Party to Something

GNN started 2020 in celebratory mode, with an open-door policy at mine and Sally's house, and as well as the usual massively-unhealthy snacks there was also the marginally-safer ones of crostini and tapenade, courtesy of Sally. There was also mackerel pate, a variety of cheeses, cloudy lemonade, and a bowl of salad that - as Martin noted nine hours later, slowly turned into a bowl of wilted leaves.

still lurking this morning

But before that could happen, Adam T and Celena were first to arrive, promptly joined by Martin, Sarah and Effie. After summing up the options, Effie left the adults to it and went to chill with Stan and Joe. Arthur joined her when he rocked up with Hannah (who came by bus), and then shortly after that Adam H arrived on two wheels. Then Joe walked in too.

But for a long time - literally, hours! - people talked. It almost reached the point where the blog would need to be renamed, but fortunately Andy Mosse arrived with his boy Finn, and brought Team 3 with him. After it sat glowing radioactively for long enough on the table, the collective curiosity of myself, Martin, the Adams and Joe couldn't be resisted any more and with Andy's help we cracked out a quick couple of plays.

The game takes the concept of see/hear/speak no evil and parcels out those communicative restrictions on three team-mates, one of whom must describe the structure they have to build (from tetris-type blocks) whilst not speaking. The second must communicate the message verbally to the third, who can't see anything. It can be played co-operatively or competitively, and our second game was the latter, with Andy, Joe and Adam H beating Martin, Adam T and myself. Maybe it was the combination of hosting, or too much cloudy lemonade, but I found it very stressful.

Later - I think it was later - Ian arrived, and as the daylight began to fail, so did Steve and Anja with Louie and Lennon. Whilst the older kids disappeared to the loft to watch Pixels, the younger crew stayed in the front room with more suitable viewing, as we were all charmed by Lennon distributing snacks, often directly into our mouths. By this point there were two rooms full of potential gamers. In the front room, Sally and I joined Adam, Hannah, Steve, Anja for what turned out to be a triumphant crack at Just One - not only scoring the maximum 13 but 2 bonus points as well. which is even more impressive considering the game probably took about an hour all told.

Meanwhile in the kitchen there was an epic game of Facecards playing out. It took even longer than Just One, so God knows what took place. Everyone seemed very happy with it though.

As the day faded away, so did the 'non-gamers' with various children and relieved parents making their way home so the regular GNNers could go full-nerd. Sally had nowhere to go, but seemed happy to stay. To be frank the order of events gets extremely hazy here, I think due to all the cheese I was eating, but I think this was when a huge game of 7 Wonders got played.

Andy Mosse had only played 7 Wonders Duel, but was otherwise new to things, and initially had Joe beside him as his trusty assistant. But then I stole Joe away to play two games of Blitzkrieg! which we won one apiece and celebrated in our joint mutual destruction. I think Martin won 7 Wonders, after which Adam and Celena departed... in the front room, Sally taught Steve and Anja Yokai. I'm not sure how they got on, but after the first game Sally was ashen-faced in the kitchen, muttering something about rules.

Somewhere around here Res Arcana got played.

I think it was while Adam, Katy - freshly arrived - Ian and I played Flamme Rouge. As we were setting it up, Chris walked in the door - passing Steve and Anja en famille on the way out - and happily sat down to join us. A while ago Flamme Rouge was a regular at the GNN tables, and it was nice to play it again even if the card system initially seems slightly counter-intuitive. I've personally found that the backs of all cards are the same colour a little bewildering, even if it's necessary to hide those exhaustion cards...

While we were pedalling through the Alps, a boisterous Medium was played out at the other end of the table, with much roaring of disbelief and approbation. I've no idea which team won, but they wrapped things up the same time as Adam H sailed over the line in Flamme Rouge.

I'm now exceedingly hazy on things but I think it was towards the end of these games that Andrew and Anna arrived to find a scene of game-related debauchery in full swing. Stan and Joe were so screened out they were taken for a walk by Sally, Andy and Finn departed, and a game of PUSH was initiated by Joe that Anna was shanghai-ed into, whilst at the other end of the table something else occurred. I'm not sure what. It may have just been wild consumption of cheese. EDIT: looking at photos I see we played Tiny Towns. This was after Adam and I tried to play Ecos: First Continent, only to have Martin rule it out by repeatedly barking "no!" even though he wasn't playing.

I think I blanked it out because of my awful building-site finale - Adam won this, followed by Chris and Ian.

However around mid-evening seat-changing occurred with Just One back on the table in the kitchen while Ian, Adam and Chris suffered the indignity of finding out a crucial rule I'd missed in Word Domination: the game of allegedly taking over the world but actually just spelling things.

It's a neat little system of claiming cards by using the letters on them, the catch being you need to claim them in subsequent turns, and may be bumped off in the meantime by other players. I'd not realised the board actually grows during play, however, and we hurriedly implemented the rule when I found it in round 5. Despite Chris' vocabulary and my alleged (by Adam) always-winning at word games, it was Adam's shrewd strategic brain and claimed another win.

In Just One, meanwhile, four people clued gatherer, leaving poor Katy to try and guess Hunter from Joe's clue Orion. There was a substantial bout of cheating here, none of which sadly helped.

Sally couldn't be persuaded to stay up for another game, and so we were reduced to eight - Joe, Martin, Katy, Adam, Anna, Andrew, Ian and myself - for what would turn out to be the last game of an epic session - Pairs. Although I was barely drinking, my cheese and sugar intake had reached gargantuan proportions and I don't know what happened here at all, although I do recall Martin serially going bust on his first card flip and Katy doing well. I think she won - I went to the toilet, and when I returned, it was all over.

And so was the night!

Although our incongruous - for GNN - start of prolonged chat was rather sweetly mirrored at the end, as we sat around the table almost like normal people before we realised the time was 11pm and Ian and I were starting to yawn.

I'm pretty sure I've missed out some games as well as plenty of high points. A big bundle of fun and lovely to have so many of us under one roof at the same time! Thanks to everyone for coming and look forward to seeing some/all of you very soon... Tuesday?

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. 

Whittle down the will

Six gamers, two of whom had travelled thousands of miles since they last met a year ago, congregated at Joe's kitchen table for an evening of games: Joe, Sam, Martin, Ian, Katy and me.

We began with Maskmen, the curious game of emergent properties (of wrestlers). The Mountain Goats provided a thematic backdrop with a concept album (about wrestlers) while Katy and I were introduced to the game.

It is strange and difficult to judge, not just what to play but who is beating who. The very sparse scoring system meant that in a six player game, three would get no points at all ("I'm okay...for zero," said Martin) while a fourth would get minus one. Fine margins indeed.

It was Katy who unleashed her gimpish inner fighter to best effect.

Katy 4
Andrew 2
Joe 2
Martin 1
Ian 0
Sam -1

Next we stayed as a six for a game of Not Alone. In this game, one player is the native of an alien planet trying to capture the other players who have all been stranded on said planet and are waiting for the rescue ship to arrive.

Katy was tonight's alien and she did very well, stopping us from doing all of the necessaries to escape. In the first move she went to the river at the same time as me, Joe, Sam and Ian did. Luckily Martin saved us with a survival card that moved the alien to an adjacent place.

Of the survivors, Martin did the best, saving our bacon with survival cards on more than one occasion. The rest of us had our will whittled away completely at some point (maybe Sam avoided that, not sure) and in the end Katy was able to assimilate us by catching Joe again, with the rescue ship only two spaces away.

Then we split into two groups. Katy, Sam and Joe played Tiny Town which looked adorable but apparently is full of Take It Easy style analysis paralysis. Ian Martin and me chose Senators, a new card game of bidding and buying, with the peculiar rules that all losing players should stand up at the end and say "Hail, Caesar!" and also that there is no second place.

In the game you can start an auction (to try and buy resources or sell them and get money), cash in sets of three resources (for money), embezzle publicly visible cards from your opponents and all of this is so you can buy senators (points, basically). Most points wins.

I had very little money early on after I went a bit nuts in an auction round. I had plenty of resources, but no sets of three. Martin is able to get some money by cashing in and while Ian started well, he fell away towards the end. My blushes were saved by a bit of a mega move where I got five points for myself and knocked one point off Martin. Not enough to catch him, though.

However at the end of the game neither Ian or I stood up to hail our new leader and, to make things worse, I decided there was a second place after all.

Martin 13
Andrew 12
Ian 8

A nice game and one I'd like to try again.

While we played that, the other half of the table got through two games of Tiny Town.

Joe 31
Sam 24
Katy 22

The second began with Sam declaring early on that he had a plan, and he certainly did better than before, only losing to Joe on a tie break. Katy seemed to have trouble differentiating between certain buildings and icons.

Joe 31
Sam 31
Katy 16

At this point Ian set off on the long trek home while we remaining five play Nakanuki Paradise to a soundtrack of "nice" music as requested by Martin to the Google Assistant. The game was new to me and my notes read simply "crazy game" but it was a lot of fun, and it is like a concentrated version of Polterfass.

Martin 11
Andrew 9
Joe 8
Katy 8
Sam 6

And since it was now a little after eleven we all bade our farewells and set off home. Thanks to all, especially to Joe for hosting the second games events in four days! What a gent.