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.

Space Arseholes

A very sparse Tuesday met with just three attendees last night: Ian, Martin and myself (Sam). Martin was first and complimented the new look kitchen, which will look even better once the huge radiator dominating the floor has gone. It's so big it feels like its presence is an extra person lying on the floor, in a cardboard coffin. While we waited for Ian we played a couple of rounds of Odin. 

Ian arrived with the score at 3-2 in his favour but I declined to award him victory, with plenty of time to recover had we kept playing. Instead we set up one of Martin's newbies, Up or Down. This is a game of building columns of cards that, like Lost Cities, may veer numerically up or down, but once you start in a direction you're committed to it. You can only ever have three columns, so if you're forced to take a card that won't fit into a set, you have to sacrifice a set of your choice and start over (although these discarded cards are worth a point each)

You have a hand of three cards and add to your set by playing into this central display, slotting your card into the place it would go in number order (above, for example, you could only play 66-68 between the 65 and 69) and then claiming one of the cards it's adjacent to. Then you replenish your hand with the top card from either deck: face-up or face-down. When the cards run out your columns score number of cards in them x most cards of a single colour. 

Because the numbers keep changing and you're watching both that wheel of possibilities and the sacrifices you're making in your columns, it's quite a thinky undertaking, albeit also ripe with dickishness, particularly at the end-game where everyone must play the cards from their hand too. Ian came out top, despite announcing his impending doom:

Ian 103

Martin 91

Sam 62

Then we moved on to a game deserving of its own curtain flourish and red carpet: Knizia's new space racer, Orbit. This only just launched on Kickstarter yesterday (along with two others by the doctor) but Martin had been gifted a preview copy. It's a bit like Powerships with more control over your own movement, but less of the environs, as the other players keep moving things just as you're about to reach them. 

The goal is to visit all the planets before returning to your own: first home is the winner. You have a hand of cards and on your turn you play one card and activate all the actions on it, in whatever order you choose. There's a number that moves your ship around the intersections of the grid, usually a planet to move along it's orbital path (the one card that doesn't move any planets changes the flips the direction of travel instead) and possibly extras like improving your hand size, improving your energy capacity (energy can be spent on additional movement) or replenishing up to your energy limit. 

As you barrel around space visiting planets, you keep progress on your player board. Knizia has also thrown in space stations that are dotted around the galaxy: ending your movement here grants you a bonus: the aforementioned upgrades/energy, hyperjump portal (jump to another hyperjump space) or hyper accelerator cannon (move as far as you want in any straight line). Additionally, if you're on a planet when it moves, you move with it.

Everyone can see everyone else's progress and play cards accordingly to push planets away from them, something we all fell foul of. Martin got off to a thrilling start but his seemingly unassailable lead turned out to be assailable as first I, then Ian, caught him up while he dawdled in deep space. All of us gave ourselves one planet remaining to visit, but despite having precious few upgrades, luck favoured me as hopped onto the purple planet on the way home to my own. A galaxy of space arseholes, this is Knizia at his most dickish.

Sam wins

Martin and Ian - lose

We moved back to Earth for Landmarks - a third new set of rules for Ian, although probably the easiest of the night. Despite the theme of exploring an island for treasure before seeking the exit, this is a word association game that plays a bit like So Clover on a map. One player knows the landscape of the island, which is made up of treasure, traps, curses (lose the game) an amulet (heals a curse) and water (replenish tiles) and must guide the others to treasure and then safety by writing words on tiles and hoping they'll place them where the clue-giver/navigator intended. 

Two curses or running out of tiles before finding the exit is a loss. In our first game I was the navigator and tried my best to guide Martin and Ian to first the treasure - success! - and then the exit - fail!

Navigator's secret map

Martin took over the navigator role for game 2 and was immediately frustrated by the game's occasional woolliness: oftentimes steering your team can feel like a lottery because a clue may clearly go with word x, but if word x has three open hexes next to it, the team has no idea which one you want them to go to. That had us all slightly baffled, although having played successfully with Sally the night before, I was more forgiving of the rough edges. Martin spent much of his navigator time with this expression:

But despite his chagrin, his stint as a navigator was a success - we only picked up two treasures but got off the island alive! And having escaped, we perused the shelves and Ian suggested Mille Fiori. 

I got off to a good start here, completing early bonuses to establish something like a thirty point lead. But as we all know, 30 points in Mille Fiori is nothing, and though I held them off as long as I could, both Ian and Martin overtook me. For a while we were bunched close together in most un-Fiori-like fashion, but when we hit the final round Martin pulled off some kind of bonus-triggering spell and moved just out of reach. With his final turn he built on that lead, with Ian taking the collateral as the side-points I scored from his turn pushed me into second by a wafer-thin margin:

Martin 199

Sam 180

Ian 179

It was getting late but there's always time for So Clover. Our first attempt was a triumph, with a rock-solid 18/18 just as Martin had predicted - and this was despite neither Ian nor I being sure who Boadicea was. I felt she was heroic, and Ian rightly felt the Romans were involved somehow. We nearly went wrong in multiple ways before we went right:

Thrilled with our eighteen, we played again. Instantly everyone was complaining about their words and Martin decried our decision "Never play again after an eighteen!" he wailed. We kicked off with a four, got another four, and decided we'd go for all fours. We got them! A triumph of sorts. 

That was it. Ian and Martin navigated their way past the sentient radiator and vanished into the night.