Enjoying the Shoelace

More games!

A quiet one this week as only Martin and I could make the trip to Anja and Steve's house. Whilst Steve got Lennon settled however Louie joined us for the evening's starter of Pictures. 

This was a hit with everyone, Anja enjoying it despite getting off to a terrible start where none of us could decode her imagery. It's a lovely mash-up of art, deduction and silliness, leading to the post title where Anja checked in on how Louie was faring with his shoelace medium. 

Martin 19

Louie and Sam 18 each

Anja 11

Steve joined us whilst we set up Jibber Jabble, making five players. As previously mentioned, there's a Just One-type vibe to this (one player doesn't know a word; everyone else tries to clue what it is) but the cluers must combine on the clueing, spelling out words without conferring on what they might be. Because of this my opening clues were LUNAR, BEG, and ASPKO, as the second and third clues hit the rocks of limited/no communication. Fortunately my guess of moon was correct. 

As with last time we played, it was notable how all the agonising and confusion is foisted onto the players who actually know what the word is. Here's a bamboozled Steve, trying to think of a letter.

One of our words - Martin's -  actually was letter, and Louie handled this with aplomb, starting off with ENVELOPE and PEN before we added WRITE. Poised on 5/6 I was the guesser for the final round, but despite Anja playing her 'bonus clue' I unfortunately only had WATER, CHAW, VEPICTORIA and BIOSA to go on. The word was lake, but I guessed surf.  No cigar. 

Louie then headed to bed and the evening's main course was determined to be Mille Fiori. I secretly guessed the order we'd finish in (Martin, Anja, Steve, myself) and said if I got them right I'd get a bonus 100 points. Then I realised that my bonus hundred points would no doubt mean I'd got it wrong.

It's not my favourite Knizia but it's nice and speedy and personally speaking I managed to stage a mini-recovery after Martin twice harpooned early turns I had planned. Despite lagging, I suspected he'd surge in the late game and I was right: at one stage he pulled off three bonus turns in a row. But it wasn't enough to catch Steve, who had sailed off to unreachable numbers. My predications were all out:

Steve 220
Martin 197
Sam 191
Anja 185

We debated what to follow this with, eventually settling on Gang of Dice, because Martin insisted it would be fun. This looked dubious at one stage, especially from Steve's perspective as he watched his dice evaporate over the early rounds. 

But it was his turn to surge in the late-game, as Martin ended the game with less than he started with.

Sam 63
Steve 56
Anja 29
Martin 14

It was close to 11pm now and we called it a night. 

The Games Larbotory

After last week's feast of 8 gamers, this Tuesday shrank to a comparatively meagre four. Come 7.30 it was myself (Sam) Ian, Katy and Martin around the table, with no more to come. We kicked off with a new game of Martin's: Pictures. 

A grid of pictures are laid out and, à la Cross Clues, each player is given a secret co-ordinate. The goal is to make a picture that clues everyone else in to what that co-ordinate is, and you'll score points for correct guesses and being guessed correctly. Then any 'used' pictures are discarded and new ones appear for the next round. The catch is that you're making pictures with very specific palettes: a 3x3 grid of cubes, or a couple of shoelaces, some wooden blocks or a collection of sticks and stones. Trickiest of all, perhaps, a bunch of cards with symbols on. 

This was fun. It was surprising how often we managed to guess correctly, but equally there were occasions when someone was appalled by how obvious their picture allegedly was, only for the rest of us to fail to spot it! Martin took this with a solid 20 points after five rounds, during which everyone gets a turn with each medium.

Martin 20

Sam 18

Ian 16

Katy 15

Next up was  Gold Country, Knizia's mining and share-dicking business. Andrew has just given a brief overview in last week's post, but essentially it's buy low, sell high, and fuck everyone over. 

 

I struggled to really make sense of it. It wasn't just Katy calling the gold nuggets potatoes that confused me - I couldn't quite grasp how the spatial element affected the shares, even though whenever I explained it to myself (or someone else did) it seemed simple. But a lot of variables, and a fairly chaotic experience that Martin, perhaps unsurprisingly, handled best. But it was close...

Martin 79

Ian 71

Sam 63

Katy 54

Then we played a new game of mine called Jibber Jabble. This is a co-operative where, like Just One, everyone is collectively trying to clue a single team-mate in on a random word. However in Jibber Jabble we must spell out clues without actually conferring on what they are, so a cluer can end up even more bamboozled by the guesser. When Martin's word was microscope, Katy - unbeknownst to us, thinking of small - began cluing him with S. Thinking of study, I said T. Ian had been assuming science so said C (in Jibber Jabber, you're allowed to misspell words and keep going). Katy and I floundered and Martin's first clue ended up being stcu. Luckily you're allowed three clues total: we followed that with Larbotory and Petridish, but it was still pretty vague. 

That was one of the hard words though. I think we succeeded on the easy and medium ones to finish 4/6 overall. Very funny. You can say Jibber if you think you know what a teammate is trying to do, and Jabble if you can't - not very helpful really, but added to the inanity. 

Martin was keen to try a game called One Round which we could proxy with cards from The Mind. This is another make-connections co-op, where we're trying to get numbers in sequential order in a circle. We start with three random cards at the 12, 4, and 8 o'clock positions (100/zero, 33, and 66) each with a word assigned to it already. and then take turns drawing a card and giving clues that will tell your team-mates where it should go in the circle. 

As the circle fills up, so there become more spaces between cards and more potential connections. But the words also become more and more similar and, one would assume, potentially harder to differentiate between the gaps. We did pretty well, only losing one life (of three) before completing our task in about 15 minutes, I think. 

We went back to competitive with dnup, the Scout-esque card shedder. I won round one and Katy and Martin won a round each leaving us poised to win. But then Ian won the next round forcing a final decider, where Katie was first out to claim victory!

It was So Clover time by this point so we dove in and our first attempt was pretty poor, something like 16/24. Katy - despite noticing it was gone 11pm - demanded we make amends immediately, so we did. And we did! We overcame a potential portobello on my opener and then sailed through the next three clovers for a perfect end to a very nice evening. thanks all. 

Hope to see you soon.