Beginner’s Luck vs. Explainer’s Curse

This week, Joe was the host and we began as a tentative six: five present and one expected imminently. Joe and friend of the family Dan, Sam, Martin and me, with Adam sure to arrive at any second. There was some idle chit-chat as if the presence of a newcomer was enough to put us off our natural inclinations to skip past the small talk and get down to the nitty-gritty.

With Adam surely about to appear at the door step, we decided that Team Play would be a good six player option to take us up to the time when Katy and then Ian were due to arrive. Dutifully, Joe talked Dan through the rules and he was almost finished when there was a knock at the door. It was Adam. And Katy. Too many players for Team Play and Joe put it away with a sigh.

Now we were seven. Katy was angling for a game of Lords Of Vegas, all they (Joe, Katy and Dan) had to do was wait for Ian to get here and they. Adam, Sam, Martin and I played Sol, the recent debutante. Martin looked through the rules as we set up (but he didn't seem keen on reading the short stories that go with it) and clarified a couple more rules.

In the game, Martin and I are both energy rich thanks to our very popular gates. Sam begins hurling his ships into the sun very early on, making him the man to beat. Was he banking on the sun collapsing quickly? He was to be disappointed as card after card was revealed without a red sign indicating the sun is becoming more unstable.

Adam finally got together enough cubes to complete his plan, but then the sun let out a solar flare and his stock of 13 energy cubes was suddenly depleted by half. How we laughed at his discomfort. Then we allowed him a do-over (since other players had been already given the same opportunity) in which he didn't take the optional bonus cube he was entitled to and therefore his 12 energy cubes were safe.

As the game progressed it looked like the sun wasn't going to collapse at all. I hurled four ships in one turn into the dying star and still it didn't end the game. The final red card was actually the final card in the deck. Luckily no one was in a position to catch me, although Adam was able to grab joint second with the last turn of the game.

Andrew 27
Adam 24
Martin 24
Sam 20

The other three played smaller shorter games. First was Kingdomino, a new game to Dan but one he seemed to take to rather well.

Dan 54
Joe 40
Katy 38

After this, they played the only Taiwanese game that Joe owns, apparently. namely, Castle Crush. Again it was new to Dan again, again, he came out victor. He modestly tried to pass off his second win in a row as beginner's luck while Joe tried to tell him about Explainer's Curse and how it is a real thing.

Dan 24
Katy 21
Joe 15

Ian arrived during Castle Crush and was informed swiftly that he would be playing Lords of Vegas as soon as they were done. Something he had no problem with.

The table was heaving with the joys of modern boardgaming and for a while, you could barely see the tabletop for cardboard.

After Sol, Adam, Martin, Sam and I got stuck into Senators the craze that's turning into a tradition. In this game of political bribery in Rome, Martin set off into an early lead while Adam and I fell back. But Adam and I both had a card that would let you steal points from the leading player. With this in mind, I cashed in as soon as I could and Sam and Adam joined me. Suddenly, Martin fell from first to joint last.

He tried to claw his way back but was beset by misfortune. In a blind bid for a senator, he bid seven talents and Sam bid eight, which is exactly how this game should be played. Then I got a stroke of luck in a round where each player has the option of buying a senator for a steadily decreasing value. I passed with the price at nine. Martin prevaricated over eight but then passed. Adam passed on seven and Sam passed on six. I didn't expect to get another chance and I snapped it up for five! Good job, too, because the fourth war came soon after.

Andrew 9
Sam 8
Martin 7
Adam 7

In Lords of Vegas, Dan's beginner's luck seemed to be holding. His first three plots where all in the same block. Katy was delighted, meanwhile, to have a casino on the strip at almost the very start of the game and then spent most of the game chanting "Strip! Strip! Strip!" whenever a new card was revealed.

But for us lot, Senators was followed up by the lighter fare of Spy Tricks. The four greatest minds of GNN clashed over this simple trick taker and deduction game and, seemingly, cancelled and each other out. In the first round, none of us got a single guess right. Astonishing.

In the second round, I guessed the right rank and Sam got the correct suit, but our attempts at finding the right card were hopeless. Any signs of improvement, though, were mere illusion as we bumbled through the last round with only me guessing something right: the suit. And that's how I managed to win a game of Spy Tricks with a score that would normally see you in distant last.

Zero correct

Andrew 7
Sam 2
Martin 0
Adam 0

Adam went home at this point and Lords of Vegas hadn't finished so we cracked out a couple of confused rounds of Sticheln (chosen after Martin checked the remaining cards in Lords of Vegas to get an idea of how much time they had left to play). Despite Martin scoring no points at all in round one, his second round stole the game.

Martin 16
Andrew 14
Sam 12

Lords of Vegas continued with Dan's six tile casino flipping to Ian in an unlikely re-organisation. It didn’t last and, if Ian’s claim to be “floundering” is anything to go by, it was the final bit of luck to go Ian’s way.

Bottom left, Ian has stolen Dan's casino

Katy, though, was in such a good position that she was able to leave the table between her turns and have a conversation with Joe’s wife. That’s confidence for you. And then, later on, she ran out of dice: a first for her. All of this added up to an impressive win, despite the Strip barely paying out at all.

Katy 54
Joe 40
Dan 26
Ian 23

Now we were seven again and, despite it creeping towards eleven o’clock, we had one more game inside us. Pairs. Joe described it to Dan as being like Blackjack in that we were aiming for 21 points. But then he had to admit that, apart from that, it was nothing like Blackjack at all.

I was Mr Cautious and, for once, it paid off. I was the only one to score in every round. Ian sneered at my and Katy’s timidness seconds before he went bust, and similarly Martin cursed himself by saying “I’ve got to go big,” before being dealt a pair.

Andrew 22
Ian 16
Sam 16
Katy 15
Joe 13
Dan 7
Martin 2

And so we were done.Thanks to Joe and a hat-tip to Dan. See you all next week.

A Sol with a deadly weapon

Except there aren’t any deadly weapons in Sol, the new game that Ian, Sam and I tackled yesterday evening. This is a fairly simple strategy where you have to... well, I’m still not sure. Keep a dying sun alive by putting energy into it? Something like that. Use your ships to build stations that give you energy, allow you transmit energy or let you build more ships.

We set off just fine. Ian even had a thematically linked beer, a lovely bottle of Sol. But something just wasn’t working. It felt like three games of solitaire on the same board. The rules allow each player to use other players’ stations, but I couldn’t see a reason to.

Then I asked if our motherships, stationed furthest from the sun where all our ships are launched, are supposed to move? I noticed all these arrows on the board going in an anticlockwise direction and thought they might mean something. Sam checked the rules. Indeed, our motherships are supposed to orbit the sun.

Now the game made more sense, and was a lot more enjoyable as a result. We needed to plan ahead a little bit more this time. However, Sam had to delete the tweet of us playing the game since it was the kind of mistake that is clearly visible from looking at the board.

Spot the mistake

As for the score, I went from not scoring any halfway through the game to suddenly leaping up the track and squeaked a win just as the sun finally died.

Andrew 22ish
Sam 21ish
Ian 18ish

What the game would look like on a real sun

After this it was still only about nine o’clock so we felt there was another big game in us. We went for an old familiar: Tinners’ Trail.

We began like greyhounds out of the traps, with iron and copper both at their highest possible prices in round one. Then, in round two, they collapsed to their lowest. This meant, as round three dawned, there were still a lot of cubes on the board.

Sam went for trains, Ian went for adits, I went for boats, I think. Anyway, it was a close game under difficult circumstances.

Ian 89 (plus 4 cash)
Sam 89 (no cash)
Andrew 83

Next we played Spy Tricks. I fell into last place with no correct guesses in round one and I stayed there, unable to make by Double Agent piece work in my favour. Sam played us all for fools with his clever reaction to Ian’s guess of red five (“I don’t like how quickly you did that”) despite him having the red five in his hand. Ian’s unerring eye for the missing card won through in the end, though.

Ian 22
Sam 19
Andrew 5

Finally, after all that astrophysics, mining and espionage, we had to get a letter to the princess! Yes, we finished on Love Letter. I ran into a 2-0-0 lead. Then Sam brought it back to 2-2-0 before Ian staged a comeback. It was 2-2-2 and Sam won in the final round, meaning we all won at least one game tonight.

Love Letter's version of dead man's hand.

Sam 3
Andrew 2
Ian 2

Cheers for hosting, Sam, and see you all soon.

Whatever is the Biomatter

Today's post is named after Adam's insistence that we identify the exact nature of biomatter.

The games began early when Stan and I nearly played chess, but then abruptly changed tack to Flipships. We blithely obliterated the oncoming mass of tiny attackers but realised we had a single round to hit the mothership 6 times. Still, we had 24 attempts to do it with. And every missed attempt would just made the final hit that much more glorious... except we hit the Mothership exactly once, and sent our other pilots careering uselessly around the kitchen table and into the salad dressing.

Alien Invaders: win
Sam and Stan: lose

With Andrew and Adam still half an hour from arrival Stan wanted a crack at The Mind. Without making any kind of verbal pact, we started playing at a much brisker pace than normal, and barrelled our way up to the eighth round before expiring. But round five was a Mind Classic: I got down three low cards and Stanley two, before I sat back with my cards face down on the table. Stan scrutinised my face for ten seconds, then played his 95. I played my 96 and 97, and he slapped down 98/99 for a clear round. Genius!

The Mind - wins
Sam and Stan: lose

Stan vacated the kitchen for the front room as Andrew and then Adam arrived to find Underwater Cities set up and ready to go.

very similar to last week

Last week's play gives a more in-depth run down of the rules, but suffice to say in Underwater Cities, you're building underwater cities. Actions are paid for by cards, and if the card colour matches the action colour: bingo! You get the action on the card too. This simple twist on worker-placement is genius when everything combines neatly, and annoying when you regularly end up with a hand of like-coloured cards. I got the rule sweats - not only is there a fair amount to get through, I was also conscious of Sally in hearing-distance as I said things like "An upgraded desalination plant gets you biomatter"

"So that's shit, essentially?" asked Adam
Andrew and I protested that biomatter could take many forms, but for the rest of the evening Adam referred to his desalination plants as 'piss factories'. Is this what Vladimir Suchy worked so hard for?

piss factories not shown

Andrew and I knew Adam would win, but by how much? There have been times in the past where his debut attempts at games we already know have been embarrassing for us, so it was up to us to keep the pressure on, which we did with lots of sarcasm about how long he took to take his turns. It didn't work - Adam had come with pyschological ploys of his own, which included pointing out my schoolboy error in round two (I coulda built a symbiotic city! Instead I'm a bum) and waving sugared peanuts in Andrew's face. Andrew hates nuts, sugared or not.

Other snacks featured, including the rowdy salt and vinegar twirls that attracted Sally's attention ("What are you eating? It's so loud") which Andrew rationalised as the acoustic properties of the twirl over our table manners. Back in the game, Adam's natural inclination to hoard, even in a world where resources can be hard to come by, became evident as we hit the final straight and his nose was just visible behind a pile of 'science'. I grabbed the first two government contracts. Andrew grabbed the next one. Adam looked unconcerned. We snapped up Special Cards with end-game bonuses. Adam shrugged. After round ten we counted up and found I had won! - If you exclude Adam, that is.

Adam!!!!

Adam 94
Sam 84
Andrew 81

We'd bashed out three submerged conurbations in rapid speed, taking a little over 2 hours. "It felt longer" Adam admitted, but that's just because he thought about it more than we did. Anyway, there was still time for a little closer which was Spy Tricks. Andrew accidentally broke the game in round two when he revealed the hidden card with what he realised was a drunken decision. I capitalised with a winning bet, and wrapped things up in round three:

Sam 27
Adam 22
Andrew 10

This morning when I mentioned my win to Stan, he archly compared the 'deep strategy' of Spy Tricks to the 'luckfest' of Underwater Cities. Pithy cynicism from an 11-year-old - this is the world we're living in now...

We couldn't persuade Adam to stay any longer, but Andrew and I finished the evening with an old favourite in Love Letter, where Andrew shot into a 3-0 lead in a matter of seconds, guessing my cards and baroning me into submission. I surged back to 3-2, in a princess-missive-mission-recreation of the recent Man City-Spurs game. I was helped a lot by my handmaid, as Andrew found himself forced to discard his own princess. But Andrew took the win when he guessed I had a shitty Baron, giving everyone a victory on the night... a delightful night too, considering the amount of biomatter involved.

Markers Aurelius

This week's games night began with eight people sat around Sam's kitchen table: Sam, Stanley, Joe, other Joe, Martin, Quentin, Katy, and me. We needed a short game we could all play before one of the Joes had to go to bed. We chose Insider and dealt Quentin in despite him never having played before.

Regular gamer Joe was the master and he handled our questions dutifully until Martin blurted out "Is it a volcano?" which was the correct word.

We discussed whether or not Martin was the Insider, but we had very little to go on. In the end, only Joe voted against him and it went to another round of voting, with Quentin's questions "Is it geological?" and "Is it a mountain?" bringing suspicion upon him, but he wasn't the Insider either. It was Stanley!

We played again, after Martin explained the finer details of the rules to Quentin, and this time it was the smaller of the two Joes who was the master. I guessed correctly ("baseball") but only Katy voted against me. Maybe there's something about him, but we chose Quentin again and we were wrong again because it was Stanley again.

One Joe went to bed and we split into two groups and played a couple of short games until Ian was due to arrive. Joe, Katy and Martin played Maskmen. Katy won with a whole round still to play but was a little put out to see her magnificent lead shorn down to a narrow victory by the end.

Katy 4
Joe 3
Martin 1

Sam, Stanley, Quentin and I chose Spy Tricks, a game I had no recollection of despite having played only a few days before. Sam won big in the final round, putting his double bet onto the correct card, and just squeezed past his son into first place.

Sam 25
Stanley 24
Quentin 20
Andrew 11

Now Stanley went to bed and Ian arrived. We rearranged the groups into me, Martin, Sam and Ian playing Senators while Joe, Katy and Quentin played Let's Make A Bus Route. That game ended

Joe 60
Katy 47
Quentin 47

And then they moved on to Good Little Tricks, a devilish card game whose basic premise escapes me at the moment. There was a fair amount of people claiming they were going to "shoot the moon," though.

Joe -21
Katy -26
Quentin -34

We were still playing Senators when they were done, so they bashed out a quick single round of Little Tricks:

Quentin 0
Joe -7
Katy -20

Meanwhile, over in Ancient Rome, we'd seen all kinds of history flash before our eyes. After Sam had the rules explained to him, our first game was over in minutes as the fourth War card game after only five or six rounds.

Sam 8
Andrew 7
Ian 6
Martin 6

We set up to play again and this time it was more of an epic, with the fourth War card not coming out until the very end. But before then all manner of events unfolded. I was hit by Civil Unrest and a lack of cash during some extortion, meaning I lost two senators but I was then able to cash in two high scoring sets of cards for 51 in cash which I used to buy my way into first place. Other players took turns being in last place, first Ian then Martin and finally Sam. But that fourth War never seemed to arrive and Ian ran out of cash, meaning he slipped further back while my frugal final rounds got me first on a tie-breaker.

Andrew 11 + 8)
Martin 11 (+2)
Sam 10
Ian 9

Finally we were all together for a game of Just One. We started well, but soon duplicates started to creep in. Sam did well to get 'cocoon' with only 'chrysalis' and 'enclosed' to guide him. Joe was less fortunate, having the impossible task of getting 'panda' from the two remaining clues (after four bamboos wiped themselves out) which were 'diplomacy' and 'eyes'. Once again we were "wow, not bad" according to the score sheet.

There was one more game in us thanks to generous offers of lifts from Joe and Quentin, and it was Fuji Flush. I was first to one card but just couldn't push through. Mid-game, Katy was doing so badly that she claimed she had more cards than when she started. But it was Quentin who was able to join his last card to another already on the table and push through for victory.

Joe's best Godfather face during Fuji Flush.

Quentin 0 cards left
Andrew 1
Martin 1
Sam 2
Katy 2
Ian 3
Joe 4

And that was all. As we set off, I somehow managed to lose my phone so at the moment I have no photos from the evening, but hopefully I'll put them on later (EDIT: done it!). Thanks to everyone for a splendid time.

Quantum Surveyor

Friday night. Andrew and I nearly played a head to head of Gugong, only to hear the hearty news that Ian had finished his attack of the crazy golfs and was headed our way. Whilst we waited, I introduced Andrew to the delights of Tiny Towns, which has been something of a cutesy hit, like an adorable puppy whose butt waggles when it shakes its tail before turning into a Nightmare as you run out of room for it in your house. Andrew built a lot of sheds and forgot about his Monument:

Sam 33

Andrew 15

Then Ian arrived, disappointingly sans golfing slacks, and we played again. This time I foolishly built a monument that prevents me from ever being starting player, and suffered for it as Andrew crazily took wood over and over. Ian adapted to the harsh environs of a town built by demented carpenters and took joint first on his debut: 

Ian and Andrew 26

Sam 21

Before we started on the evening's epic. We didn't realise it was going to be an epic, but it truly was: Quantum. We went for a triangular map where we started out reasonably close to each other, and interaction was high from the early rounds. Ian was first to get a cube down if I recall correctly, and Andrew's ships suffered at the hands of both his opponents as he frequently found himself with a solitary 4 flying in the cosmos. 

For a long period Ian's low-numbered ships patrolled the central area of the board picking us off one by one. This meant he was slow to get cubes down as his strategy was all dominance, but while we were effectively shooting targets, slow was better than our sloth-like progress. Because the first advancement he made was Brilliant, he was also adding cards at a rate of knots courtesy of his research advancing two points every turn. In fact I was surprised to find after an hour Andrew and I were still level with him, having sneakily got a quantum cube down against the run of play. 

Then two dramatic turn of events: Ian rerolled all his ships and pursued a different, less aggressive strategy, and then I managed to wangle cubes down on subsequent turns to take the lead.

I was on the verge of a dramatic victory, in fact, but Andrew cannily occupied the only space that could stop me. No matter, I thought, as I engineered another imminent win - only for Ian to pull off the move of the night and claim a spectacular triumph. 

It had been a long game, but a fantastic one. 

Ian - all cubes down

Sam - one cube left

Andrew - two cubes left

We followed that with Push It, which I don't remember much of now except to say I think I won by default, when my discs were shoved into fortunate spots with the scores poised at 10-10-8. 

Sam 11

Andrew 10

Ian 8

And we ended an epic night with Spy Tricks, a rather bizarre but fun mash-up of deduction, roulette, and trick-taking. Everyone is trying to guess the identity of a hidden card, and you get to guess the suit, rank, or both by winning a trick - or indeed losing a trick, if you played the worst card of all. 

As the played cards reveal what isn't the hidden card, slowly more information is revealed about what it might be. It was fun, and rather funny too... in a kind of sweary way. 

Andrew 27

Sam 17

Ian 2

"You'll always have Quantum Ian" we said. And it's true.