Games in the key of life

If late is the new on-time then I'd be as punctual as a Japanese train. Unfortunately, it's not and so when I finally arrived well after 8, i found Sam (host), Joe and Katy deep in a game of New York Zoo. 

It's from Uwe Rosenberg and it involves filling a grid of squares with various shaped areas which you can fill with animals. It caused a lot of anguish as players bemoaned their non-breeding stock, imagining the animals either looking at each other from afar or just wanking. Joe was first to fill his area which gave him an instawin.

Joe first

Sam and Katy joint last

Next the four of us played Take The A Chord, a Japanese trick taking game which has a vague theme of playing Jazz music. All of it seemed confusing and opaque, such as who won the trick, who started an improvisation, who got the spotlight and what happens if we change keys. Even working out who started the next round in the event of a tie for least points in the previous round required us to read the rules slowly at least twice.

Meanwhile, Katy's request to have jazz on the stereo was largely left unfulfilled as the playlist kept veering off into other genres. Mind you, we filled in by humming the note we’d just played in a perfectly tone-deaf manner. I think I had fun playing it but that was mostly due to the company, not the game. I'm not sure it's the kind of thing you understand first time. Just like real jazz, then.

Katy 80

Sam 60

Joe 45

Andrew 20

Then we tried Rumble Nation as a four player. It’s pretty feisty, at least it was for Katy who snatched Joe’s phone from his hand as he was searching for Sri Lankan restaurants so that he could concentrate on taking his move, and then she criticised me for folding up a crisp packet really loudly. Nevertheless, her dedication was rewarded by a comfortable win.Maybe we should all play like that.

Katy 39

Sam 28

Andrew 20

Joe 19

By now it was after 10.00, which is usually finishing up time online, but not here. Instead we leapt feet first into our best Victorian story-telling pants with a rousing game of The Secret Adventures of the Old Hellfire Club. It’s a very basic trick-taker dressed up with a lot of nonsense about storytelling.

This evening’s nonsense was based around our attempts to find the Elephant’s Graveyard and we made a fairly good start, getting on a ship with a foul-mouthed Karl Marx and sailing past the Cape of Good Hope, but then I was arrested and we all went to Newgate Prison. Joe won, but let’s be honest it’s the kind of game that doesn’t need winners. 

Joe 15

Katy 14

Sam 12

Andrew 6

So, congrats to Joe and Katy for winning everything. See you all next week.

Active Pile On

 Just like that, we're back in the room. After what seems like at least a decade, the Olde London mob of GNN assembled at Chris' house last night - along with the host there was Paul and myself (Sam) with Andrew coming later. There was a slight hesitancy as one might expect, particularly as I had brought the boys along. Suddenly we were all in a situation we weren't used to - a crowd. 

Luckily Chris' house is enormous and the children scampered off to do God knows what after we'd all hugged and kissed and eaten pizza. 

Chris and Paul had already been gaming with Ashton, trying out Paul's charity shop find of the day before, Space Lines. I think they played twice and Ashton won both times. But now with three of us, we had the luxury of starting an epic six-hour gaming session, and we did so with Project L. 

The rules have already been explained but suffice to say that Chris won it convincingly, and then Paul won our second game convincingly (I was third both times), and if there's a gigantic void of theme and the merest smidgen of Hey I Wanted That interaction, it's also enormously satisfying just putting all these bits into place. Especially when you do one of those delicious Master Actions and pull off a zinger of a move. Or you can just build a tetronomic totem like Chris did. 

We then played 7 Wonders. Without the computer to move cards around for you and tell you what everything does, it wasn't quite the super-breezy ten minutes the online implementation is, but it was still pretty speedy and nice to be in the room. Paul suggested we could slide the tablecloth back and forth if we wanted to relive the BGA version, but we ended up focusing our energies on the game in the end, and I picked up a rare win.

Then Andrew arrived! We were now pushing the legal limits and feeling marginally bandity about it all, and felt like something silly, plumping for Cubitos, with it's seemingly simple dice-rolling system that still tied us all in knots - me especially, as I'd explained the rules wrong previously, had a correction from Joe, reread the rules, but still got confused, and ended with the worse case of rules sweats I've had in a while as I fretted over draw piles, active piles, discard piles and roll piles. I mean, that's at least one pile too many isn't it? 

Basically you roll shitloads of dice though: it's a deckbuilder in cube form. We all played cautiously except Paul, who kept going bust and was miles behind the rest of us, only to suddenly spring forward like a geometric hunting dog. As before, the sedate opening changes and before you know it everyone suddenly speeds up - my previous experiences and the fact I got a Rollosaurus meant I was first over the line.

Sam wins.

Others: DNF

Chris was keen to try out The Secret Adventures of the Old Hellfire Club and I was certainly amenable, although it meant a brief rules-read, we were off!

This is a Very Silly game. Mechanically-speaking, all you're doing is playing cards of suits on your turn and hoping nobody plays a lower card of the same suit - pushing your luck or banking them after a minimum of two. You get coins for high cards and coins for having the most of a suit at the end. But heaped on top of this basic-math, risk-reward thing is the story you're telling. Players are drunken patrons of the titular Victorian-age club and are retelling the great adventure they undertook to (for example, as we did) save the world from a scourge of invading aliens. The cards represent story elements, such as Person, Place, Weapon, Insult, Motive, and as you play the cards you integrate them into your retelling. But the higher cards are more fabulously boastful, exaggerating things, and the lower ones rather more run of the mill. At one point I recalled how we set our man o' war with all hands against the invaders, only for Paul to play a lower card, reminding me it was actually an Amazonian blowpipe. In that instance, my turn's over and Paul banks his card instead, and the turn moves on. 

I can imagine sitting next to us as we played this could be very irritating if you were, say, reading a book, or engaged in everyday conversation. Particularly with Chris and I releasing long-dormant acting aspirations, but I found it enormous fun and probably the highlight of the evening. It's perhaps the most group-dependent game I've ever encountered but there were some golden moments in it, like when we encountered Karl Marx outside Whitechapel and charged the aliens with art fraud. Discovering Andrew  was a Fart-catcher (5 Insult) will always stay with me. 

Although as he pointed out, isn't Disillusionment with Life (8 Peril) more of an everyday occurrence than an 8?

Andrew had time for one more game and it was High Society. This is still my (second) favourite Knizia, a miniature work of genius. Everyone was in with a shout right up until the end - except for Chris, who wasn't. My skin was saved though when Andrew took the last card...

Sam 15

Paul/Andrew 13 each

Chris - BUST

We tried to tempt Andrew to stay by setting up Raj, but he was resolute and returned to whence he had came (the A350) while Chris took us to the fackin' cleaners in Raj world: with no Martin to bid high against me on the mid-range stuff, I kept overpaying for everything and my last-round recovery wasn't enough to catch him. 

Chris 64

Sam 54

Paul 20

The witching hour was approaching so we blasted through Mountain Goats: a dice-chucking, point-collecting, goat-removing evening-ender!

....but it didn't actually end the evening because Paul was eager to play Project L again, so we did! This time I fared a bit better. You gotta take those Master Actions!

Marvellous stuff, well worth the trip while the place is open!