Memoarrr 49

The occasional Thursday Night Club was occasioning last night, but the faces were all different. With no Ian. Andrew or Adam there was no morose fatalism, pithy one-liners or emotionally hollow apologies for sneakily harpooning your best-laid plans. The gouty rules-bungler was present though (me), and so were Avuncular (not fat) Big Joe and sweary Katy, who kicked things off by yelling Shit! the first chance she got.

pic from Joe's earlier in the week

That chance was with Memoarrr! and an audience of two: Stan and Little Joe (less little by the day) and they added a tingling of performance pressure as we tried to remember where our walruses, penguins and lava were. I began as I left off on Tuesday, winning three of the first four rounds, but this was largely down to the assistance of Dirk as thrice I went random and pulled it off. However Katy's resurgence in the endgame - to a soundtrack of wails from Big Joe - proved decisive, as her three treasure cards outscored my eventual four:

Katy 8
Sam 7
Joe 0

It was bedtime for the boys, and I had to shout down Stan's protests as he was keen to play Memoarrr. I felt a bit mean but his first week in secondary has been a big one. Whilst he read upstairs, Joe introduced me to the joys of Mhing, the Mah-Jong variant in card form.

As with Mah-Jong it's a game of set-collection, with the inherent risk that whatever card you discard may help someone else make a set or even complete their collections (they get to shout Mhing if so). We agreed to play for 45 mins and I was unexpectedly the winner, having scored a measly 32 points. Officially you play to 500!

Sam 32
Joe 22
Katy 4

Next up was Men at Work, one of the hits of the summer in the Morrison household with even Little Joe admitting he liked it. It's a very simple stacker where on every turn you add either a worker or a girder to a growing construction on the table, but each one with some caveat regarding placement. Workers might carry bricks or beams, girders might transport things or have to touch certain other colours on the site. You have three safety certificates (lives) to avoid losing, and a quarter-way through the game can start earning Worker of the Month certificates by placing the highest piece on the construction.

This was the most geometrically-sound game of Men at Work I've played - lots of workers came out early (we ran out) and nobody placed a girder at a nasty slant, meaning our construction, despite being the product of a demented architect, never collapsed. Katy was a clear winner and I think Joe and I tied for second. Can't remember now.

Katy: P500
Sam and Joe: P60

After a brief debate we decided to play something we all knew, and settled on the Quest for El Dorado. I gave Katy a brief refresher whilst Joe set up a fairly tricksy route, and then we were off.

While Katy and Joe made slow progress over the first board, I lingered at the back picking up new cards. My plan was to get two Urenhwoners (probably wrong spelling; my edition is German) and reduce my deck so they came around quickly. Katy picking to up the Kartographer (add two cards to your hand) gave me the idea of combining with those two, but while I was busy admiring my plans I was falling behind, and in my rush to catch up had to somewhat reduce the idea of deck-reduction.

Katy, despite having to wait two turns to navigate the final jungle, sailed into the mythical city with Joe and I far behind: I kartographed my way into second place on the next turn but poor Joe needed two more turns to make it over the line. It was nice of Katy to wait for us though.

Katy
Sam
Joe

Joe got up from the table in going-home-haver, but I managed to reseat him with the offer of NMBR9, in a slightly abstracted return to building things upwards from the tabletop. The scores were 73-71-70 (I think) but I now don't recall who won at all. It's both reassuring and terrifying to know this is despite being almost entirely sober.

And with that, another Thursday concluded.

Mhing the merciless

Eight gamers squeezed into Joe's kitchen for some pre-Easter gaming fun. Along with Joe were Martin, Katy, Ian, Stuart, Sam, Andy and me.

We began with a nice communal game of Fuji Flush. Sam's opening hand was so bad the he ignored the usual rule of keeping them secret to show his neighbours: a veritable blue rainbow of cards below four. His luck changed slightly during the game, though, which is more than can be said for Katy.

Andrew 0 cards left
Andy, Martin, Stuart 1
Sam, Joe, Ian 2
Katy 4

At this point we embarked upon perhaps the longest discussion we've ever had about what to play next. Splitting into two groups of four was obvious, but who would be where and what was on offer?

Slowly, one game after another was brought to the table with varying degrees of reaction. Heaven and Ale was an early favourite but there were worries about the amount of space it would need. Joe then made an executive decision and got out the card table. With the chance of a card game on offer, Martin quickly moved his chair and sat beside it. He even grabbed onto it and drew it towards him, making him even more snug.

With more room on the large table, Heaven and Ale became the clear front runner and, in an effort to avoid further procrastination, Sam was encouraged to set it up and see who was interested.

Katy seemed keen but didn't want to learn a big game so soon before her year-long absence. So it was me, Sam, Ian and Andy who set off on our monastic beer quest.

The other group began their card game trilogy with The Mind. This game of consecutive guesswork played out in silence, punctuated by muffled laughter. The only talking was between rounds when they discussed the previous round.

And there were plenty of rounds to discuss. They managed to make it to the Dark Mind where the cards are played face down. Katy wanted to pee, but carried on thinking that the game was about to end at any second. But it didn't. They survived one insurmountable odd after another and cleared round three!

At this point, Katy had to go to the toilet. Did this interruption ruin their flow? Or was the task too great to continue, since once she was back, they failed round four. But only by a narrow margin.

Then they played Krass Kariert, which I paid less attention to. All I recall is the occasional comment about how mean you could be to people.

Joe and Martin won
Stuart came second
Katy lost

Finally, they played Mhing, a card game version of Mah Jong. I kept hearing calls of "Chow" and "pung" but since I was now deep into the endgame of H&A, I didn't follow it. Joe helpfully suggested to me that "Fuck the green dragon" could be used as a blog title, and as I was jotting that down, Katy began the next round with the words "that is the south wind... from my anus." Since the pen was already in my hand, I thought I'd preserve it for posterity.

Katy 128
Martin 64
Stuart 32
Joe 8

The reaction to the game seemed positive, but mostly prompted a longing to actually play Mah Jong. Joe even brought out his briefcase-sized, slightly stinky, set for all to admire.

Meanwhile, in Heaven and Ale we were in the final stages. Or, for Ian and me, the death throes. Andy had overcome his slow start where his biermiester seemed unwilling to go anywhere in a hurry, and was now bearing down hard on the monktastic Sam. I, once again, failed to put together a money making machine.

Ian had a healthy looking board and spent most of round five sauntering round and completing a cheap shed, but then he couldn't get to the scoring tokens in time in round six. This meant for the both of us the final round involved leaping absurdly ahead just to score any points at all.

Andy and Sam were playing a much more measured game. They took their time in round six with money in the bank. Andy managed to complete both sides of his board, to our amazement. He tried to insist that he didn't know if that was a good thing or not, but he did so in the tone of voice of a man sitting in front of a five course meal trying to tell people that it might not fill him up.

Sam played his usual monk-heavy game and with a very highly placed biermiester, he did enough to see off the challenge from the young upstart Andy.

Sam 49
Andy 40
Andrew 23
Ian 18

Actually when we ended, Mhing was still someway off completion, so we banged out a few quick games. For Sale was first, with some peculiar tableaux of cards whose values were all pretty equally shit. People picked them up for nothing usually with me as the main beneficiary. And then, when real high cards came out, everyone overpaid for them. Everyone except me. What I'm saying is my pile of cash pushed me from distant second into first.

Andrew 70
Andy 68
Sam 58
Ian 44

Then we played a couple of games of Fuji Flush. The first can only be described as Friendly Fuji Flush, as we seemed to follow the cards on the table rather than ruin them. It was the first game of Fuji Flush to have a sense of community, someone remarked. It was also very short, with Sam getting rid of his six cards in six rounds.

Sam 0 cards left
Andy and Andrew 2
Ian 3

Then we played a more typical spoiling game. It lasted longer and, if I'm being honest, was more fun. There's a moral in there, somewhere.

Andrew 0 cards left
Ian and Sam 1
Andy 2

Now we were all back together again and we decided on Dead Man's Chest to finish us off. This was Stuart's first game so we explained the rules to him (not that that's helped in the past). And we were off!

Andy was out first, since he merely passed on the chest, raising the bid by one. He never even looked at the dice. It could be considered an audacious tactic but the truth was he wasn't keen on the game. After that...

Joe out by accidentally looking
Stuart out to Kathy's bid of Dead Man
Martin out to Katy's blind bid of 1-1
Ian out to my challenge
Katy out wrongly challenged my 5-5
Andrew out when Sam challenged me
Sam wins!

And with that, we drew the curtain on another night of entertainment. Thanks to Joe for hosting and to everyone else for their company.