What briefly threatened to be a three surged to a six and the first few to arrive - Martin, Katy and Adam T, along with myself - elected to begin the evening with Rankster, reasoning that the others could join us on arrival. Pele was one of the first out of the box - it's getting to be a habit - as Adam was requested to rate his newsreading capacity compared to that of Queen Elizabeth II (great elocution) and Little Red Riding Hood (may not even know the word news). While the rest of us were pondering his rankings Adam H arrived, having initially gone to Joe's house by mistake. "I was too lazy to read the whole thread" he said, rationalising that as Joe was last to reply, we'd be at his house.
We did okay at Rankster, although Martin was furious with us for proposing a Medusa would be good at pulling faces at a three-year-old. "She'd turn them to stone!" he wailed. Then after Joe arrived and we learned from Adam that the reason John F Kennedy didn't duck was because he wears a corset, the table split into threes. Adam T joined Martin and Joe for a crack at Faraway...
While Adam, Katy and I began our animal assembly duties in Caldera Park, where the goal is to group animals of a type together, and then multiply their number by how many waterholes they connect to for points. The catch is that some tiles contain more than one type of animal, and there are placement restrictions that may force you to put animals where they won't score at all. In fact, they may be killed off by weather.
Over five rounds players take turns announcing which animal - assuming it's still available - goes on which terrain, and their fellow players must follow suit if they can. But if they can't, their opportunities expand rather than contract - if Katy says 'put a wolf in the forest' and you currently have no wolves, you can put anything you like in the forest. And if all your forest is already covered, you can put a wolf anywhere. If you have neither wolves nor forest available, the world is your oyster.
In each round a weather tile is added, but these are unpredictable and may wipe out neighbouring animal tiles if you are unlucky. At the end of the game, you tot up your animal score but also accrue points for covering parts of your board (all forest, all river, all waterfalls etc). Katy said she really enjoyed the game right up until the end, when she discovered she'd lost.
Adam 161
Sam 153
Katy 146
But she still loved the scorepad, even if she wasn't keen on what it had to say. Meantime Faraway, with its curious dynamic of laying out a tableau of cards before scoring them backwards (point-scoring relies on certain symbols being exposed when the card itself is flipped) had been played not once but twice! In the first game there was some mild symmetry to scoring:
Martin 90
Joe 80
Adam T 70
And in the second, Adam took his distant card-flipped revenge:
Adam 74
Joe 65
Martin 64
It was time to do a bit of seat-swapping and so Katy and Adam T switched sides so she, Joe and Martin could play Robo-Trick and I could confuse the Adams by saying 'Adam's turn!' for the next 60 minutes.
I still haven't played Robo-Trick so I can't explain it but I recall Joe teaching me the rules and it sounded nuts. I think it was nuts, and there was a lot of minus points scored and some chagrin from Katy. Meantime, Adam H's position at the table was identical to when he played Caldera Park, only someone had removed his glasses.
World Wonders rules are pretty straightforward but the spatial element had Adam T in knots at times and he frowned at his progress as we filled our boards with roads, buildings, and the aforementioned wonders like deistic architects intent on wiping out every last blade of grass. Meantime Martin won Robo Trick:
And to my surprise they began to play Tipperary, even though Martin said "There is literally NO interaction" in his scathingly-dismissive mode. Katy and Martin had both played before but they needed to run through the rules and so spent almost as much time learning them as playing the game itself.
I missed the drama/lack-of though, as I was spending the last two rounds of World Wonders frustrated at my lack of options. The shitty pyramids had come out which rarely fit anywhere and I couldn't build the other two wonders either, so was literally throwing away gold to pass. Maybe another wonder or two would have made a difference, but we'll never know:
Adam H 33
Adam T/Sam 30 each
And, brief as it is, Tipperary finished too, and as they added up the sheep Adam T wondered if they might nod off halfway through counting. Joe and Martin tied on 94 points each with Katy back on 84. Martin gave a brief recap on the lack of interaction, Adam T headed home and after some further post-Tipperary scathing dismissery, the five of us played Little Tavern.
Perhaps the antidote to Tetris-Ireland's solitaire tile-placement, in Little Tavern we are regularly palming off customers we don't want to each other's tables, and when all tables are full customers will tip according to current table state (or tavern state, which means the real table). Witches like having witches around the place. Elves - or racists, as we referred to them - like having elves at the same table. Dwarves like a mix, Goblins are all called Billy-something and only tip if their leader (Billy-Billy) is present, and so on. Mix in some shenanigans in the form of optional events and this tavern is a fairly dastardly place.
There are only six events and in both rounds we used them all up. I had an appalling start which may have been explainers curse but was quite likely surrounded-by-dicks. Katy and Adam were in a strong position and found themselves targeted in round two, but it was Katy and Martin who snaffled the shared-win courtesy of some hot elf on elf action:
Martin/Katy 26 each
Sam 25
Adam H 24
Joe 20
Now Adam H took his leave too as the rest of us took our leaves for So Clover. Probably the less said about our first attempt the better, as after a cracking opening (6 points for Martin's tile) we followed it with three pitiful threes, and despite the late hour Katy insisted we play again. This time it wasn't a perfect score either, but 20/24 was a considerable improvement, especially since mine and Katy's red herring card both fit perfectly with two of our clues, Katy's in particular (seen below) reminiscent of Martin's 'portobello' moment.
It was now past 11 though and time to call it a night. Thanks all!
