. It was a nearly-triumphant 24/25, and I wish I could remember any of the words/clues/funny moments but unfortunately it's been too long now, sorry. 

My notes say that Laura now arrived however, with Joe hot on her heels, and - although she didn't join the table - Sally returned as well, adding to the sense of a full house. We split into two groups, with Martin introducing Joe Laura and Gareth to Harvest, the multi-player Connect 4 with tornadoes. At the other end of the table, Adam thrashed the three of us at Photograph, and Ian and I fell foul of multiple over-exposures.

Adam T 28

Mel 15

Ian 12

Sam 6

Although it was pretty speedy, it wasn't as quick as Harvest. Martin beat the others 110-70 (each) in the first game, and they dealt a newly-arrived Katy in for the second. Laura cleaned up in this one:

Laura 160

Joe 90

Katy 70

Martin 60

Gareth 40 

With everyone now present who was going to be, we split into three - three! - groups across the table. Katy was keen to have a history-making (we suspect) GNN women-only game, and corralled Laura and Mel into Mille Fiori. Martin, Joe and Gareth set up KuZOOka leaving the remaining three of us just enough table space for Babylonia. Good times!

With two Knizias and a non-quarterbacking minimal-comms co-op on the table, Martin rhapsodized at length, almost as though his long-term scheme had finally come to fruition and he could move on to the next group enjoying some heads-down individual player boards somewhere in the south-west. But hopefully he'll stay - they triumphed at Kuzooka on the final round just as we finished not only a tense and tight Babylonia (Adam 155, Sam 152, Ian 151) but a dastardly chaser in Harvest, which Adam won again. Who invited this guy?

We packed away our games whilst also attending to the drama playing out on Mille Fiori, where debutant Mel was having the debut from heaven, a fact which Laura and Katy both tried to take credit for by being good teachers. Possibly true, but either way it was a spectacular score!

Mel 323

Katy 257

Laura 236

Incredible stuff.

However, that was the headliners done with and we lost some players to fatigue, with Joe, Adam and Mel retiring and leaving the rest of us to crack out a couple of attempts at So Clover. Our first attempt was very impressive, too, as we scored 34/36. Sadly I took no photos of our clovers and time hasn't been kind to my memory for the last decade or two, and especially since Tuesday. But it was a triumphant finale.

Or was it? As Laura and Ian headed for their respective beds, a brightly awake Katy cajoled us into the second game and this time we were rather less triumphant, scoring just 16/24 and prompting an unusually mournful tone from Martin about staying after the bell has rung. 

*

Somewhere in the midst of all this I think we played Strike twice as well. I won one of them, and Martin the other. I think? 

 

Inky Blinders

 I arrived at Joe's a little late but actually perfectly timed, as I was let in by Joe's daughters who had just popped out to get their cat.

Downstairs Ian, Joe, Martin and Gareth were playing Hot Lead. While I watched in bemusement, Katy arrived, followed shortly after by Adam in mirror shades.

Anyway, Hot Lead finished…

Martin 61

Gareth 90

Joe 55

Ian 29

Next up, all seven of us played Phantom Ink which is like Decrypto for dead people. We are spirit mediums trying to divine the object that a spirit (for example, Joe and Ian) knows. They both know a word (always a physical object) and the two teams of spirit mediums have to choose questions from a hand of seven cards that will help one team (and not their opponents) guess the word. The Decrypto ish part is that everyone has access to the same answers.

Martin, Katy, Ian and Gareth beat Joe, Adam and me twice.

It was a lot of fun. Although it wasn't as brain burny as Decrypto, it still involved a decent amount of lateral thinking and Joe would often ponder "There must be a good answer to this…" after we'd handed over our questions.

Then we split into two groups. Ian, Katy, Joe and I played Mille Fiori, a game now so well understood that we zip through it in about half the time we used to.

Gareth, Adam and Martin played Keltis: Das Orakal. I guess Reiner Knizia thought the world needed another Keltis game. Especially one with a German subtitle

Mille Fiori began with a brief discussion about whether being starting player in the first round is a disadvantage. Later, Katy was briefly in first but seemed disappointed that she hadn't used her finger to its best advantage. Soon after that Ian leapt into a big lead and Joe overtook Katy while she was in the toilet. 

As we both played our Knizias, there was a moment of curious synchronicity. Katy complained that her options were a choice of one point, one point or one point. Then Adam, playing keltis, complains about the same thing immediately after. We asked if he was making fun of Katy and he insisted he'd been completely oblivious to our banter.

Keltis ended…

Martin 73

Adam 72

Gareth 64

They watched the end of our game with Ian poised to finish the game. Gareth asked why there was such a disparity in the amount of counters we had left and I, in a distant last, joked that I was just more efficient than the other players, thus misleading Gareth into thinking I was in a massive lead.

But then my fortunes changed. After being in last for much of the game, I hit an "extra go cascade" and pass Katy and then hit another two high scoring options and went around the board in about three turns. My first win. Katy took solace in the fact that a tie between Ian and Joe meant she finished third.

Andrew 188

Joe 174

Ian 174

Katy 158

Then we played Doodle dash, the game of stupid pictures done quickly. The number of professional artists around the table (which included me, somehow) made Gareth and Katy cautious but there's no substitute for speed.

Katy's pyjamas 

My slippers 

More synchronicity, two identical restaurants 

I have no idea 

Talking of which, there was a couple of times when the die would not roll on the Stop side. I even had enough time to start shading my picture in.

Ian 9

Adam 7

Andrew 7

Martin 7

Katy 6

Gareth 5

Joe 4

It was a crazy blast and my last game of the night. I've no idea what happened next. Hopefully someone will elaborate in the comments.

Cheers all.

We're all the 99%

At 7.45 there were seven of us clustered around Steve and Anja's table: along with Steve and Louie, Joe and I were first to arrive, then Ian, Adam and Martin made it a septet. Lennon made a brief appearance too, but mainly to collect a squidgy toy for bed. At Joe's suggestion, we set up 7 Wonders Architects, one of a clutch of new games in his bag. 

This is like an even-speedier 7 Wonders, or at least it would be with less players. Everyone's cardboard wonder starts scaffold-side up, and as soon as you've the resources to build it it's mandatory to do so, discarding the cards and flipping it over, starting from the bottom and working up - as Louie pointed out, you can't build from the top down in real life either. 

Ian's Big Dude, with pedestals flipped

Flipped wonder sections score points and - as with the original game - may also trigger bonuses. So far, so similar. But rather than drafting cards simultaneously, players take turns taking one card from the decks placed between players face-up, or - as I kept forgetting - from a shared face-down central deck, representing a mini-gamble. Wonder resource needs are fairly flexible: it's usually x number of matching or non-matching resources and what they actually are is immaterial. I think someone built a pedestal out of glass at one point. 

Science cards are cashed in for science tokens (one-off rewards/end-game scoring) and military cards compete with neighbours whenever war is triggered, which is less predictable than the end of a round. In fact, there are no rounds, and the game chugs along at a fairly rapid pace until someone - Adam, in this case - completes their wonder:

Adam 35

Louie 34

Ian 30

Sam and Joe 28 each

Steve 26

Martin 24

It was a bit long with seven of us, but the reaction was mostly positive. "I enjoyed it" I said. 

"I'll enjoy writing about it" Martin muttered. With Anja now joining us and Louie wanting one quick game before he was exiled to his bedroom, we set up That's Not a Hat.

The chalice of palpable disdain passed from Martin to Adam as confusion reigned supreme - the game's actual aim, rather than an inadvertent by-product. Ian and Anja confessed to having no idea what cards they had, and Ian's speculative skateboard proved his undoing. 

Ian loses (three penalty points)

Adam, Joe, Steve, Martin and Sam all win (no penalty points)

Louie left us and we split into groups. It was now Martin's turn to break out a new game in Hot Lead, for which he was joined by Joe and Ian. 

Anja was keen to try Hansa Teutonica and I needed no encouragement. Steve looked slightly askance at the busy board but signed up, and soon established a classic confused-Steve-scores-loads-of-points strategy. I missed what happened in Hot Lead, other than it finished before before I'd concluded teaching Hansa Teutonica, as Martin crowed happily. Joe win twice and Ian once before they moved on to Gang of Dice. 

Ian's view

We'd kicked off in Hansa Teutonica by now, and Steve's early trading post in Guttingen (I think?) started hoovering him up points. We kept remarking on it, but didn't actually do anything about it, each of us busy concocting our own little schemes. 

But you know in a game where one concocts their own little schemes, Adam will probably concoct more efficiently than anyone else, and so it proved in a tense - for some - conclusion. Steve triggered the end of the game by hitting 20 points, with the rest of us some way behind. Anja had no network to speak of, as our scheming around Guttingen kept her on a miserly two actions for half the game. I had some end-game points to score, but not enough to catch the breakaway leaders: Adam and Steve tied on points, and were only separated by the second tie-breaker!

Adam 48 and most valuable network
Steve 48
Sam 35
Anja 15

Brutal stuff. At the other end of the table Ian was wrapping up a win in Spots, of which I missed all the drama as we were hypnotised by Adam's scoretrack action in HT. Joe and Martin finished with three dogs each. We made a big group again for another new game out of Joe's magical bag: Fun Facts. 

This a slightly Wavelength-esque co-operative where in each round we are asked a hypothetical question such as How much would you need to be paid to work for a year at a research station in Antarctica or a factual question like How long have you been doing your favourite hobby. Everyone writes their answer - always expressed as a number - on the back of their own plastic chevron and then we go around the table adding ours to the column, placing it where we think it's correct relative to everyone else's. Once that's done, the starting player has the option of moving their own chevron before they are revealed, starting at the bottom. Collectively the hope is we're in ascending order, but of course the game throws up surprises. 

We score points for each chevron that keeps to the 'order' we're trying to establish. Above we are discovering everyone's liking for celebrating their own birthday. Ian (35) is perhaps unsurprisingly at the bottom. Joe (orange) and Anja (red) are the numbers slightly out of kilter. 

I loved this game, even if some of the questions skew it rather heavily away from joyful innocence and into unabashed smut. How comfortable are you around nudity? Do you enjoy time with old people? By the time the relatively innocuous query about favourite hobbies arrived, everyone was basically talking about wanking and how much Steve likes reading on the toilet (99%) which he not unreasonably argued was a percentage of the time he enjoyed reading, imagining one would assume that if he's not enjoying it, he'll stop. 

We didn't do brilliantly but it was a fascinating insight into everyone's psyche, sending Ian and Adam home with possible big thoughts. Steve was starting to yawn but we coaxed another game out of him that turned into four games - the rapid and tense Kites. Our first attempt was the most successful as we weren't that far off emptying the deck. But every time we said one more time, we seemed to get worse.

So much so we had to eventually accept that we are just shit at flying kites, and better at judging each other's peccadillos. After decades of our favourite hobby (exceptions: Ian (video games), Adam (football), Anja (listening to music)), at least there's something to show for it.