Squid Games

Six doughty gamers assembled around the table last night - Gareth and Martin were first to arrive, followed by Joe, Ian and finally Katy. We kicked things off with My Gold Mine, an Incan-Gold-esque escapade of trying to make out of the mine with the most gold and not be dead. On your turn you can either move towards the exit, or stay where you are and grab some gold; the catch being that doing so may provoke the ire - and movement - of the dragon, who will roast you its fiery flames if you're caught, like it's been reading the Daily Mail its entire life.

Some movement cards allow you to swap places with someone. I was discouraged from doing this and praised when I took Katy's advice. She then praised Gareth for swapping places with me! I had won round one, I suppose, and put a target on my back. The game was mainly notable for these dick moves and Joe despairing at everyone else referring to the exit direction as 'forward' - he explained it's obviously backwards because we were returning the way we came in. But are we? Other rationales were discussed. 

Maybe we should have paid more attention to Joe, even if his talk of being roasting was conjuring some unsolicited images in our heads:

Joe 6

Gareth/Sam 4 each

Ian 2

Katy/Martin 0

We split into two gangs of three, with Mille Fiori  set up one end of the table (Martin, Katy, Ian) and Calimala the other. One game involved passing cards and swearing, the other was a weird mash up of area majorities, token activations, and silk. 

Calimala's USP is that each turn you take an action, but if someone took it before you at any point in the game, they get to do so again as well. The actions are generating resources, using them to build infrastructure, or shipping silk to far off destinations. Whenever an action is taken a fourth time a scoring round is triggered, meaning the game starts off sedately but escalates into an every-turn-scores display. I thoroughly enjoy that mechanic and the manic pace it gives rise to, but it's not an easy one to jump into from a strategic perspective, and Joe confessed to being bamboozled by it. "I thought it was about calamari" he rued, leading to the post title. 

Despite that however, he did enough to ultimately draw on points with Gareth, who claimed the win on the tiebreaker of council seats. I was some way behind!

Gareth 35

Joe 35

Sam 28

They'd finished Mille Fiori and Ian's romance with the game continues to endure:

Ian 208

Katy 175

Martin 165

And also reversed their positions in Gang of Dice:

Martin 96

Katy 38

Ian 27

We shuffled seats with Joe, Katy and Martin setting up Tajuto and myself Gareth and Ian embracing Quantum. I confess I lost track of the meditative bag-plunging drama at the other end of the table as Quantum developed into an epic. Things didn't look promising for Gareth and I when Ian got a cube down on his first two turns. Moreover, he picked up beautifully synergising cards that allowed him to tweak resource and dominance in either direction, like a madman with a nuclear etch-a-sketch. 

He needed stopping. 

Somewhere in the stopping-of-Ian, we managed to eke our way forwards as well, slowly catching him up and placing the game into a fragile state where all of us were poised on a single cube for the win. Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, Tajuto continued apace, complete with what now looks like a face-pulling contest amongst the fun-loving monks.

Ian kept engineering himself into one-turn-to-win conditions, cooking up a seemingly-imminent victory, and Gareth and I kept shitting in his pie. We hampered him with attacks and when that didn't work, I sabotaged him by moving one of his cubes into the planet he was ready to win with, meaning he now needed to migrate elsewhere.

It was a dramatic and ding-dong battle, and I managed to sneak the win courtesy of a bit of guerrilla tactics and a couple of spawny dice rolls!

Sam - 0 cubes

Ian and Gareth - 1 cube left

With everything in cosmic balance on Tajuto, they wrapped up at the same time. Joe proved to be best at monking:

Joe 18

Katy 16

Martin 14

And although I waved my new purchase Cafe Order Overload around hopefully, we elected to finish the night off with the classic that is So Clover. And it was so clovery, as Martin and my clovers kicked us off with a couple of six-pointers and we followed that with Joe's, which was nearly a car crash until we spotted some links we'd missed. We did less well on Katy's, surged back with Ian's and then Gareth revealed he'd ignored our demands he not make up words when we saw he'd written Margarglerita and Mashhhhhh on his clover. For shame, Gareth!

On the other hand, they were damn fine clues and we got all his clover leaves immediately. And then everyone left immediately, as another fine Tuesday came to a close.

Breathless

Tuesday arrived, and so did Ian. We chatted for a bit and then realised as we were here, we might as well play So Clover. Ian had tricky words so while he was thinking I attempted to draw the singer we were listening to. Any guesses?

Joe arrived during our ruminations, and together we scored a reasonable 10/12. We were still only three and I mentioned I'd like to try KuZOOka when everyone got here, so Ian encouraged me to set it up. That's why Katy, Adam and Gareth all walked in to find their first game decided for them (sorry) as we collaborated on getting some animals out of a zoo. 

Initially there was some confusion, and I must admit I was feeling a touch of the cosmic frogs as Joe queried my interpretation of the rules. However the confusion turned out to be I'd actually got them correct for a change, and we ploughed on. It was thirsty work.

   

We all had a small hand of cards and use them to advance along the track, and hopefully get the animals to freedom by reaching the white zone at the end (see pic). However we don't play or reveal cards, but just place markers where we think we can collectively reach once some decides that's far enough for now, and all cards are revealed. Hopefully, we get experience points which means more cards and further progress next round.

The advancing along the track is less about movement then, and more planning - how far you advance and where you place your marker is, one hopes, revealing information about your hand. It's like a co-op Perudo. But we started badly when I took a risk in round one, then we busted in round two as well and in round four we busted when going further would actually have made us safe! In the seventh and final round we had to go for broke, but unfortunately the game ended in disaster.

I really liked it and was up for another stab, but Katy's excitement over the animal meeples had faded and it just made her want to play Perudo, which sadly nobody else was keen on. Instead we played My Gold Mine.

In this Incan Gold-esque undertaking, we're all trying to grab gold whilst avoiding being caught by the dragon. Instead of Incan Gold's table-reading though, we're flipping cards: either movement cards to get us to safety, or gold cards that may trigger the dragon's movement. It's quite dickish, especially when movement cards allow you to swap places with someone. Ian had a strong start in round one, Gareth had a good round two, but I snuck ahead of both in the final round - when instead of 'most gold' all your gold scores - as Joe went down in flames. 

Sam 14

Ian 12

Adam 9

Gareth 8

Katy and Joe 6 each

Then we split into two groups. Ian Adam and Katy played Biblios whilst Joe, Gareth and I revisited 7 Wonders Architects. With three of us the game was much quicker than the seven of last week, and divergent strategies emerged, with Gareth going a mostly civil route - with attendant cat noises - me building a hefty military, and Joe focusing on a swiftly-constructed wonder.

Meanwhile in Biblios things were marginally more raucous, as you can probably tell from the facial comparisons below.

The planets aligned with the finales, with everyone wrapping up almost to the second. It was a tense finale, with Adam winning tie-breaker for second according to the official rules and Ian winning it according to Extreme Biblios variant. "I prefer that" Ian said. Either way, they both lost.

Katy 7

Adam 7/Ian 7

In Architects, neither Joe's completed wonder and my warlike ways were enough to prevent Gareth from taking a debut win, despite me grabbing the cat off him. His city full of statues apparently made up for a wonder without a head:

Gareth 46

Sam 39

Joe 34

I canvassed immediately for Fun Facts, and to my recollection there were very little protests. I wish I'd written the categories down now from a fascinating couple of plays. For every dud (How many cousins do you have) there were several bangers, like how much we like animals to how much we think money brings happiness, and we did reasonably well in game one (35 from a possible 48) before falling marginally shorter in game two (34/48) probably because of the dumb cousins question. 

How many cups of coffee or tea had we had today? How many hats did we own? It transpired that Katy owns Many Hats, and Gareth very few. Joe thinks of himself (correctly) as the Most Creative, and Ian has a lot of cousins. Most grippingly of all, the How long can you hold your breath question had us all attempting to live up to our claims at the end of the game. Gareth did much better than he thought he would. I fell 7 seconds short of my 60 seconds. But Adam and Joe can hold their breath, it turns out, quite a long time. Joe can even perform mimes and - to Katy's skepticism - 'open his mouth' while holding his breath, up to an astonishing two minutes. All those swims up at Henleaze in the icy water finally counted for something, even though he'd only written 60 seconds during the actual game. 

But after these eye-watering scenes, it was now time for bed, and as everyone (except me, obviously) made their way into the summery night air, another GNN came to a close.