Ships, towers, and submarines

This week's GNN nearly didn't happen, which I believe (I cannot fully recall) would have been a first since the inception of the blog. With the Eastonites busy with nappies and sleep deprivation, Joe unable to host and Andrew poorly, it took a plaintive email from Katy to stir the collective consciousness to life.

I was supposed to be off out on a beer-laden jolly at work, but I decided I was too tired to face two hours of drinking before tea even started, so stepped in to host at the last minute.

Come 7.30 Katy, Ian and Andy appeared at the door, and I forced them to play Riff Raff. This game (see previous post for description) is a lot of fun, unless you're Andy, who announced near the end he didn't like balancing games at all. This began a trio of disdainful verdicts that ran through the evening, with Ian next to bring judgement.

 Riff Raff

But before that happened, Katy won her inaugural seagoing adventure with Riff Raff drawing to a close tight at the top, but with Andy rolling around in the hold, being sick on himself:

Katy 0
Sam 1
Ian 2
Andy 18

We stepped into the front room to admire my shelving pick the next game. I got a bit excited when I realised Andy knew the rules to Firenze, and made an executive decision that he teach us. "It's not a long game!" I trilled, like a town planner in front of the media expecting a bus to sail around the corner on time. Oh, Sammy.

So in Firenze we're all trying to build the towers in the town and get points for doing so. That much was straightforward and easy to pick up. The vagaries of strategy and tactics come in the cards, of which you select one at the start of every turn. The problem was my set of Firenze is German, so there was an awful lot of checking the photocopied English rules, making sure we had the right card, and then attempting to remember what the card did. Andy had been playing online and felt comfortable, so much so that he did at one point get labelled "tower c**t".

Germ of an idea

Katy didn't seem to be that perplexed after some first round confusion. I remained slightly bamboozled throughout, only relaxing slightly when I focused on an obvious plan and ignored everything else (probably to my cost). Ian however had a gaming meltdown, going from semi-fluent in German and semi-lucid on the game to suddenly unable to compute anything - and fatalistically allowing Andy and Katy to take his last two turns for him while he sat and shook his head, like a broken man.

a building site in Florence

Andy, as we thought he might, walked away with it. Ian announced he didn't like the game, with a reasonable degree of conviction. I was disappointed but I don't really feel I've played it yet - I never truly got past asking for translations and wondering what the hell was going on.

Andy 61
Katy 41
Sam 38
Ian 27

It had taken what we in gaming circles call "fucking ages" to play, and we desperately needed some light relief. I was canvassing for Push It when Katy announced she had Deep Sea Adventure so we played that instead. We also played Pretense (non-leaderboard) which I won by getting Katy to change seats with me and dismissing her suspicions that I was about to win Pretense by saying how far-fetched the idea was.

That was mid-adventure, which Katy played with abandon, announcing she never wins whilst going to hair-raising depths of the ocean while the rest of us legged it back to the sub. Andy, despite trying to play safer, never got anywhere. I hedged my bets, mixing some safety play with one bit of luck-pushing.  Unlike my similar Incan Gold tactics, it proved a decent manoeuvre:

Sam 30
Ian 23
Katy 20
Andy 0

With 11 o'clock showing on the clock, we drew the curtain on an unusually quiet Tuesday that had a little bit of everything  - old favourites, new brain-burners, dexterity challenges and push-your-luck dice-rollers. Plus Katy dissing her own game at the end, making up the trio of unimpressed gamers.* But despite that, we had fun.

*she didn't diss the game, actually, just her record in it.

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!