Tom Selleck

Games night. After the extremely rare occurrence of a Missed Tuesday last week, Joe was first to arrive at my house and, out of practice at opening boxes, we sat and chatted with Sally and our guest Cassidy for a good twenty minutes. Then Adam H and Katy arrived and normal service resumed. 

First up was Joe's madcap trick-taker, the hairily-themed Moustache.  

This is a must-follow game where each round players split into temporary teams, with the goal to win the cards with stars (ie points) on them. Whilst there's no trump as such, there is a ranking of suits, so if you're out of the lowly green you can effectively trump in with any other suit. But over four rounds a new rule is introduced in each one: in round one, all pink cards are placed face-up on the table so everyone can see what everyone has. In round two pinks became worth extra points, in round three a card was passed to the left after every zero was played and in the last round something else happened that I've now forgotten. 

Joe and Katy rinsed Adam and I initially, and then did the same in round 2. Katy and Adam narrowly beat Joe and I in the final round and then I lost again with Katy at the end. My experience of this game was basically being some kind of curse on my partner. 

Katy 10
Joe and Adam 9 each
Sam 0

I suggested we try out my mini Robo-Rally dice game, which dumps the card programming in favour of dice instead; the catch being that everyone rolls at the same time and as soon as any one player is finished they start putting a time pressure on everyone else. 

It's speedier than the original in that you can tick off a checkpoint just by going over it, and there's no falling off the board. But it still manages to produce a fair amount of chaos, to which I added by not explaining it very well and forgetting the order things happened in. 

Martin, post-gig, turned up just in time to see Adam win, whilst I punched the air in excitement that I finally reached the first checkpoint on the same time (and relief it was all over). We heard the gig was full of 'old bald men' and Joe and I wondered where our invites had been mislaid. 

We debated what to play next and Joe lobbied for Knizia's Hollywood Blockbuster. Martin gamely took on the rules-explanation and did it far better than my Robo-efforts: basically whilst the theme is making movies the mechanics are all about auctions (Katy: "Not auctions!") with the goal being to assemble the various persona needed to complete your movie: director, actor, camera, special effects and so on. The movies vary in their make-up, with the only hard and fast consistency being a director and the optional guest star. 

Over four rounds we bid for these people and the winning bid gets distributed amongst the losers. A completed film instantly scores the sum value of its component parts (the title also has a value) and there's prizes for best movie in each genre, best movie overall, and even the highly-contested worst movie overall, which was won by Joe after I, perhaps understandably, couldn't get an actor attached to my dogshit sci-fi Star Battles. How can you resist a title like that? Especially 'Keanu Breeze' in it.

This was a tie in the end. Martin's collection of actors stood him in good stead throughout but Adam's focus on quality over quantity meant his late surge of releases pulled him level. 

Martin and Adam 73

Katy 59

Joe 55

Sam 37

At this point Adam left for home, unable to to be tempted by So Clover. So it was just the four of us for our traditional closer, and we did pretty well, only being thrown off by the idea of camp-stick for Martin's clue of flagpole, to his chagrin/palpable disdain. 

After that we tried a game Martin had come up with this very evening, which Joe christened Slow Co-ver (rhymes with clover). We placed a single clover on the table with cards in it as per usual, but then take a clover each and secretly write our own clues for the shared clover. The goal is to try to write the same clue as everyone else, for a point - although as Martin pointed out, Slow Co-ver could be played competitively. 

Though I neglected the pictures front we enjoyed this so much we played twice more, improving a little each time. Weirdly our last effort had the same combo Sally and I had encountered the night before: past/drink, so I put the same answer she had, mead. Joe and Martin did the same, whereas Katy went for port. It was the closest we came to a perfect point. 

And on that high-note, the games concluded.