Unlucky thirty

What manner of cruel fates were lined up against us this week? On Monday, it promised to be a bumper crop, with nine of us expected. Then Katy's two friends bailed out before Katy herself decided that exhaustion had got the better of her and she, too, declined. Then Joe, while moving a book case, had it fall on his head and he had to go to hospital to have it checked out. Finally, my neighbour found water dripping down through her ceiling so I stayed until the maintenance guy arrived and sorted everything out meaning that I would be late if I arrived at all .

That's why, at the regular time, only four players sat around Sam's kitchen table, which Sam had pulled away from the wall and put stools around to accommodate far more people. The four in question were Sam, Martin, Ian and Adam (of the T variety).

First they played EQ.

Sam 41
Ian 30
Adam 25
Martin out, but scored 32

Then they played Panic Lab. I arrived just as it was being put away. I don't know the scores but judging by Ian and Sam's air of bamboozlement, I think either Martin or Adam won.

I took my place at the table, exhausted, and waited for the games selection to be brought in by the others.

A sparse games night

Martin and Adam brought in a couple of clever area control/set collecting games while Sam brought in Villagers and his son, Stanley. I went for certain last place by agreeing to Traders Of Osaka (hoping that the method of choosing starting player was Last Player To Visit Japan, but it wasn't) while Ian got involved in a battle between father and son.

Martin gave a rules explanation, prefacing certain aspects with phrases like "the tricky bit is..." "the mean bit is..." And so on. It all seemed typically devious. Simple, yet difficult enough that I struggle to summarise it here.

The main premise of the game is the market - a row of cards. You can buy everything or take only one card and use it as money later. Of course, if you take a card then you make the market cheaper for others. A delicate balance. Buying cards pushes ships of that colour from Osaka to Edo and, once there, those cards will pay out.

There's more to it than that, but I spent most of the time juggling personal needs with communal benefits. There was never any doubt about first place, but Adam's initial reticence to use his reserve token may have cost him second place.

Martin 18
Andrew 11
Adam 10

Villagers is, I believe, about rebuilding a village after the plague has hit and that's all I know. They ended at the same time as we did and although Ian ended with a good score for a debutant, Sam was more concerned waiting for his son to count up his score.

"Thirty eight," said Stanley.

"Really?" remarked Sam, full of hope.

"One hundred and thirty eight." Stanley clarified.

"Go to bed," Sam ordered.

Stanley 138
Sam 133
Ian 66

After this we were a group of five. What to play next? We chose Voodoo Prince and what a tense event it was. We played three rounds and in round two we were all poised for victory/defeat/humiliation with two tricks each. One more trick would see anyone have to bow out and take whatever points were available. In the end it was Ian. But his haul of eight points got him considerably more than the player who never scored that third trick, Sam, who got only two points.

And this is how slow and steady Ian, never last, never first, won the game. Adam must take some of the credit, though. He was in stone cold last as we entered round three and he fell on his sword to spite the current leader Martin; he was the first to get his third trick just to stop Martin from winning. In fact Adam sent Martin from first to fourth.

Ian 25
Sam 24
Andrew 24
Martin 23
Adam 17

Now Adam left, as heroes should, on a high. The remaining four played L.A.M.A. We chuckled as we remarked on those short sighted people on Board Game Geek who seemed to think that the game required no decisions. Then we demonstrated what they meant by playing a round where no one picked up a card and the starting player (Martin) went out.

Martin 12
Sam 17
Andrew 27
Ian 46

Ian left at this point, and the three of us set off on a game of Flotsam Fight. Another gem from Oink Games and with a gossamer-thin theme draped over the game mechanic. Basically, there are eight lifeboats, numbered three to ten. Each player has a hand of cards of numbers between (I assume) 3 and 99. You can only put the cards in lifeboats that are a factor of the card. For example, the card 12 could go in the boats 3, 4 and 6. The factors are listed on the card, so you don't have to work it out yourself.

It was fun and more subtle than I initially thought. Amazingly, the mathematically minded Martin didn't win.

Sam 5
Martin 2
Andrew - 1

And what about a finale? We chose the old favourite, The Mind. Again, Martin regaled us with some of the dumber criticisms of the game from BGG including one reviewer who'd interpreted the silence during the game as being passive aggressive. "It's a co-op game," Sam sighed.

Some people, eh?

The game was amazing. We got through a tough round one (39 - 45 - 51) and in round three Martin managed to slide a 69 under the 70 that Sam was about to put down.

In round eight we lost a life when a 27 got stuck to the back of another card in Sam's hand, only revealing itself far too late. Despite this, we went into round ten with two lives left. We could almost smell the Dark Mind. Alas, we lost those two lives. Both to close calls, as I recall.

And then we were done. Despite my late start, it had been worth it. Keen to give Flotsam Fight another go, and Traders... too. And thanks to all for attending. Commiserations to those who didn't.

Third Dan

The muggy Bristol heat almost made for an eighth player last night, with even Sybil subdued by humidity. But we were seven: Joe hosting, Martin, Adam T, Katy, Ian, myself (Sam) and newbie Dan who has just moved in around the corner from Joe, so - who knows? - may feature regularly for the year he plans on staying.

I was a little late and before I arrived they played Panic Lab. I know nothing about it other than the fact there is a Dobble-esque real-time pressure and therefore probably best I was late. Martin, apparently, was the least panicked when they finished.

Then, with Dan's arrival imminent, we split into two factions of Pax Pamir and Chinatown and set up whilst trying to recall all the Dans who have come and gone in the near-decade existence of GNN. There's been at least two. I thought there was three, but then I remembered one of them wasn't called Dan. Anyway: in Afghanistan it was Adam, Martin and myself. Across the other side of the world Joe, Katy and Ian explained Chinatown to now-present Dan. Or Joe did. "The rules are very simple" he assured him. "I just can't remember them."

We had no such issues in Pamir, having played it only last week. Adam and Martin aligned themselves with the Afghans whilst I went Russian. This gave me a bit of a workout keeping up with the pair of them placing armies and roads on the board - in order to score points I either needed the Russians dominant or nobody at all. The latter was more likely.

Normally when Pamir gets played there's one player who gets stuck in stasis - not having enough cash, or stuck with off-suit cards and taking underwhelming turns whilst waiting for the tide to change. Last night was the first time this seemed to happen to all of us simultaneously though; Adam cash-poor, Martin frustrated by the cards and me having to add cards to my court then instantly discard them several times.

On the other half of the table, there were no in-at-the-deep-end troubles for Dan - he seemed to be in his element, channeling the survival skills of the perpetually self-employed as he haggled for position in Chinatown. But beyond that I didn't pick up much of what was going on, as Pamir's inscrutability took all our attention.

When the first dominance card was activated (by the appearance of the second) nobody was dominant, so Adam and I shared non-dominant points: a massive 2 each with Martin back on zero. I was seconds away from a win as Martin - now aligned with the British - removed an Afghan road instead of a Russian one. But he changed his mind! Then as we inched towards the third dominance scoring, I changed allegiance to the Afghans and so did Martin. Suddenly we were all vying for dominance and I was in pole position. I gave the warlords a second gift, and wrapped the game up with the others unable to prevent me scoring:

Sam 7
Adam/Martin 2

Martin's face suggested he was marginally less enamoured of Pamir than last week, and both he and Adam said Pax Porfiriana is less abstracted. In fact Martin's complaint wasn't about the play but the lack of theme. As the winner, I was less bothered by that but I agreed with Adam's summary: It was too hot to play Pamir.

Chinatown was still in full-construction so we tried our luck, literally, at PUSH; Joe's recent purchase of card collection and implosion. I remembered Andrew's success and decided to bank as soon as my cards went into double figures, and despite some swingy dice-rolling, this tactic worked for me too:

Sam 74
Martin 61
Adam 56

To Martin's disbelief, they were still at it in Chinatown, so we played the (not hugely dissimilar to PUSH) L.A.M.A as well. Martin's evening went from bad to worse:

Sam 8
Adam 13
Martin 43

As we wrapped that up, the final roof tile was placed in Chinatown and the scaffolders left for good. When the dust of negotiation settled, the triumphant wheeler-dealer was Dan:

Dan 11,70000
Katy 11,10000
Joe 10,80000
Ian 10,40000

It had been an epic but everyone seemed happy to have lived through it. But with the time now pressing on somewhat, Ian departed for home and Adam T followed him out the door. We were left as a five and that was the perfect number for Martin's new addition to his games cupboard, QE.

I guess QE, unsnappy though it is, is still more snappy than quantitive easing, which is what it stands for. Players each represent a country (apart from me - I was the EU) trying to become the most profitable by bidding for industries. Over 15 turns (three rounds of five) an industry tile is flipped over that will score between 2-4 points, and represents an industry as well as a country. If you buy your own country tile, it's worth additional points to you. If you have diverse industries, that's good - but you can also score points by specialising. Your industries are gathered together in a bingo-like card in front of you, where your other scores are recorded as well.

One considerable catch with QE is that you can bid absolutely anything you like: from zero to fifty trillion and higher. But the player who has spent the most, like High Society, is an instant loser. This leads to a see-saw battle battle between bidding high enough to win and not so high as to promote yourself to status of most-profligate. And the other considerable catch is all bids are hidden from everyone except the auctioneer: when it's your turn, you start the bidding (everyone sees that) and then you get to see all bids and announce the winner, but without announcing the bid itself. Instead the bid is recorded on the industry tile and kept face-down. Everybody has the option of looking at the winning bid too, which is really helpful, but can only use this special power once in the entire game.

It amounted to a weird mix of group-think and second-guessing. Martin claimed the first two tiles to himself and got them, considering where we ended up, very cheaply. Dan started pushing the bids up as he claimed no less than three housing tiles. Katy also seemed to be doing well early on. I had a strong mid-game, but Joe was stuck on one tile and kept being outbid. Determined to get the final one, he hiked up the price to 10,000 and got the tile - but also shunted himself into last position by virtue of money-spent. Dan and I looked most productive, and I pipped him to the win:

Sam 41
Dan 36
Martin 31
Katy 28
Joe 18 and spent most!

Katy and I now plumped for Dead Man's Chest to finish the evening. Martin was against it, not least because the rules are always so oddly bewildering to us, and when I brought Dan to see Joe's game collection he also vehemently insisted I had "twice as many" games as Joe. We also mentioned the blog to Dan somewhere around this point, which was a real "Let's invite him to the club, Michael" moment: Dan realised that despite the relatively light baptism with Chinatown, perhaps wasn't all quite as it seemed.

Martin returned with some options but found Katy was already explaining the rules of Dead Man's Chest to Dan. We all chipped in with some extra clarifications at this point, none of which helped particularly. I suggested since Dan was to my right I start and he can watch us play, but I'm not sure this helped either. It is such a bizarre game, and Dan was unsurprised to go out first (I think), reflecting that "I should never have looked" after his second challenge on Katy. Martin was next to fall (I think), followed by Katy and leaving Joe and I to face off. I guessed his bluff, and - even more bizarre - picked up my fifth win of the night!

1 Sam
2 Joe
3 Katy
4 Martin
5 Dan

With the distant sound of thunder rumbling in from Clifton but the heat still as stifling as when we arrived, it was finally time to go. Another wonderful GNN evening, and hopefully we'll see Dan again. He seemed to be as coherent when he left as when he arrived.