President Hickman

A week might be a long time in politics, but 20 minutes gave Ian and I (Sam) time to play a couple of games of Love Letter while we waited for Adam to arrive. This was notable mainly for Ian thrice playing barons when I had the princess, the third time saying "this has to work at some point" before his countess went down in flames. We played with the new 6-player version, which adds two new characters in the spy (potential point if you played the only spy and make it to the end of the round) and chancellor (draw two cards, place two of your three cards at the bottom of the deck).

Then Adam arrived through the rain, and we sat down to a game of SHASN, which tells the story of an election: the regions, the voters, the underhand tactics (my copy is the Indian version; there's also a USA edition). The board is broken into nine regions that the players contest: simply put, voters are the currency of victory - or not. The currency of progress is down to four political resources: funds, media, trust and the somewhat nebulous clout. Basically, you gather resource tokens representing the public's faith in you and 'spend' them to influence (or buy) voters, which you then add to the map. Having the most voters in a region means you can gerrymander: dicking about with voters in your own or adjacent region to swing things in your favour. Having a majority (-not just the most, but over half all the possible voters) means - if you hang on to it - you'll score points at the end of the game, which arrives when all majorities are claimed. 

But although it sounds, and broadly is, an extremely swingy take-that affair of screwing each other over on a regular basis, SHASN's theme comes through clearly in part because of how you get these resources: at the start of your turn you're asked an interview-style question on policy from a deck of Ideology cards, and you're permitted one of two binary answers. In either case, you take the card and collect the tokens on it: if you answer in the style of an idealist, say, you're going to improve the public trust in you. If you take a more populist view, you'll be a hit with the media. As well as gaining resources, you keep the card itself, and the gathering of cards builds an impression of your political identity, as sets of cards spark first bonus resources (for every two matching cards you have) and then additional abilities - usually of the nasty, interfering kind. Five matching cards endow the players with the really brutal stuff: I, predominantly playing the role of the Trump-esque supremo, could steal resources from other players on every turn and force their voters away from the polls. Adam - a more idealist identity - could get voters at less expense and convert others to his cause. But Ian's extra voters and ability to gerrymander not one, but two voters for every region he controlled was brutal. 

When you hear the question, you don't actually know the ideologue identities of the answers you're offered, and must instead work on your hunches. The idealist and capitalist are usually easy to spot, but the lines between the supremo and showstopper are a bit more murky. They both sound like twats, and oftentimes you feel like each question deserves a bit more nuance as to how they are answered. But the fun of SHASN is in the humour of these moments, and the fact that in order to win this election, you can't take a consistent position: simply having loads of the same type of card is ultimately unproductive, so the idealist is forced to tax sanitary towels, the capitalist must make concessions to healthcare and the populist might decide to be anti-capital punishment. 

As a game it feels like an inelegant punch-up, foregoing the control you might enjoy for round after round of face-slapping and shin-kicking, with interesting seams of luck, trading and pact-making running through it. But that's what we signed up for, and we all enjoyed it as a sort of event: particularly Ian, seeing as how he closed out the game in one fell swoop - suddenly polling day was upon us, and Adam and I didn't have time to form a coalition against him.

Ian 34 / Adam 23 / Sam 12

If a week is a long time in politics though (sorry), SHASN only took a couple of hours so there was plenty of evening left to fill, and we began with Fae, or Land of the Old Men's Penises as I immaturely insisted on calling it. 

I love Fae's simplicity of simply pushing old men's penises druids around on your turn in order for them to throw a party once no-one's looking; the catch being each player's colour is secret. Adam's afternoon siesta perhaps came back to haunt him, or maybe he was fatigued from all that canvassing. I snuck a win despite gifting Ian multiple points for getting the parties started.

Sam 47 / Ian 41 / Adam 39

Next up was For Sale. This is a copy Joe gifted to me and we found after our online adventures in 2020 that the older version had a slightly different make-up, with both properties and cheques numbering zero to 20. Ultimately, it made little difference to my experience of For Sale, which often ends something like this...

Adam 72 / Ian 68 / Sam 60

we were baffled by how the boring 20 skyscraper is considered 

better than these bonkers abodes

And we rounded off our night as a trio by playing Project L, which I thought I was rather well set to win until Adam revealed his score. Adammmmmm!!!

Adam 23 / Sam 19 / Ian 15

The winner hit the thankfully-dry road, but Ian and I felt we had one more game in us, and it was Wavelength. I wrote down all our spectrums and clues, but somehow this morning they don't seem quite as compelling as they did last night. Still, we overcame our different spheres of knowledge (Star Trek; Pokemon Go) and different paradigms of perception (IKEA furniture) to scrape a win. A fun way to round off a fun evening, thanks chaps!

Agents of Change

Last night Andrew and I played Lords of Waterdeep for the first time in four years. With just the two of us, it was a quite speedy affair even with the Scoundrels of Skullport expansion included. We shook off a little rules rustiness on set-up and leapt in to the titular city, gathering adventurers for our quests. 

I felt I was off to a good start and this confidence only increased as Andrew's agents seemed often a source of frustration to him rather than good news. "Why the fuck did I do that?" he sighed at one point. He also had a huge pile of the punitive skulls, whereas I was stockpiling quests and buildings that my Lord - whose name I now cannot recall, but he looks like a blue squid - would reward me for handsomely. I was so confident of victory that I relaxed somewhat, taking somewhat lackadaisical moves on the last two rounds. I don't know if being more concentrated would have helped or not, but Andrew's margin of victory was something like 30 points in the end. A fool and his dreams are soon parted...

Andrew followed this with another triumph. Cube Quest first appeared on GNN eight years ago, and is as much fun now as it was then. True, we didn't play with any tactical savoir faire at all, mainly just taking turns to aim for the kings, but the fun in this game is mainly about things going wrong, which they often did. More often for me:

Andrew wins 2-1

Andrew was now making going-home mumblings, but agreed to stay for his first crack at the haptic joy that is Project L. I would stop short of saying I 'love' Project L in the way I do some games, but it's always enjoyable and doesn't outstay it's welcome. Plus it gives me an opportunity for revenge, in what was a fairly low-scoring game:

Sam 19

Andrew 17

And that was that! Nice to get a trio of fast-moving games in on the night the heatwave finally broke. Hope to see you all on Tuesday.

Gwyneth Paltrow *is* a Person

On Saturday Katy, Ian and I (Sam) met at my place for some extra-curricular gaming. Katy was running slightly late so we set up Project L, but after a couple of turns she arrived, so after the briefest of chats we reset and started again as a trio. As touched on previously, this is the simplest of games to learn - bar perhaps Gold Fever - and all you're doing is gathering tetris-type shapes to complete puzzles, which equal points. The juice is really in the bits, which are gorgeous, and that tactility (along with the satisfaction of completing each puzzle) counters any shortcomings. Although I'd won very few of the previous 25 times I'd played it, 26th was a charm:

Sam 25

Katy/Ian 19 each

After a brief discussion we moved on to The Quest for El Dorado, Knizia's always pleasurable deck-building racing game. I couldn't recall if you were allowed to buy more than one card on your turn, and as my rules were in German I texted Martin, assuring Katy that this would probably be quicker than looking up the rules online. Sure enough it took only a few moments for Martin to reply with not only a clarifier, but in the form of a screengrab of the relevant rule. This astonished Katy, who became convinced Martin is a robot. Maybe that's why she didn't win. 

I know why I didn't - I loaded up with money to buy good cards, then kept finding I was just buying good cards with handfuls of money. Until I arrived at the place where I needed money, only to find I had a hand full of machetes. Ian meanwhile sashayed to an extremely convincing win:

Ian - El Dorado!

Katy/Sam - El Stupido

Then we played a new game called Cabo: each player is dealt four face-down cards from a deck numbered 0-13, and the goal is to have the four lowest-numbered cards collectively. Everyone looks at just two of their cards before play begins, then on a turn you can draw the top card from either the deck or the discards. 

If it's the discards, you simply exchange it with a card in your tableau. If it's the deck, you can either a. do the same b. simply discard it or c. discard it and take the action on the card (if there is one). There's only three actions: Peek at one of your own cards, Spy at one of someone else's and Swap with someone else. Or, if you think you're in a good position numerically-speaking, you can forego drawing at all and call 'Cabo'. Now everyone else has one final turn before cards are revealed and scored. Points are bad, so a successful cabo scores zero. Everyone else scores the number value of their cards. An unsuccessful cabo scores the number value plus ten, and as soon as someone goes over 100 points the player with the fewest points wins.

There's two twists: if you manage to hit 100 points exactly, your score gets halved to 50. And if when cards are revealed you have the 'kamikaze' hand - two 12s and two 13s - you score zero and everyone else scores 50!

(There's a rule I missed as well: you're allowed to swap a card you pick up for multiple cards, but the catch is they must be the same number. If you flip them over and they don't match, you have to keep them and the card you drew - I'm not sure any of us were ever quite aware enough of what we had to attempt this though!)

Ian sailed through this game as he had through El Dorado: calmly, drinking strong beer. Katy and I regularly imploded, both of us calling cabo more often than was sensible and suffering as a result. Poised on 97 points Katy needed either a 3 point hand or a kamikaze to save her, but I called cabo before she could engineer either of those things. Inevitably, Ian won. 

Ian 57

Sam 112

Katy 121

Next up was Fae, or the Land of Old Men's Penises as we fondly christened it. 

Turns couldn't be simpler: move a penis, or a group of penises, from one region to another. They will refuse to go into an empty region, and instantly throw a party if the region they gather in is (somewhat topically) isolated: if there's no penises in adjacent regions, they score points. The catch in this game is all colours score and nobody is can be totally sure what colour anyone else is until the end of the game, when identities are revealed. My gray penises - don't say anything - triumphed, though I didn't write down the scores:

Sam 

Ian

Katy

"We need something fun after that" said Katy, who had found arranging all the plastic pieces into a socially-isolating party on her side of the table more entertaining than the actual game, although I like Fae quite a lot myself. And so we played the most abysmal game of Wavelength ever: very fun, and funny, but a point-scoring catastrophe: we finished with two points. Ian's clues were probably the most logical, but at this point I was a little drunk and forgot, for instance, that there are many thousand tv programmes that are inarguably lower-brow than You've Been Framed. Not able to take that result lying down, we tried again, appalling Katy with our guess that Gwyneth Paltrow looks 'somewhat' like a person. "Gwyneth Paltrow is a person!" she cried in despair, revealing that the target was very much in the person zone and accusing us of guessing a place that would be occupied by a potato. Another mostly-inarguable truth, but Ian and I were factoring in Katy's recent candle-related disdain, that had threatened to turn into a late night rant about "the system". 

I didn't take photos, we were having too much fun/scorn. 

Then we played Push It, which Ian won. My memory of this is mostly about Katy trying to cheat. I think it was before or after this game that we had a long cereal-based tangent that took in kitchen size, milk type, relationship status and the joys of living alone. Katy also insisted she knew "nothing" about us, as we all conceded games nights were mostly "business". I told Katy I have one kidney. Ian stayed enigmatically silent. Who knows how many internal organs he possesses?

And finally we midnight looming we broke out Gold Fever, the simplest bag-builder/deconstructor there is, where you're trying to be first to draw four gold out a bag made of mostly rubble. With Ian having won El Dorado, Cabo and Push It and my name on the Project L and Fae cups, Katy finally picked up the win she craved, with Ian poised on three gold and myself a pitiful one. 

A fantastic night of games and silly fun, thanks guys!

Active Pile On

 Just like that, we're back in the room. After what seems like at least a decade, the Olde London mob of GNN assembled at Chris' house last night - along with the host there was Paul and myself (Sam) with Andrew coming later. There was a slight hesitancy as one might expect, particularly as I had brought the boys along. Suddenly we were all in a situation we weren't used to - a crowd. 

Luckily Chris' house is enormous and the children scampered off to do God knows what after we'd all hugged and kissed and eaten pizza. 

Chris and Paul had already been gaming with Ashton, trying out Paul's charity shop find of the day before, Space Lines. I think they played twice and Ashton won both times. But now with three of us, we had the luxury of starting an epic six-hour gaming session, and we did so with Project L. 

The rules have already been explained but suffice to say that Chris won it convincingly, and then Paul won our second game convincingly (I was third both times), and if there's a gigantic void of theme and the merest smidgen of Hey I Wanted That interaction, it's also enormously satisfying just putting all these bits into place. Especially when you do one of those delicious Master Actions and pull off a zinger of a move. Or you can just build a tetronomic totem like Chris did. 

We then played 7 Wonders. Without the computer to move cards around for you and tell you what everything does, it wasn't quite the super-breezy ten minutes the online implementation is, but it was still pretty speedy and nice to be in the room. Paul suggested we could slide the tablecloth back and forth if we wanted to relive the BGA version, but we ended up focusing our energies on the game in the end, and I picked up a rare win.

Then Andrew arrived! We were now pushing the legal limits and feeling marginally bandity about it all, and felt like something silly, plumping for Cubitos, with it's seemingly simple dice-rolling system that still tied us all in knots - me especially, as I'd explained the rules wrong previously, had a correction from Joe, reread the rules, but still got confused, and ended with the worse case of rules sweats I've had in a while as I fretted over draw piles, active piles, discard piles and roll piles. I mean, that's at least one pile too many isn't it? 

Basically you roll shitloads of dice though: it's a deckbuilder in cube form. We all played cautiously except Paul, who kept going bust and was miles behind the rest of us, only to suddenly spring forward like a geometric hunting dog. As before, the sedate opening changes and before you know it everyone suddenly speeds up - my previous experiences and the fact I got a Rollosaurus meant I was first over the line.

Sam wins.

Others: DNF

Chris was keen to try out The Secret Adventures of the Old Hellfire Club and I was certainly amenable, although it meant a brief rules-read, we were off!

This is a Very Silly game. Mechanically-speaking, all you're doing is playing cards of suits on your turn and hoping nobody plays a lower card of the same suit - pushing your luck or banking them after a minimum of two. You get coins for high cards and coins for having the most of a suit at the end. But heaped on top of this basic-math, risk-reward thing is the story you're telling. Players are drunken patrons of the titular Victorian-age club and are retelling the great adventure they undertook to (for example, as we did) save the world from a scourge of invading aliens. The cards represent story elements, such as Person, Place, Weapon, Insult, Motive, and as you play the cards you integrate them into your retelling. But the higher cards are more fabulously boastful, exaggerating things, and the lower ones rather more run of the mill. At one point I recalled how we set our man o' war with all hands against the invaders, only for Paul to play a lower card, reminding me it was actually an Amazonian blowpipe. In that instance, my turn's over and Paul banks his card instead, and the turn moves on. 

I can imagine sitting next to us as we played this could be very irritating if you were, say, reading a book, or engaged in everyday conversation. Particularly with Chris and I releasing long-dormant acting aspirations, but I found it enormous fun and probably the highlight of the evening. It's perhaps the most group-dependent game I've ever encountered but there were some golden moments in it, like when we encountered Karl Marx outside Whitechapel and charged the aliens with art fraud. Discovering Andrew  was a Fart-catcher (5 Insult) will always stay with me. 

Although as he pointed out, isn't Disillusionment with Life (8 Peril) more of an everyday occurrence than an 8?

Andrew had time for one more game and it was High Society. This is still my (second) favourite Knizia, a miniature work of genius. Everyone was in with a shout right up until the end - except for Chris, who wasn't. My skin was saved though when Andrew took the last card...

Sam 15

Paul/Andrew 13 each

Chris - BUST

We tried to tempt Andrew to stay by setting up Raj, but he was resolute and returned to whence he had came (the A350) while Chris took us to the fackin' cleaners in Raj world: with no Martin to bid high against me on the mid-range stuff, I kept overpaying for everything and my last-round recovery wasn't enough to catch him. 

Chris 64

Sam 54

Paul 20

The witching hour was approaching so we blasted through Mountain Goats: a dice-chucking, point-collecting, goat-removing evening-ender!

....but it didn't actually end the evening because Paul was eager to play Project L again, so we did! This time I fared a bit better. You gotta take those Master Actions!

Marvellous stuff, well worth the trip while the place is open!

Smug Too Soon

Another Tuesday, and yet rather than gathered around screens, six of the GNN brethren came together at my (Sam's) house for the still-slightly-surreal act of gaming face to face, around a shared table, touching wooden pieces, testing our wits and numeracy and - in this case - fondling Adam Hillmann's nuts. Thanks Adam. 

Also present was Adam T, Katy, myself and a slightly bewildered-looking Martin, appearing as though stumbling in from the mountains halfway through a Beckett play. It was kind of strange, but not so strange that we couldn't squeeze in a quick (new) game before Joe rocked up - as he rocked up, in fact, but he charitably let us continue - which was Whale Riders: The card game. 

This was a slightly Fuji Flush-esque undertaking of collecting cards in sets, and whenever a set was claimed (four 4's, six 6's and so on) by the collective owners, any other active sets imploded. There were a couple of other wrinkles, but it was very simple, and only took ten minutes to bash through:

Martin 42

Katy 35

Sam 31

Adam T 25

Adam H 16

Then with Joe present and happily amenable, we moved directly to another new game: Scape Goat, in which everyone is told (by the game) who the scape goat is, but it's lying to someone and nobody knows who. The air is thick with paranoia and the sound of pistachio shells cracking already, then Joe began talking about Steve Coogan's balls, which feature in a film he'd recently watched. We spent a good few minutes integrated the relevant testicles into the ongoing game, then I walked outside and realised the neighbour's doors were wide open. When I came back inside I decided I should warn everyone about the possible audience before the current goat impersonations really took hold. 

Scape Goat is simple on the rules, but trickier on working out what you should actually do. Definitely working out the scape goat isn't you is a good idea, but I failed miserably in game one, panicking and running to the cops when I suspected I was about to be framed. 

As it turned out, I wasn't:

Adam T (the scapegoat) wins!

Then we played again and Adam H worked out he was the scape goat before we could frame him. He - correctly - ran to the cops as well, and saved himself. 

Adam H (the scape goat) wins!

We then played Whale Riders: Not the card game, which comes with a board and little wooden whales.

 

It bore very little relation to the card game, with the only cards being contracts to fulfill as we - riding whales, naturally - swim around grabbing what we could to do so, in most Knizian fashion; all decisions tantalising and options designed to recede from sight like the tide going out before a tsunami. 

The big wave in this case was Adam H, who halfway through the game completed fifteen thousand contracts and scored a million pearls. That's what it felt like anyway, although it was much closer than we realised. 

Adam 18

Joe / Adam T 16 each

Sam 15

Martin 13

Katy 10

We split into two groups, with Joe, Katy and Martin playing new game #4 Renature, and myself and the Adams breaking out new game #5, Luzon Rails. I didn't pick up much of what was happening in Renature apart from some talk about neutral bushes and Katy's early-game confidence giving way to late-game doubt.

I was experiencing a similar narrative arc in Luzon Rails, in part because with both Adams assuring me I was winning, I let my iron grip on the isle of Luzon loosen like a railroad builder who got lucky with a first swing of the hammer and then spent the rest of the day admiring a single sleeper. 

As we build track we also control companies by owning shares in them. At the end of each round every company pays dividends so you're all trying to push their dividend value up by building track to prosperous places on the board. But companies can only build track with monies paid from auctioning shares, and there is the considerable rub, because you win the game by having the most personal cash. I shoulda bid for that last yellow share...

Adam H 109

Adam T 103

Sam 99

With Renature still puzzling the other end of the table, Adam T took his leave and vanished into the night. I tempted Adam H to stay by flinging all the luscious pieces of Project L (not a new game; we played it last week) onto the table. 

It's very easy to pick up and play, but you still want to win, right? And I thought I'd triumphed, but I may have been just a bit innumerate by this point.

Adam 22

Sam 17

As we packed that away, Katy reminded me that we should never invite Adam for this very reason. Renature concluded with Katy saying "I might have been smug too soon".

 Going by the scores, she was right.

Martin 78

Katy 72

Joe 50-something

The jury seemed to be out - but enjoying the debate, with all of them surprised how thinky it was for an alleged 'family' game, but perhaps impressed all the same. "It was long" Katy pointed out. Martin said he wouldn't even attempt it with four. Joe looked slightly rueful, whether at his performance or the purchase itself, he'll have to explain. I tried to get them to stay longer, but with 11 o'clock now past, it was time to wrap up another delightful evening. Lovely to be back!