Gameathon

Thursday night saw my (Chris) old board gaming world in Bracknell and beyond meet my new one in Chippenham. A long over due visit from Paul coincided with my semi regular Thursday games session here in my relocated home. Paul was here early this time so an afternoon of games beaconed after we got the perfunctory nuisance of lunch out of the way.

First up saw Jacquie join us in a couple of games of Heck Meck. This recent purchase of mine has seen a lot of activity in the household since I tentatively asked my understanding wife to indulge me in a game. Subsequently, it seems, I now never win a game and that vein continued for the two matches we managed before she had to rush off and collect the kids.

Jacquie 11
Paul 7
Chris 0

Jacquie 12
Chris 7
Paul 6

With the kitchen table to ourselves I then convinced Paul to take me on at 5 Tribes. Sam off loaded this to me a little while ago but I hadn't got to play it yet. As documented before in these fair pages its a simple enough game to learn but quite a brain burner to play. I didn't think too much about my strategy and picked up what ever looked good whereas Paul collected goods cards. Toward the end of the game I was nervously eying his colossal stack knowing how much they could score. Unfortunately due to a misunderstanding of how the multipliers worked he had collected a fair few of the same card and thus negated his advantage.

Chris 245
Paul 169

Then Paul was whisked away for Lego duties with the kids whilst dinner was being prepared and even though the general melee of kids bedtime then ensued we still manufactured enough time to play Nations the Dice Game. Again, possibly, a new title to Paul but this didn't hold him back squeezing in a very neat final round by scoring heavily on famine and war where I narrowly missed out.

Paul 27
Chris 23

Shortly after this was packed away my gaming buddies from Chippenham (Paul H and Stuart) arrived for an evening of laying cards, pushing cubes, making bids and pretending to be a medieval sheriff. After some introductions and quick laugh about there being two Pauls, we got down to it.

The general consensus was many quicker games rather than one big one. A kinda schedule was drawn up with Pairs getting its first airing for the collective. I'm not sure if the rules we play are actually the right ones but it doesn't seem to matter because the objective is met. A quick, light, fun jaunt to get the gaming muscles warmed up. In this bout Paul H calculated his winning position very well by sticking when he was assured of enough points.

Paul H 21
Stuart 16
Chris 16
Paul J 15

Next to the table was King of Tokyo. The remarkable part of Paul H's win in this game was the lack  of visits to Tokyo he made. This many have been instigated by the 5 damage whacking he got from me in his first foray to the bright lighted city. However, three strong rounds in a row which saw him collect 13 points was enough to see him slip in to first place with Paul J narrowly missing out on his turn.

Paul H 20
Paul J 19
Chris 12
Stuart 10

The bits had barely been stuffed back in to their box when 7 Wonders was being decanted and arranged. The first game of the night where nobody needed a rules refresher. Well nearly. This game still causes a memory black spot for Paul J even though he's been playing it on and off for 6 years!

Didn't prove to be much of a hinderance though as he squeaked past me and wrapped up first place. The game was notable for the lack of any cloth which I discovered late into the second era. This threw the proverbial spanner into the machinery of my careful devised plans and meant I couldn't build my last wonder. Shame.

Paul J 46
Chris 45
Paul H 42
Stuart 33

See...No cloth.

Then it was Kingdom Builders turn to be hastily arranged on the table. Stuart absorbed the quick rules explanation like a boss and was playing within 5 minutes. It was here that I managed to catch a bit of luck. My long and winding civilisation finally meeting up to make one large settlement area to take advantage of the citizen scoring card and score big

Chris 62
Paul H 50
Stuart 40
Paul J 37

By now the beers had been sampled to an appropriate level to bring out Sheriff of Nottingham. Nobody really stood out as a particularly good liar but with Paul J, the eventual winner, it was possible that his nursing of a single bottle of ale may have aided his decision making processes. Who knows?

Paul J 205
Stuart 153
Chris 138
Paul H 105

With the late hour approaching there was just enough time for a 13 point game of Push It. Paul J's 'technique' of blasting the pucks to the four corners of the table may need some work as his final score of minus 3 bares testament to a bit of jack abuse.

Chris 13
Paul H
Stuart 7
Paul J -3

And at that we called it a night. I'm not sure we could have squeezed any more games into the evening. What a corker.

Full Meta Boardgames

Tonight's Kubrick-esque post title comes courtesy of Andrew, commenting on my  (Sam's) Take It Easy choice of tile-calling. I'm pretty sure that sentence has never been written before and never will again.

But I get ahead of myself. We began, Andrew and I and Little Joe, playing Timeline. Stanley decided to watch/roam the house, and while I helped Joe as much as I could, we were no match for Andrew, who came through a solid winner on a game he has long professed to admire, but rarely gets to play:

Andrew - all cards out
Joe - one card left
Sam - two cards left

Now it was Stanley's turn, and we played Love Letter. It was, as ever, a feisty affair, and at one (late) stage it looked as though we might be tied on two cubes each. But I saw off Andrew's levelling efforts and secured the win:

Sam - 3 cubes
Stanley - 2 cubes
Andrew - 1 cube

I now packed the boys off to bed and returned to find Chris had materialised - or at least, come through the front door - and he and Andrew had set up Nations: The Dice Game. A quick rules-refresher and we were off.

To be honest I don't remember a huge amount about it now. except Chris's appalling luck with re-rolls. It's one of those games were you can theoretically counter your shitty dice rolls by making sure you have enough re-roll tokens in hand, but every roll Chris did saw him subsequently worse off. It was quite astonishing. Meantime I managed to see of Andrew and nab first place:

Sam 28
Andrew 25
Chris 22

We then played a game that I cannot recall and seeing as I can't read my own writing, will have to remain a mystery, unless someone enlightens us in the comments. But well done Chris on a fabulous victory!

Chris 109
Sam 72
Andrew 39

OK I've remembered it now - it was the Road to Canterbury (or Caolby, going by my notes) which we went for after a lengthy discussion that resolved in us choosing the game I'd suggested ten minutes before. Unusually for me I wasn't pushy - not that much anyway - but nobody seemed able to make a choice, and we kind of ended up with it.

Andrew was unimpressed at best (scores above) but Chris seemed ok with it. I really like it, but maybe that's because I shelled out for the thing, as nobody else seems to think it much cop. Oh well.

Fortunately for us we moved on from the slightly-damp squib to trusted favourite Take It Easy. And despite the ribbing about my apparent imminent win, it was Chris who ran away with it. The game was notable not only for his three straight victories in each round, but also Andrew's choice of racial stereotypes - I hasten to add, he was mocking casual racism rather than races themselves... I did boardgames (see above) and Chris did "depressing English towns" which he seemed to know an awful lot about, even if one of them was Penrith.

Chris 475
Sam 412
Andrew 293

We ended with a slightly mad game of Raj - the last four bids of the last round saw Chris and Andrew bidding the same card each time, and me picking up two positive and two negative tiles as a result. IT wasn't enough to get me anywhere near Andrew, who had scored an unbelievable 36 points in the first round (when I got zero and Chris got 6)

Andrew 66
Sam 39
Chris 30

Andrew headed off into the night and Chris and I played a couple of games of The Duke, which I believe has been described elsewhere in the blog but is a fun and fast distant relation of Chess. Chris won both times, which for me was fast but not quite so much fun. A good game, though.

The Moth at the Window

Saturday! With Sally away on an extended trip to London, I sent out the word to gamers that the table would be free. Flying the flag for GNN were the trusty extra-curricular stalwarts Andrew, Ian and Chris.

With Chris yet to arrive, and both boys theoretically involved, we began with Stanley's choice of Sheriff of Nottingham. This game is all about bluffing, double-bluffing and triple-bluffing. Everyone takes a turn being the Sheriff and everyone else hands him a bag of goods they want to bring within the city walls: they can tell the truth or fib, and it's the Sheriff's job to work out what they're up to. Stanley proved to be rather adept at the casual smuggle of contraband, Andrew found himself serialising paying punishment payments, but Ian sailed rather serenely to a commanding win:

Ian 177
Stanley 129
Sam 123
Andrew 64

Joe hadn't been very interested in the comings and goings of Nottingham trade, and had tried a variety of distraction techniques before finally retiring, post Sheriff, to bed. With Chris now here he, Ian and Andrew bashed out a game of Love Letter whilst I read stories upstairs. I'm not sure what happened, but having completed the game we tried Chris' new purchase of Nations: The Dice Game.

This is a dice-management game with custom dice where you can go a variety of ways in terms of strategy. I couldn't remember what it reminded me of until just now, when I recalled Tiny Epic Galaxies. Except although I think TEG is an ok game I preferred Nations. Not a classic maybe, but a solid game we can bash out in under an hour that balances tactics and luck quite nicely.

Sam 29
Ian 23
Chris 21
Andrew 20

Next up was Istanbul. This game needs no introduction, especially to us as we've played it before. It looked like Ian was leading the charge but, in contrast to my experiences with Tales of the Arabian Nights, my repeat visits to the Great Mosque brought reward:

Sam 5 gems
Ian 4 most cash
Andrew 4 next most cash
Chris 4 least cash

At this point I also managed to win Pretense, the game with the largest gap between sounds-shit and is-actually-fun. I doubt the game has a huge amount of replayability, but the concept is that whilst playing other games, everyone is also trying to fulfil their games-related moments on their hidden cards - if you do so, flip the card over. First to flip all their cards wins.*

*The official rules are slightly more convoluted but I like the simplicity of our house version

At some point during Istanbul the blog title surfaced with Andrew excusing a fart with the comment "It's just a moth at the window". This sent me into hysterics, that kept returning throughout the remainder of the evening whenever I remembered it.

With everyone now willing we began playing one of the old classics: Tsuro. This path-making game is so simple it's almost not a game. Except it is a game, and I won it:

Sam
Andrew
Ian
Chris

At this point I was wondering why I can't bring this type of form to Tuesdays, but hubris was waiting just around the corner in the form of Bandu: I managed to accrue five coins and had plenty of passes in the bank, but like Joe (Berger) and myself before me, I couldn't resist the urge to build, and my construction didn't have the foundations to withstand my ambition and optimism. While Ian built a kind of dainty Barbican, Chris held on for the win with what Andrew dismissed as a low-rise block of flats:

Sam and Chris AE

My impossible structure and Ian in the distance AE

I managed to put an egg cup above an egg! What larks! AE

Chris
Andrew
Ian
Sam

With the evening closing out we just had time to play Push It. Andrew and I established a big lead but Ian came back into it, the Chris threatened to, before fate smiled on me with some deflections and I grabbed a fortuitous win:

Sam's winning move

Sam 7
Ian 6
Andrew 5
Chris 3

With 11 o'clock looming we called it a night. Lots of fun, thanks chaps.

Cheese!