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!

Wonderful rumbles

This week saw a rare sojourn to Katy's house, squeezing in a table-testing six players (Katy, Joe, Sam, Adam H, Adam T, and myself). Katy had worked out who was sitting where based on ease of getting up for the toilet and amount of discomfort her husband might feel in squeezing past them. Adam, apparently, would cause the least. We were also surprised to learn that it was Sam's first visit to Katy's place. "Welcome," she said, half an hour after he'd arrived.

But as for the games, I arrived at 8, at the same time as Adam H and found people in the dining area, chatting. Apparently they hadn't played anything. Amazing. But with a full attendance, we soon leapt into a rousing game of Team Play. I was matched up with Adam H, which is always a bit of a mixed blessing. A greater chance that you'll win, but only if he wins as well. Adam T teamed up Sam and finally Joe and Katy were the third team.

I started slow and was last to finish a trick, while Sam whipped off two tricks in one turn for an early lead. Katy got stuck with a target of Three pairs, all even or all odd and she wasn't encouraged when Joe admitted he hadn't been paying attention to what she'd been picking up for the past few rounds.

But Adam and I turned it around and triggered the game end with our eighth trick and had already scored enough to win.

Andrew and Adam H 25

Sam and Adam T 24

Katy and Joe 19

Next we split into two groups. Adam, Adam and Joe played It's A Wonderful Life, which is nothing to do with the classic film starring James Stewart. It's set in a"non specific near future," according to rules explainer Adam T. And it seemed a bit 7Wonders-ish, judging from what little I understood of it.

Sam, Katy and I played Rumble Nation. This, according to Sam, consists of rolling dice, placing cubes accordingly and then resolving fights. "It's like a three act game with the middle act taken out," Sam added.

Players are not completely at the mercy of luck, and there is a little strategy involved in that a victory in one area has a knock-on effect in the neighboring provinces. I used this to good effect when my initial win set off further victories across the board like toppling dominoes.

Andrew 42

Sam 34

Katy 32

Midway through this, Rob came down and pottered about a bit, before making sure we were playing two different games, so confusing was our banter.

When Rumble Nation ended, It's A Wonderful Life was still midway through so we played Hit Z Road. It's a fun game of zombie apocalypse mayhem that always seems to go on too long. 

My band of survivors was wiped out in the penultimate round which at least allowed me to go to the toilet. Katy died in the final round, killed by the last zombie, while Sam made it to the coast with load's of resources and fourteen points. An impressive performance.

Sam, Gulf Coast Highway

Katy and Andrew, Road To Hell

It’s A Wonderful Life had ended before Hit Z Road, and they patiently waited for us to finish. Except that Adam T left, and I went soon after. The Wonderful Life scores were…

Adam T 61

Adam H 57

Joe 29

I later learnt by text that Sam and Katy won Durian and then Sam won Push It. Thanks all, and special thanks to Rob for putting up with six gamers blocking the way into the back garden. See you all soon.

The six o'clock special

Six o'clock in Joe's studio. That's when the evening began, although when I arrived at 6.20, Joe was out getting pizza and Ian, Sam and Adam T didn't seem to have begun a game yet. After some polite chat, we began team Push It, me and Adam against Sam and Ian. It was a whitewash, with Sam and Ian picking up the maximum four points in one round as they glided towards victory.

Sam and Ian 11
Adam and Andrew 1

Joe returned with pepperoni pizza and Adam H arrived too. We split into two groups of three. Adam T, Sam and I went for Kodachi, card game based on the combat section of Ninjato. Adam H, Joe and Ian played Kribbeln, using Das Exclusive as the dice arena for that extra touch of class.

Adam H 20
Joe 18
Ian 15

As for the three of us, Kodachi was clipping along at a fair old rate until we found ourselves stuck in a rut. In order to finish the game, certain cards needed to be played but these needed to be bought and, for whatever reason, we never seemed to have the resources when they were available. To add to this, Adam found himself with an increasingly middling hand, full of cards that scored points but weren’t much use in a fight. This all meant that the game outstayed its welcome which is a shame since it started brightly.

Sam 74
Andrew 62
Adam 48

During Kodachi Martin, Steve and Katy arrived and so the five of them set up the card table while we three stayed on the big table - something wrong there. But anyway, they played a game whose name I didn’t write down which seemed to involve grabbing sticks from the table according to the criterion on a card. According to Katy, the winning order was...

Katy
Martin
Steve
Adam
Ian
Joe

It was loud and chaotic, and was followed by a game of Happy Salmon which was also loud and chaotic. Katy won that, and then they played Silent Happy Salmon. Not sure who won that.

Then they played Team Play. Still as a group of six, and still on the tiny card table. Kodachi had ended by now and we played Memoarrr just as a filler. Adam T said he wasn’t keen on memory games, but not liking them is clearly not the same as being bad at them. Early on, Adam and I teamed up to leave Sam with a blue walrus card, which he consistently failed to find a match for.

Adam T 7
Andrew 6
Sam 2

Team Play ended

Team Play, but Martin and Joe still seem to 

be playing Happy Salmon

Katy & Adam 31
Joe and Martin 30
Steve and Ian 28

Now there was a chance to reshuffle the groups, and Andy M called to see if there was a game going on, so he was soon on his way. Sam, Martin, Adam T and I set up Babylonia. The other five then six (still on the card table) considered I’m The Boss, but Joe got the rules sweats halfway through explaining them so instead went for Incan Gold/Diamant. I was lucky enough to witness Steve pushing his luck beyond all reasonable boundaries and also watch Joe and Andy go further into a dungeon together, not daring to be the first out.

Steve 61
Joe 39
Andy M 34
Katy 26
Adam H 24
Ian 18

Babylonia went all Martin’s way as he got a continent all to himself, picking up a load of early cities. At the end of the game, Adam mused that there were two strategies: either play your own game and let Martin win or try and stop Martin and let someone else win.

Martin 153
Sam 105
Adam 102
Andrew 71

Then Katy beat Adam T in paper, rock,scissors and insisted I write it down. Adam T then left. Not because he lost at paper, rock, scissors: he was leaving anyway.

Now the groups changed again. Ian, Joe, Steve and I played Ra. During it, I experienced a strange kind of better’s fallacy whereby I called Ra to trigger an auction with every intention of paying 7 for it. But when the only competing bid for it was a 2, it somehow seemed like a waste of a 7, and I let it pass. With that kind of clinical thinking, no wonder I did so badly. Steve did well on his debut, picking up monuments and Niles, but no one could stop Pharaoh Joe from taking top spot.

Joe 31
Steve 28
Ian 24
Andrew 17

On the card table, Martin, Andy and Sam played Sissi: Die Bohnenkaiserin. I’m sure that Martin likes German games only so he can say the titles in a theatrical German accent. And because he wins them.

Martin 27
Andy M 24
Sam 23

Adam and Katy played a head-to-head game of Yokohama. They started setting up at about 9.30 and the first points were scored at 10.10.

They were done by 11 o’clock when Katy claimed victory while admitting Adam might have won.

Katy 108
Adam 105 (or 109)

Lastly, the other six of us joined together for a final game: Wavelength. This time we weren’t quite as in tune as previously but when the chips were down, and we needed them to fail and us to pick up a point to keep the game alive, Joe got the only perfect score of the game: cluing “sloth” to “stationary/mobile”.

Andy felt he needed photographic evidence to prove

that such a game actually existed

Joe, Ian, Martin 12 (estimated)
Sam, Andy, Andrew 8 (I think)

And so we were done. We picked up our crisps packets and beer cans as if we were obeying the country code and left Joe’s studio almost as we found it. Thanks all. It was a good one.

2020 Visions

In case anyone has missed us comparing notes, Martin and I have agreed to end 2020 with a net spend of zero on games: trades are allowed, and even purchases, as long as the money spent is raised by selling games.

Self-control is,  just perhaps, easier for Martin than I, but the handy thing about having no self-control up to this point is that I have several unplayed games to work through in the cupboard - a welcome distraction any time I see an alluring picture on Twitter.

That's why I finally played Gugong last week (Andrew and I were schooled by Adam and Katy) after it sat on a shelf for a year. (To be fair Andrew and I did get as far as setting it up one night but then Steve knocked on the door and we changed plans) But Adam and I enjoyed Gugong so much we played it again the very next night, and although I improved my score considerably... so did Adam.

Adam 53
Sam 35

I did at least have the satisfaction of beating him at Blitzkrieg! and Ankh'or afterwards. Blitzkrieg is a nifty chit-pull game where Axis and Allies fight over five theatres of war in WWII. Ankh'or is a set-collecting game where the sets can overlap. In each case however I'd had several previous plays to hone my skills. "This is what it's like playing Odin with you" I told Adam, when he frowned at my second victory.

On Friday, my last purchase of 2019 had arrived in the form of Rurik: Dawn of Kiev, and Ian and Adam rocked up to give it a whirl. On the board players fight for control of regions, tax regions, construct churches (flip opponents soldiers to your cause!) forts (defend better!) or markets (tax more!) in order to move up four point-scoring tracks: control of regions, buildings built, goods acquired and battles undertaken.

It's all surprisingly simple on the rules front, but implementation is something else: what the publisher calls auction programming. It does sound a bit of a stretch, admittedly, but I haven't encountered it before: players assign numbered workers to auction tracks that give you actions on the board (muster, move, attack, build, tax, or scheme: cards that give you extra actions) and higher-numbered workers will push lower-numbered workers down the track... But: lower numbered workers will activate first. This is a real puzzle and makes the auction almost as interactive as the board, as you can guess (or try to) opponent's plans and react accordingly. In fact there's a real sneakiness to proceedings that reminded me a little of Battle for Rokugan, albeit the mechanics are entirely different.

I was pleasantly surprised to win too: Adam and Ian probably gave me too much freedom in the north to build, and although I scored nothing for combat I was highest on two other tracks and it ended something like:

Sam 18
Adam 13
Ian 9

We finished the night with Push It - what can be said about this classic that hasn't already escaped our lips? Well, I could mention that I won.

Sam 11
Adam 10
Ian 9

And then, on Saturday, Wavelength arrived! This is has been long-anticipated; a party game co-designed by Wolfgang Warsch (The Mind) that I suspect we may play tomorrow night. Teams are trying to clue the location of a target on a spectrum between two extremes: the target's position is assigned randomly, and the spectrum changes with every turn: from simple concepts such as good/bad or hot/cold to more random things - there's even an advanced deck with things like Dictatorship/Democracy.

It seems like it could be a GNN favourite, and we put it through its paces yesterday when Sally and I played with some friends - all of us were enamoured of it. The spectrum categories can sometimes seem easy, sometimes hard, and it illuminates the differences in perceptions around the table. Both teams are involved in both rounds (the non-active team can win points off the potential inaccuracy of the active team's guess) and the whole thing is probably quicker than Just One. A winner!

Razing Your Game

Rokugan! Legend has it that one Friday night, long ago, the Phoenix, Dragon, Crab and Hippo - it might not have been a hippo, I can't remember - sent their warriors out over the landscape, swords a-blazin', to make the land their own. Who would shape destiny to their own will? Would it be the shrewdest, wisest leader? Or the one who kept their Territory bonus card until round five?

Round five is the final round in what is best described as an epic punch-up. All of us - Ian, Adam, Andrew and myself - controlled five provinces each at the start of the game, and you pretty much come out swinging and keep swinging for the duration. In each round players get six tokens that have varying degrees of power, from 1 to 5 more in Army, a less-impactful (and less common) navy, plus a few special tokens: Blessing, Raid, Shinobi and Diplomacy.

Everyone takes turns placing five tokens face-down on the board: either defending provinces they control, or attacking from them. The Shinobi can attack anywhere they like: they're kind of a travelling ninja troupe, intent on destruction.

The catch is, however, that every token - bar the Blessing, which bestows extra strength and immunity - is played face-down, before all being revealed simultaneously - then defenders versus attackers are resolved, with the winner claiming or keeping the province in question. If the defender wins, their defensive strength improves as a result, and the province gains extra 'honour' - points value.

Into this mix come the previously-mentioned special tokens: the Diplomacy brings peace to a province and it cannot be attacked, but the controlling player can't attack from it either. The Raid essentially razes a province to the ground, rendering it obsolete. Additionally, everyone has a bluff token, which can be used to misdirect your intentions and encourage opponents to spend tokens needlessly. And controlling all provinces in a territory grants you a special card that can only be played once - if you cease to control the territory, you cease to own the card as well...

What this all amounts to is a tense, swingy, obscenity-laden, four-way punch-up, with everyone relishing the moments when someone else was attacked, and indignant with disbelief when they were. Adam's attempt to establish peace was undone when Ian razed him to the ground before diplomatic talks could even be opened. Ian returned from the loo to find Adam and I had both attacked him - although I was bluffing. Andrew managed to spread his wings reasonably well, though as it turned out this wasn't actually want he wanted to do...

Players score a considerable bonus for controlling a territory at the end of the game, and we all have a secret objective too, meaning you really cannot tell who's won until the final count-up. As it turned out, the winner was me, as not only did I control a territory but I also hit my secret objective which got me a whopping ten points. Ian came second and Adam - who was perhaps targeted more than anyone else due to his habit of Winning The Games - trailed in third. Andrew had the double-edged sword of only hitting his objective if he controlled the least provinces - but having expanded successfully, he couldn't get us to attack him enough!

Sam 39
Ian 23
Adam 18
Andrew 10

A modern classic! But one you do need a recovery period from, and with that in mind we played competitive team sushi-stacking game of Maki Stack. It was Adam and Ian versus me and Andrew, racing to be the first to score points. Each point is a card that demands you stack various pieces in specific fashion, with the caveat that you either (when the card is yellow) do the stacking using one finger each, like chopsticks, or one team member wears a blindfold whilst the other instructs them.

It was hilarious: silly, rapid and over in ten minutes:

Andrew and Sam: top stackers!
Adam and Ian: bottom stackers

After that we moved swiftly on to non-team Push It, playing the official version of furthest-from-the-jack plays next. Ian and I surged into early contention as Andrew found his pucks flying everywhere but close to the jack. Adam kept inadvertently helping me by knocking me closer, and this played no small part in my eventual victory:

Sam 11
Ian 7
Adam 4
Andrew 3

Then we played four-player 6Nimmt. I'd not even considered this with four, but as it turns out the same Nimmty moments are present and correct, as it only took us three rounds to go from giddily optimistic to aghast and destroyed (Andrew) or giddily relieved (me)

Sam 15
Ian 35
Adam 51
Andrew 68

A fine ending to a very fun night, even if we probably had a few more crisps than even hardened gamers should ingest in 24 hours... but who's counting?

The Adam Family

A balmy Bristol evening in late May, and what better way to spend it than cloistered around the Table Of Joe, doors thrown open wide, saying things like "you can activate as many energy nodes as you like, but you can only take your own bonus". So that's what we did: as well as the host, there was Martin, Katy, myself (Sam) and the two Adams.

How to distinguish them - in their absence - was the dominant early part of the conversation, but this was later succeeded by how to stop them, as both embarked on a winning spree that made up almost the entire evening.

However - before we even got to that point, Martin introduced Joe, Ian, Katy, Adam T and myself to Reiner Knizia's Spiel des Jahres-nominated L.A.M.A. Apparently it stands for (in German) something like 'avoid minus points', and with good reason. Like Fuji Flush, you're trying to get rid of your cards, by playing them in ascending order (-you can also play a matching value in LAMA) and if you can't go, you can pick up a card. But unlike Fuji Flush, you can also choose to stop playing when you still have cards in your hand (accepting their number value as minus points) while the other players keep going. In fact, even one player can keep going, if they have cards that don't jump anything on the number line. The numbers go from 1-6 and then the LAMA card links the 6 back to the 1 - but being left with a LAMA card in your hand is bad, as it scores a lot of points:

Adam T 1
Katy/Joe 2
Sam 5
Ian/Martin 8

After one round, Adam H had arrived and so we split into two groups. While Joe, Martin and Adam T set up Res Arcana, the rest of us introduced Adam to Sol: Last Days of a Star. I made sure to mention that motherships move before I explained anything else, and Ian mentioned it again right at the end of the explanation. Despite that though, we all kept forgetting to move our mothership. Even worse was that I forgot that activating stations triggers card draws, but I'm pinning this on having to say things like transmit towers convert energy into momentum within earshot of Joe's family.

Adam picked things up with no issue and we cleared up the activation gaffe pretty quickly. It was a game of elusive patterns as we circled the sun like a quartet of wary boxers, each hoping to... well, here the analogy breaks down. I sped into an early lead but with Ian and Adam hot on my tail. Katy languished on the momentum track ("Again!") and we sped through the instability deck like boxers intent on solar collapse.

On the other side of the table, meanwhile, a more combative battle was playing out, with Martin complaining that Joe was 'sapping his death'. Joe grinned happily. Whatever they were doing to each other, Adam invoked some kind of Darwinian strategy and emerged a convincing victor.

Adam wins.

And they enjoyed it so much, they played again. This time:

Martin wins.

They even snuck in a quick game of Good Little Tricks, and Adam T reclaimed the current-winner status, whilst previous incumbent Martin sank to a sweary third:

Adam T 0
Joe 9
Martin 18

Unfortunately I took no photos of any of these incredible events - we were in a combustive game - endgame, by now - of Sol. Adam (H) had surged ahead of me on the scoretrack, and I needed one more turn to activate my transmit tower for a piddling three points - enough to reclaim the lead. With only four cards left in the deck, however, Katy triggered three of them: and one was the last solar flare, instantly ending the game!

Adam 19
Sam 18
Ian/Katy 12

Whew. What drama! After the death of a star we needed something less portentuous. The groups cross-pollinated with Ian, Martin and Joe going for Ra, while the rest of us perused Joe's game collection. Adam T suggested Castles of Burgundy, but at 9.20 already we felt it might be a little late to start that one. Katy proposed Can't Stop and the murmurs of approval had enough weight to carry.

While we hurled dice on our side of the table - occasionally going bust - Joe was weaving some kind of magic in Ra. By the end of the second epoch he had a collection of buildings so colossal Martin and Ian must have felt like throwing in the towel. And despite his collection of low bidding tiles, he only added more in the third epoch, ending a high-scoring game like some kind of Egyptian contractor with a connection in the council office.

Joe 71
Martin 48
Ian 42

Meanwhile we'd squeezed in two games: belying his reputation as a zero-sum Euro-gamer, Adam H won Can't Stop with time and dice to spare. Katy and Adam found they couldn't stop. I stopped too often, except for when I shouldn't have.

Adam H 3
Katy 2
Adam T 1
Sam 0

We also played a quick game of Winston, the sausage-dog building competition featuring a wooden bone and wooden poo. To be frank, I think that description is as good as Winston gets, despite my phone's insistence on naming the game Einstein.

Adam H 20 (+6 for the bone!)
Adam T 16
Sam 15 (-6 for the poo!)
Katy 0

With the hour fairly late, Adam T and Ian now made their excuses and hit the road. The five remainers decided to return to LAMA, which - now we knew the rules - came into its own a little more. Joe and Adam found themselves locked into a stand-off as they both warily picked up cards, hoping the other wasn't about to quit and leave them with a bunch of non-ascending numbers.

The tension was palpable, and very Knizia-ry. And Adam H's winning run finally came to and end as Joe got rid of all his cards, allowing him to return a ten-point chit to the supply!

Joe 7
Katy 15
Sam 25
Martin 27
Adam H 51

I now made my way home as well, with the final four still keen to play another game. I'm not sure what it was, but no doubt they'll let us know in the comments...

The Old Ones are the Worst

Last night Andrew and I set out on a great adventure that turned into a horrific nightmare - a tale of lives given, sanity lost, farms blighted and kangaroos mown down in a hail of panic-stricken gunfire.

It was AuZtralia. After being something of a hit at last year's Novocon when Joe's peaceful farming tactic (leaving the battles to the rest of us!) saw him emerge victorious this mash-up of trains, agriculture and Cthulu has lain fallow since, and we felt it was time to return to Oz.

After a quick refresher of some of the rules we began, and beginning in AuZtralia is all about seeding the board with good stuff (iron, coal, gold, phosphorus) and bad (the Old Ones). We were pretty fortunate in how the tiles fell, giving us a landscape of some fairly bad guys, a few pretty bad guys, but almost bereft of really bad guys. As a result, the early moves were all about exploration - build some track here, throw up a farm there, build an airship... and so on. Andrew was first to awaken the Old Ones when his train track bumped into a pyramid.

Combat in AuZtralia borders on funny - there's a luck-pushing mechanism where cards are flipped and you see if you hurt the Old One in question, or they hurt you, or both, or neither. You can retreat, but you can also double-down and, as a result, have all your military units go insane. That happened to me. Mid-game, all the Old Ones started to awaken regardless of whatever noise we were/weren't making, and Zombies staggered over Andrew's farms, blighting them before he retaliated and wiped them out. I seemed comparatively safe for a while, until suddenly a seemingly-indestructible Loyalist nearly made it all the way to my port before expiring.

That near-miss aside though, the Old Ones were never really in with a shout of victory as we tooled up and took them apart. Despite doing most of the dirty work though, Andrew lost out to me courtesy of my train tracks leading me to phosphorus, which are worth 3 points each at the end of the game. An arbitrary and somewhat bizarre decider, really, but in a way appropriate for a game as silly as AuZtralia is.

Sam 26
Andrew 22

It is a bizarre game but replete with adventure and, though at odds with the theme, moments of comedy. Also pretty fast with two...

One can never take photos of Push It because the game moves much too fast, but I beat Andrew something like 21-12 before he then got his own back on his debut of Kariba:

Andrew 27
Sam 21

I should never have scared away the mice.

Senator, you are spoiling us

Missing GNN planetoids Andrew and Katy as well as several orbiting satellites, at one stage it looked like just Ian, Martin and myself. Would Martin be persuaded to play Underwater Cities? Fortunately for him, Adam T and Joe swooped in to save the day, abetted by Stanley.

Joe was running late and Stan was in the garden attacking his brother with a space-hopper, so we started the evening with a quick play of Kariba, a very Knizian game by, unsurprisingly, Knizia.

Animals (numbered 1-8) come to the waterhole to drink, but three or more animals of a higher number will scare away the next-lowest numbered animal - and these scattering prey become your points if you played the card that did the scaring. The lowly mice (number 1) aren't completely hopeless - they're the only animal that can scare away the otherwise-indomitable elephants (number 8).

Sam 15
Ian 14
Martin 12
Adam 7

By the time Kariba wrapped up (it only took ten minutes) Joe had arrived and enticed Stanley into a try out of Shards of Infinity. I played with Joe at the weekend so can give a quick precis: it's a battle between players to be last one standing: each player begins with 50 health and then damage is done via the medium of cardplay and deck-building. The neat twist with Shards of Infinity is that you have a Mastery score that, when improved to certain points (5/10/20) empowers some of your cards: get your Mastery to 30 and it's possible to destroy your opponent outright when you pull the Infinity Shard into your hand.

While that epic played out at one end of the table, we were busy with Martin's latest sentient-vegetable game, this time another old Knizia in Too Many Cooks. This is a trick-taker of sorts where each player announces what kind of soup they intend to make at the start of each round, with the cards themselves the ingredients. If you're making onion soup, you want to win a trick with lots of onions in - and no chilli. If you're making a chilli soup, you don't want bouillion. Because the trick is only complete when the collective score of all the cards reaches ten points - and some cards reset the score to zero - it's more than likely that someone will throw some chilli in your lovely pot of onions, or even pick them up themselves. The 'wrong' ingredient doesn't necessarily do any damage, as long as it's not really wrong.

But as well as that reasonably-simple premise, there are cards that score zero when led but a whopping ten when played in a 'live' trick, complicating things somewhat. Additional complications arrive in the form of these cards being erroneously labelled zero instead if ten, and one recipe being 'no soup' - don't win any cards at all. The fact that previously played recipes can't be played again muddies things further, as the last couple of rounds you are more at the mercy of fate, depending on what cards you get.

Ian began badly and announced he didn't like the game. He surged back into contention and seemed briefly more enamoured. Then he fell away again. I stagnated too, but Adam made hay in the penultimate round, establishing a lead that was too strong for Martin to catch him:

Adam 20
Martin 16
Sam 14
Ian 12

Martin and Adam liked it. I was somewhere between their enthusiasm and Ian's chagrin. The main take-away for me was to have the song from Too Many Cooks going around in my head all night.  Just after we finished, Joe vanquished Stanley in a nail-biting finish to Shards: with them both at death's door it was Joe's turn to attack and Stanley didn't draw the shield he needed.

Joe: wins
Stan: off to bed

Which left us as a five. Martin was keen to play Senators so after brief speculative mentions of Battle for Rokugan (one day...) and Northern Pacific, we embarked on our weekly bunfight for the senate.

forgot to take any more pictures at this point, here's Senators being played at Martin's house

It was brutal. Adam in particular suffered from a dearth of money and fortune, as he constantly found himself penniless and senatorially bereft. Martin kept trying to extort money from me and being appalled when I sold things to him. Ian kept up a cash-supply with impressive consistency, especially in a game as barmy as Senators is. He at one point pulled off a spectacular 4-senator cash-in to take the lead, only to have Adam exact some minor pleasure from the game by immediately taking a senator off him.

Martin gambled on events that didn't arrive, and I paid nine sestertii for a Senator when everyone else bid zero. But despite that lavish spending, I pushed ahead of Ian and Joe to claim the seat of power:

Sam 12
Ian 11
Joe 10
Martin / Adam: 5

Adam, exhausted from Senators work, now took his leave and we were a four again. We ended the evening in proper GNN style, with some short silly games.

pic courtesy kalchio, BGG

In Tomatomato you pronounce increasingly long variations on the word tomato: get it wrong and your opponents get to - possibly - claim points; by spelling out the word 'tomato' obviously. Martin's speed at this game was so spectacular that neither Joe, Ian or I could keep up with him and had to trust his word that he wasn't just making random tomato-related noises up. Ian and I stumbled the most, but Joe and Martin tried to claim the same reward - cancelling it out - and I snuck the win:

Sam 3
Joe 2 (wins tie-breaker by owning a potato)
Martin / Ian 2

Then we split into teams to play Push It. Ian teamed up with Joe and I with Martin, as we sat diagonally across from each other. In the past we've played Team Push It pretty much to the same structure as solo Push It, but Martin spotted the team variant in the rules suggests that whichever team is furthest from the puck is currently active. This changed the dynamic of the game considerably, as it escalates the need to be close to the puck: remain furthest away, and you can swiftly run out of discs to fire at it, leaving your opponents with 2 or 3 free shots. Martin and I capitalised on the rule as we raced to a surprisingly one-sided victory:

Martin + Sam 21
Ian + Joe 2

Their only points came from me accidentally hitting the puck off the table. So astonished were we by this lopsided result that we played again. Joe was sure that going first was key to success, and his theory looked like it might hold water when he and Ian quickly established a 5-1 lead. But then it imploded as we raced past them again to another victory:

Martin + Sam 21
Ian + Joe 5

Despite their lack of success both Ian and Joe liked this team rule - we all did, as though it didn't make for the dramatic finales you often get when playing rigidly clockwise, it does enable some big results - and potentially big comebacks as well.

It was reasonably early for a Tuesday, but Ian especially had an early morning to look forward to and the evening came to a natural conclusion. Thanks all!

Hold your breath...

...it's Underwater Cities! But Underwater Cities played at such a rate of knots you almost could have held your breath. Andrew and I played a rapid-fire two-player game this evening - so quick we were finished at 9.05pm. It's much quicker a. when you know what you're doing b. with 2 players and c. knowing Adam is not there to make you feel like every turn was a wasted opportunity should you fail to optimise.

Andrew built pleasurable, diverse cities with a lot of upgraded tunnels. He coined in the cash in production and, what's more, grabbed two of the government contracts. My cities by contrast looked a bit Little Englander early doors, focusing on only one or two types of building but then upgrading the biomatter out of them for big returns in production.

My metropolis also rewarded upgrades, and in the final count-up, these sent me into a convincing win:

Sam 100
Andrew 76

Brief though it was - accompanied by a visit and advice from Stan - we needed something silly afterwards, so played Tomatomato. Officially it plays 3-6 but it's been such a hit in the house we already have a two-player variant devised.

The game is just flipping tiles that say tomato, to, ma, or mato. As a row of syllables get longer, you take turns attempting to pronounce it - stumble or pause, and it's a tile to your opponent. It's very silly, especially when the rogue Potato tile pops up, and Andrew's familiarity with the Japanese language - I like to think - gave him a convincing victory:

Andrew 4
Sam 2

After that we tried our hand at a recent gift in the form of an educational/dialogue-provoking game in Less is Max, a Spanish publication aimed, it seems, at classes. Players win by developing the nine parts of their personality, and do so by bidding on cards that allow you to add your tokens on the board, where each constituent part is laid out. Some cards have bad effects though that remove tokens, and there's also a shared element in the common good, which fills up with suns to reward everyone with more cash, or poison to take it away.

Our game, thanks to an odd falling of cards, took about 15 minutes, after I grabbed the card that let me do sport once a week to tick off the leisure box. Both of us got very excited by the option of theatre, and I tried not to use plastic bags. It's not a gamer's game, but it was an interesting experience and very pertinent.

Sam - most rounded personality
Andrew - Loser!!! nyah nyah nyah-nyah-nyah

We ended the night with Push It, and what a masterpiece of gaming this was, including flicks of brilliance and - more often - flicks of pathetic mental collapse. Andrew surged into the lead; I pulled him back. He surged again; I pulled back again! Then he was poised to win at 20-19 but got the yips and I picked up double points to grab the victory:

Sam 21
Andrew 20

Although writing this now it occurs to me that the official rule, I believe, is someone has to be two clear points ahead to win! So Andrew - to be continued...