Missing whirled

 When I arrived at around eight, I was surprised to see only three people around Sam’s kitchen table: Sam, Joe and Ian. What with people ill, isolating or absent for some other reason, we were down to a quartet for this week’s gaming. The three of them were midway through a game of Whirling Witchcraft and I sat down and tried to work out the rules but, apart from turning cubes into other cubes, I was kind of baffled. People said things like “My toads are overflowing!” which didn’t help. In the end, Joe won so easily he admitted he wasn’t sure if he’d been playing it right.

Joe 8
Sam 4
Ian 1
 
Then the four of us brought out Search For Planet X, the app-based game of logical deduction. Each player, via their phone, is drip fed a number of clues such as “no comet within two sectors of a gas cloud” or information about how many of a certain astronomical object are with a certain number of sectors. With these facts, we are left to deduce the location of Planet X, the only astral body to elude our sensors.

The board came complete with dazzling sun in the middle

It was nice to play it again, and I went scanning for gas clouds while Sam targeted two sectors with his first two moves. And I was progressing quite nicely and had worked out the comets, gas clouds and asteroids when Joe asked what he should do if he knew where Planet X was. He followed the apps instructions, typed in his guess and a little jingle told him he was correct. All that was left for the rest of us was the make two final guesses on whatever we thought we knew for sure, and that was the game. Well done, Joe.
 
Joe 22
Andrew 14 + tie breaker
Sam 14
Ian 7
 
Next we played Art Robbery, a quick game of stealing points from your opponents while trying to make sure you don’t have least “alibis” (little white dots on certain tiles). It was fast and mean and Joe won again with the highest score and most alibis. He ruefully noted, however, that having lots of alibis isn’t necessarily a good thing. “I was ice-skating and…”
 

Joe 29

Andrew 25
Ian 23
Sam, fewest alibis
 
Could Joe continue his run of form? We would have to wait and see as the rest of the evening belonged to So Clover. We played twice when I was there. I didn’t right the scores, but neither was a full house. A couple of guesses made me sad when they turned out to be wrong, such as “Friend” and “Moist” wasn’t loveheart although it surely should have been. It was fun as always, and I did have the interesting feeling of watching my friends guess every single one wrong before they reconsider and end up with three out of four.

Ian did not hint at "dirty" with "sister" although we felt confident he had

A tricky one, especially with Sunday, school, brother and religion all possibles for "Church"

 

Then I left, and the three of the kept going with scores of 10, 13 and 16. Finally, after Joe and Ian went home, Sam and Sally played and got 21. Or maybe they played 21? Anyway, next week is the Christmas do. Assuming it’s not illegal, of course.

The Search for Planet Games

Last night Martin made his way to my house for some socially-distanced two-player games.

After a quick catch up, we kicked off with The Search for Planet X.

In this deductive undertaking, you are astronomers scanning the solar system for the mysterious (and actually plausible in real life) extra planet. The board is separated into 12 sectors (18 if you're feeling expert, but we did 12) and nine have a single thing in them (comet, gas cloud, asteroid, or dwarf planet)  while three are apparently empty (two are genuinely empty;  one will actually be hiding Planet X itself). Each game has some universal rules about how these things relate to each other, and also some specific ones that are furnished by the app. Your goal is to find the Planet, obviously, but the method of doing so is deducing what is in all the sectors, and while you're doing this the game invites you to submit theories as to what celestial body is where - because these theories score points, you can actually win even if you don't locate the planet first.

On each turn you choose whether to survey (look for a specific object in specific sectors) research (uncover facts about how objects relate to each other) and, only twice a game, target (establish categorically what is in one sector of your choice). All actions take time, and the furthest back on the time track is the active player - like a spacey version of Tokaido. Although the app suddenly needed an update halfway through, the mechanics are actually simple - and the submitted theories, when proved right, give additional clues to help you work out what's where. The brain-melting is applying the incremental drip of info to the elimination and clarification of what, exactly, is where, in the firmament.

My early targeting found an apparently empty sector, which didn't really help with my opening theory (you can't theorise that there's nothing ) but found the solitary Dwarf Planet with my second. Martin revealed later he'd located the two comets early on, and he led the running in the theories from the get-go. I could have been first to find Planet X but I made a critical error, surveying when I didn't actually need to. As it turned out, it wouldn't have been enough anyway: Martin's astronomy skills were superior to mine.

Martin 29
Sam 19

Having completed a great step forward for mankind, we took a couple backwards to try Martin's acquisition of Heir to the Pharaoh.  It's a tricky one to precis, but I'll give it a quick go: bid for God cards to put things on a track and get monuments and build obelisks and stuff that point at other obelisks and stuff for points and contribute to a pyramid and if things point at the pyramid they score themselves too and get Magic Animals.

Yes, it's pretty abstract, and pretty bonkers as well, but we liked it. There's a nifty bidding mechanic where sun cards beat moon cards in ties, and bidded cards go to the opposing player at the start of the next round. It was a mixture of Knizia and someone a bit more fiddly, but a lot of fun.

I led through much of the game, but having reached peak red wine around the halfway mark, couldn't quite crack the puzzle playing out on the board itself, satisfying myself with monument collections and pyramid contributions. Twice I ended up with a single God (along with Thoth, the God of catch-up mechanisms and round-resetting) and on the penultimate round I spent so much that my final bidding hand was predominantly a confection of low moon cards.

Martin - loads of points
Sam - about ten less points

We wrapped up with Letterpress, at which point my memories get a little bit blurry except to say I temporarily convinced myself I could spell advisable as advizable and my stashed cards for the final, critical round, looked like some kind of consonant-heavy secret code. I managed a thematically-apt DAZED, but Martin came up trumps with a very impressive BLUSTERY.

Lots of fun. I hope we'll be growing the numbers at some point, somewhere, soon. Meantime if anyone fancies a head-to-head evening of physically distant fun...???