I'll Tichu a thing or two

Christmas at Joe's was actually Christmas at Joe's parents, who were away and allowing their offspring to party while the house was empty. By party, I obviously mean play games, which began with three of us - the host, Stanley and myself (Sam; Andrew will take over narrative duties when he arrives). And by empty, I mean there was some Michael Crawford style comedy of Joe being unable to let Stanley and I via the back door, so we passed games through a gap under the window before walking around the block to reach the front door.

Finally in, there was some further comedy - less Michael Crawford, more Friday Night Dinners - about getting the heating working, before we finally stood perusing our options. I was keen to play Rajas of the Ganges, Stan suggested Pulsar, but Joe proposed we begin with lighter fare in the form of Majesty: For the Realm.

Generation game

Each of us has a tableau of cards forming key buildings in a village (Inn, Barracks, etc) and on your turn, you simply add a card from the display beneath one of the buildings to gain points and sometimes some other benefit. But claiming the cards uses the same economy as Tribes or Firenze - the further up the display you go, the more expensive the card is.

Cards!

Joe focused on his castle and the chaining of this rewarding multiplier offset the attacks from Stanley (via Barracks) and my mish-mash of different cards. If Stan had managed to get himself a single castle card he might have claimed a debut win, but as it was the host's calculated castling got him the victory:

Joe 190
Stan 184
Sam 179

It was quite a sweet game, and I definitely prefer it to Splendor. And with the palette-cleanser out of the way, I suggested Rajas of the Ganges again, but no joy. Joe was keen to play The Quest for El Dorado though, and this was met with murmurs of approval from Stan and I.

forgot to take a photo

If only we'd known then how Joe was going to show us a clean pair of heels and sail off to the most convincing victory I've seen yet, with both Stan and I miles behind him. Stupid game!

Joe wins.
Sam probably second.
Stan most likely third.

With time on the afternoon session running out, the possibility of playing Rajas of the Ganges looked remote and so we had a few rounds of Zendo, doing the easy and figure-able-out rules.

plastic!

Katy arrived at the tail end of it when I was master, and guessed the rule before either Joe or Stan did. Then it was time to take Stanley home for tea, which I did, hoping that when I returned, perhaps we'd play Rajas of the Ganges!  We bumped into Andrew arriving as we left, and it is he who will now tell you the story of What Happened Next.

*

I arrived at around five o’clock, just in time to pass Stan and Sam leaving the house. Inside I found Joe and Katy about to embark upon the grand tour of Joe’s parents’ house. Soon after this, Adam arrived so Katy and I decided that now would be the best time to go and get chips. We set off, with promises to get Adam some chips too.

But the chip shop was shut so we went walking to find other food establishments. We looked in the local shop, but did not fancy limp sandwiches and crisps. Instead we found a “multi-cuisine” place that did wraps. And fries too, so we were sorted.

We returned and ate while we watched Adam and Joe play Azul.

Joe 60
Adam 54

“And that's the only time I will ever beat Adam at Azul.” said Joe, referring to the fact that it was Adam’s first game.

We were still waiting for Sam to return for the evening session, so we decided to start playing a game of Tichu. The last time I played it was a while ago, and I didn’t care for it (I don’t like old card games given a few new game-breaking cards and then sold as a brand new game) but I was happy to try again.

We split into teams according to how we were sat around the table, and began. There were a few occasions when I sighed at Tichu's fiddly rules, and Katy kept playing a card or set of cards by mistake and then putting them back into her hand meaning that we all knew what she had. It didn’t seem to help us, as Joe completed an early Grand Tichu and put them into an early lead.

Katy and Joe 295
Adam and Andrew 105

Then Sam returned and we finished off the hand we were playing while he satisfied his curiosity by investigating the cellar. Once we were all together we decided to play a five-player before the inevitable split into smaller components. Five players is a tricky number and, in this mostly gameless house, our options were more limited than usual. But Sam had brought The Godfather: A New Don so we set it up and he explained the rules for the newcomers.

It was fun, and there was a nice amount of muscling in on each others’ patches but there was confusion about when you can re-roll and, like the last time we played, the grimy pastel colour scheme lead to some confusion about where the boundaries were.

Adam won, despite having never been the Godfather while Joe came pretty close despite having only a handful of soldiers on the board. Perhaps there are hidden depths to this game under its murky surface.

Adam 15
Andrew 14
Sam 14
Joe 13
Katy 8

Nice, but a bit too long with five.

So now we split into two groups. Katy cradled Yokohama in her arms long enough to tempt Adam into a rematch. The board looks tiny when it’s set up for only two players.

Sam, Joe and I played Paperback since Joe couldn’t find his copy of Movable Type that he thought he’d brought with him. Paperback is a word building game.

I found it a bit dry. You make a word that gets you enough money to buy a new letter card which, if you use that in a word later on gives you even more money to buy cards. It was a “get stuff to get stuff” mechanic pasted onto a word-making game.

Sam 46
Joe 39
Andrew 29

Yokohama was still in full swing, so we played Azul. Such a nice game, with opportunities for evil. Sam told Joe to “stop looking at my board!” But I got two columns completed for a win.

Andrew 62
Joe 51
Sam 45

As for Yokohama, Adam didn’t score any points at all while Katy raced into a 44-0 lead. Adam said he was “trying something”.

Whatever it was, it almost worked. I remember him making a long and complicated mega-move near the game end and, during the final count up, it was quite close.

Katy 129
Adam 124

In the after game discussion, Adam worked out that he could’ve won if only he’d played his last turn differently.

Then Katy neatly put the game away. Into the box lid. She just closed it anyway, and flipped it over so it was the right way up again, to Joe's appalled wails of dismay.

Than Sam decided he would probably go back and, in indecent haste, Joe said “We can finish Tichu!” before he remembered to thank Sam for joining us.

Katy was not keen, preferring instead Divinare but Joe had already said he wasn’t in the mood for new any more rules. She was also unwilling to lose their 295-105 lead. "Come on, we'll take it home!" said Joe, encouragingly.

So we recommenced our game. It was an epic. Adam and I came out of the traps running, winning the first two hands in first and second for two 200-point bonuses. Then I got cocky and failed a Tichu, allowing J&K back into the game. Joe Grand Tichued again, under extraordinary circumstances. When he picked up the card given to him by Katy, he pointed out that if your partner declares a Grand Tichu it’s usually the done thing to give them your best card.

But despite Katy’s lack of help because she wanted to keep the two straights she had (we later found out she’d given him a five) and despite having no aces in his hand, Joe still managed to complete his Grand Tichu to edge them back into the lead.

Later Adam put down a 12-card run, which was nice.

Soon after that I noticed that midnight had passed and, since this was the closest to a New Year’s Party that I was going to this year, I wished everyone a happy new year!!

Katy was keen for the game to end, and seemed disappointed that Adam and I, regaining the lead, ended a round a mere ten points off the game-ending 1,000 point mark.

Surely it would end in the next round. And it did, but only just, as a lone king in our stack of tricks gave us the ten points we needed to close the game as winners.

Adam and Andrew 1,000
Katy and Joe 800

And so we were done. Phew, what an evening. What a year! Well done everyone for getting to the end. Let’s do it all again next year.

Happy New Year!

Bishop!

An unusual Wednesday night games occurrence occurred as Andrew, Ian and I all found ourselves free, and chomping at the bit for some more Christmas gaming - Andrew and I especially, having been unable to attend the official GNN last night.

So it was we converged at my table with the pre-agreed Rajas of the Ganges set up. Initially, it must be said it looks like someone ate a Hawaiian pizza and threw up on some Christmas lights, but as previously touched on, the game at heart is quite simple - it's a race to push your cash income one way and your glory another, until the twain meet.

Everything else is about maximising that engine: keeping the dice rolling in, so you can roll 'em back out again, getting money for markets, glory for buildings, and lots of other glorious shit inbetween. Ian rinsed us, having chained together a bunch of spice markets and scored a whole load of buildings. Despite my late-game surge of ten - ten! - points along the glory track, when Ian ended it neither Andrew nor I had managed to get our markers in kissing distance.

That most Euro-y of Euros packed away, we played another new game: The Godfather: A New Don, which we couldn't work out was meant to be a pun on a new dawn or not, but for some reason Andrew insisted we all use Australian accents.

It's a little like Las Vegas and a little like something more directly interactive. Players are one of the families in the 1950's hoping to become the dominant force in New York. You place soldiers in the various New York districts to score points at the end of the game for controlling/nearly controlling/nearly nearly controlling a district, but in order to get a soldier in there you need to spend dice. So dice are handy, but in each round one player is the current Godfather, and they take dice (or offers) off the other players. If you want to be Godfather yourself, you need to work your way up the muscle track, which takes... dice. There are also dice to be won at Las Vegas if you feel lucky.

It all made for a feisty, spicy affair, as being ahead on the muscle track also allows you to eject other players from districts you fancy having yourself. The game end is triggered when either a district is full or a player runs out of soldiers, then it's all about majorities.

As it turned out, Ian was the new don, as his points scored for soldiers left-in-hand pushed him ahead of me on the score track - a crushing twist, as I'd deliberately spent soldiers in order to trigger the end of the game!

We moved on to Phrasell, one of the games from the Wibbell++ deck which I have long wanted to play, and Andrew rated as one of his games of the year.

It's all about coming with an appropriate phrase for a randomly-chosen subject, which officially plays 5 players or more but we thought we'd have a crack at anyway. And it was funny, not least in part due to the difficulty of coming up with a phrase that made any kind of sense. Andrew's Someone Call Nurse Fatima had no relevance to the subject, but he won the round anyway. It's that kind of game.

Overall though, it was yet another win for Ian, who was on a roll. Maybe because Andrew and I were clearly drunk at this point; I'm not sure. I can't remember if Ian was.

Sticking with the Wibbell++ deck, we bashed out the game Andrew and I created with Scrabble tiles some 25 years ago - Hypothetickell. In this game you add a letter to an ever-extending chain of letters, but you must (unless you're bluffing) have a word in mind that has the current letters in it, in the current order (though there can be any number of letters before/after/between them). I don't know who won but we played a couple of rounds before Andrew remarked that if we add it to Games Night Guru we'll have to say there is a shitload of AP. Good fun though.

My word was locksmithing. Andrew added the S as a bluff

And we rounded off the evening with Love Letter - a GNN mainstay and classic. Countless times we've played it and countless times Ian has won. But not tonight. Tonight was Andrew's turn; a win richly deserved if only for the fact he was drunk enough to ask me if I had a Bishop, and I was drunk enough to reply "No". While Ian merely blinked, before we collectively recalled there are no Bishops in Love Letter.

Andrew 3
Sam 2
Ian 1

Thanks guys, a great bunch of games and a lot of fun!