Niagara Falls, attendance plummets

The world outside might have been churning up a froth over the US Election, a new lockdown in the UK and Wimbledon AFC returning to Plough Lane after 29 years, but GNN ploughs on regardless like a short sighted old aged pensioner driving the wrong way down a main road.

Tonight there were just three gamers crammed into that car: Ian, Andy and myself. Elsewhere, Katy, Sam and Joe were grabbing a few minutes of quality time together before social mixing is outlawed again and Martin was taking a break from screens before launching himself into some early-morning news coverage.

The first game of the evening was Kingdom Builder. This was played in almost complete silence and it was only Ian's sighs of disappointment that reassured me that I was still connected. Andy, meanwhile, hoovered up the tiles and quickly ended the game.

Andy 76
Andrew 53
Ian 46

After this, I was in the mood for something a little more conversational, so I suggested Niagara. Andy had mentioned several times recently and I had vague memories of it being slightly combative and silly, so Andy ran through the rules for us, and away we went.  

It was fun, trying to judge what the likely lowest card might be (and therefore how quickly the river will move). I'm pleased to say that no one went over the falls. I'm even more pleased to say that just as Andy got back to shore with his fourth identical gem, I arrived back too, carrying the final gem for a last minute game winning set of five different gems.

Andrew wins on tie breaker
Andy a close second
Ian, one gem short

Next was Piraten Kapern, a luck-pushing dice game. Roll eight dice as often as you please to collect sets or coins and diamonds, but skulls are frozen and once you get three skulls, you go bust. On the plus side, if you roll four skulls on your first roll, you go to the Island of Skulls (figuratively speaking) and now have to roll as many skulls as possible, which will take points off your opponents.

So it went as you’d expect luck-pushing dice games to go, until Andy hit the game-winning 5000 points. Then I rolled four dice and I was off to the Island of Skulls! In the end I did 1200 points of damage to my two opponents and the game didn’t end after all. And then I sailed to 5400 points and the game ended with my victory. Andy seemed puzzled as to why they hadn’t had a chance to roll some negative points against me, but put it down to the game still being in Beta.

Andrew 5400
Andy 4400
Ian 1600

Next was 7 Wonders, just to finish off. Ian said he’d screwed himself over in round two and then spent round three burning science cards for money just so I couldn’t build them. It worked.

Ian 52

Andy 50
Andrew 44

Thanks all. See some of you next week, I expect. 

Games are fun

That's what I thought as I walked home after this fortnight's Roll For The Soul evening.

But Roll For The Soul with no Adam or Joe is a delicate proposition. No Ticket To Ride, nor Joe’s selection of light games. But Martin and Gonz had said they’d be there, so I could be sure we wouldn’t be playing Tsuro all evening.

There were five of us in all: myself, Martin, Gonz and Katie and Tom even though Katie said she might go upstairs in a few minutes to watch a Cuban zombie movie. We might have been seven, as there was a couple that Katie recognised from an earlier games night, but we weren’t sure if they were here for games or not. They left without saying anything, but were we supposed to ask them over? Oh, the etiquette of board gaming in public: it’s a minefield.

The five of us began with a new game: Fauna. Possibly the most underwhelming title of any game since Draughts. Martin explained the rules of the game: Place one of our six cubes on a map of the world or on three scales of weight, length or (if applicable) tail length. Accurate guesses score big, close guesses not so big, wrong guesses means you lose your cubes.

This game, so simple to explain, caused much thought and debate as we scraped through our memories for any mention at all of the Moonrat, the Collared Peccary, or the Northern Brown Bandicoot. This latter, in particular, confused a lot of people. The word “Northern” made most of us think it was in the northern hemisphere, but Gonz had played the game Crash Bandicoot on the old PlayStation, so he knew it was set in Australia. He cleaned up on that round, but it was to be a fleeting victory. He ended in fourth, just ahead of Tom.

I played it fairly safe, going for adjacent areas on the map, which meant I usually put a cube on the Tibetan Plateau and the North Indian Ocean since they were next to lots of places. You can imagine everyone’s surprise when one of these guesses turned out to be spot on. Who’d have thought a small furry rodent would live in the Indian Ocean. At the end of the game, I placed second, one point ahead of Katie, and Martin won with over a hundred points that caused the end of the game. We all enjoyed it, and Katie said it was more fun than a zombie movie in Spanish. She certainly got into it, yelling “Yes!” at the top of her voice when she correctly guessed the weight of an animal.

After this, we chose Niagara, the game that Gonz has been hopefully suggesting at several GNN nights recently. Roll For The Soul is exactly the kind of venue for tiny canoes on plastic discs slowly being pushed off the edge of a board, so this time his suggestion was happily accepted.

It was another game with very few rules to learn: use you cards, 1-6, top move your canoes back and forth, picking up coloured crystals and bringing them safely back. I started out as the nice guy, using my cloud card to slow the flow of the river. Later on, though, I turned evil, speeding the river up in an attempt at getting myself to the end quickly, and also maybe sending a couple of opponents off the edge.

Meanwhile, Katie also played an evil game, stealing crystals from myself and Gonz. Not that it made any difference. He calmly picked up four crystals of the same coloured, and paddled his way to victory.

It was still barely nine o’clock, so the next game we tried was Hanabi, the game of firework displays. When Katie heard this, she was definitely keen to give it a try, and even accompanied Martin’s explanation of the rules with “oooh, aaah” reactions, as if the fireworks had already begun.

Mostly it went fairly smoothly, apart from when Martin told Gonz about a particular card because he wanted him to not play it yet. Gonz misunderstood and discarded it, ruining our green fireworks. Otherwise, it was mostly a case of using slight intonations of voices or looking for reactions when considering playing a particular card. Funny but silly. We ended with 19 points.

There was just enough time for one game of Tsuro! Martin hadn’t played before, so I explained the rules. Most of them, anyway. He’s a clever guy: he worked out the rest. We all lasted for quite a long time before Gonz sent Katie off the board, and then Martin and I ended up in the same corner with no available exits. Another win for Gonz.

By now it was ten o’clock, and even though the night was young I am not. So I'm quite glad the evening had to end there. A very nice evening. Thanks all!