I'm totally incensed

This Tuesday's GNN-ness started a few minutes earlier than expected when I met former regular Steve as I walked to Sam's. He couldn't make it tonight, but he told me of a recent visit to a games shop in Germany. Has his flame been rekindled? We can only hope.

I arrived at Sam's to find the host and Joe already halfway through a game of Kribbeln and a margarita each. The roll & write game didn't last long with just two players, but despite its short duration it was surprisingly tense.

Joe 12
Sam 12

By the time they were done, Ian and Martin had joined us. We weren't expecting Katy and Adam for another fifteen minutes so we squeezed in a quick game of No Thanks! The game which, as Ian noted, you can't turn down because it sounds like you're agreeing.

Ian went for the low cards, with the rest of us going for higher cards. In my case, much higher. Martin seemed resigned to the fact that his favoured cards would be picked by other players, with a weary question (rhetorical, I hope) of "Who wants to kick me in the balls?" whenever he turned over certain cards. Turns out, the player furthest from wanting to kick his balls was the clear winner.

Ian 6
Sam 23
Andrew 26
Martin 29
Joe 29

Now we were seven, so we split into to. Three (Katy, Ian and Martin) took on the undead in Hit Z Road. The remainder (Sam, Adam, Joe and me) chose Tribes.

Tribes has been a recent hit of the summer with Sam playing several games and had enjoyed it. This time, though, for whatever reason, the wheels fell of the game's engine.

Sam's early bad luck with exploring didn't help his cause. He found a lot of incense, which is fine for ceremonial burials, but not much else. At least it gave me the blog title.

But it was probably the twin threat of two event tiles that exhausted tiles (ie, took away resources) that really caused problems. No matter how much we avoided them, eventually they got played, with Adam suddenly finding all his abundant fields were barren. On the other hand, he had almost all the shells (the game's currency, used to avoid choosing a tile) while the rest of us had only a few, if any.

This meant there were a few goes were we couldn't afford to choose our action and Adam could only explore, trying to find new resources to use. The game entered a sort of holding pattern, while we slowly tried to get our plans in place.

I was first to leap into action and, since I was already in the lead, my victory was pretty comprehensive.

Andrew 28
Sam 18
Joe 11
Adam 11

Tribes didn't get a lot of love, and Sam admitted that if that had been his first game, he wouldn't have been impressed either. He seemed baffled by how it had played out, as if he didn’t recognise the game at all. Perhaps the most entertaining parts were the text messages from Joe’s daughter on a camping trip wanting to know how to make a kettle boil faster. “Don’t look at it,” suggested Adam.

Hit Z Road, on the other hand, was all excitement accompanied by a steady flow of expletives, mostly from Martin. They had a hard time of it, and had only two survivors left by the time the tougher cards came out.

They didn't last much longer. No one reached the West coast, but Martin was last man standing.

Martin, one survivor still alive
Ian, died later
Katy, died earlier

Since we ended at the same time, groups were rearranged. And I think it was around now when Joe insisted he could probably kick himself in the balls. He even stood up, lifting his left foot up, yoga-like in the required direction. Just as a proof of concept: I don't think actual contact was made. I guess those margaritas were pretty potent.

Now Adam, Katy and Ian played Biblios while Martin & me and Joe & Sam teamed up for Montage.

Montage was tough and I kept getting the colours confused, and I had the embarrassment of giving a clue and then having to retract it. Sam & Joe were perhaps feeling the effect of the early margaritas, since the game was over quite quickly.

Martin & Andrew 4
Sam & Joe 1

Biblios (of the Extreme type) ended with some low scoring dice to fight over.

Adam 7
Katy 5
Ian 1

Then they played NMBR9 while we were finishing off Montage. It appears that Katy is not a fan of this game. Adam, on the other hand...

Adam 111
Ian 65
Katy 46

Then we rearranged again. Now Adam, Sam, Martin and Joe played Polterfass (with fresh margaritas). Ian and I chose Pickomino/Heck Meck as our game, thinking that Katy might be amused at other people's misfortune. Unfortunately the misfortune was all hers. She obsessed over the 27 tile, winning it, losing it, getting it back, and then losing it again. If we’d hoped to get Katy in a better mood, then we had failed. Ian, though, failed more constructively than I did.

Ian 8 (and the 30 tile)
Andrew 8 (and the 29 tiles)
Katy 0

Still needing a pick-me-up for a Katy suffering from a gaming lull, we brought out the big guns: Colour Wheel from Pyramid Arcade. With its bright colours and co-operative ethos, it’s like a board game equivalent of a My Little Pony film. Slowly the mix of shiny plastic and puzzling logic brought out Katy’s better side. And we even solved the puzzle!

By now Polterfass had ended too, with Sam scoring a last-ditch high of 13 points in a round to avoid ending in negative points, which is where he spent most of the game. Adam, though, won again.

Adam 75
Joe 41
Martin 35
Sam 11

They also played another game of Kribbeln which I only know about thanks to the photos on my phone.

I forgot to note the scores, but I did take a photo of the score card near the end. It looks like Joe nicked it in the final round.

Finally, it was time to the finale: Fuji Flush. Ian managed to put a new spin on his reputation of Le Coq Bloquer by repeatedly playing a card that wiped out the chain before I was going to join it. Amazing. Frustrating for me, but it seemed to be a winning strategy.

Ian 0 cards left
Martin 1
Adam 1
Katy 1
Sam 2
Andrew 2
Joe 2

And with that, we were done. Emotionally exhausted and really quite drunk. That’s Tuesday for you!

Ian's Sheep is Exhausted

Wednesday night. After missing the last three (three!!!) Tuesdays, Chris and I agreed to play a post-football game. Ian also joined us, making the trek from Easton for a ludicrous 10pm start!

We played a game I backed on Kickstarter earlier in the year: Tribes: Early Civilisation. This is by the designer of Nations, so it came with some pedigree. Unlike Nations though, it plays in about 40 minutes. But would it be bona fide fun, or Kickstarter Crap (©Martin) ?

 very early doors

The verdict was positive. Maybe not a Martin game - despite more interaction than first appears, it's a brisk Euro - but there's a simple mechanic at play that gives it some intrigue. On your turn you can take one of three basic actions - grow your tribe, explore (adding hexes to your own mini-board) or move the tribes across the land, accessing new hexes - and new resources.

walking, yes indeed

The resources are used for the non-basic action, which is inventing something. Your tribes survive across the paleolithic, neolithic and bronze ages, so some inventions arise. They might be as simple as leather or the wheel, or they might be the surprisingly topical idea of despotism.

Ian's tribes

One invention leads to another, which provided some wry comedy: only after you've invented cooking, for instance, can you become a despot. If you don't have the resources you need to invent something, you can always 'exhaust' a non-matching hex as a joker - flipping it over to it's non-resource side, lost forever. Ian exhausted a couple of sheep this way, in order to invent smelting...

gold needed to invent currency, or mercenaries

Inventing gives you a points reward, and your tribe advances in other ways too - making their basic actions more fruitful, or improving their strength to resist the events that happen from time to time.

But the twist with Tribes is the choosing of the action you take - action tiles are laid out in a vertical time track: the tile at the bottom is free to use, but if you want to take an action further up the track, you must pay a shell - the game's currency - to skip any tiles you're not using. When you use the action tiles you get any shells on it, and the activated tile goes to the top of the time track.

This is the real crux of the game, because if you find yourself with no shells - as both Ian and I did at some stage - you have no choice, and have to take the bottom action tile - yes, I know - even if it's a crappy, punitive event tile that's been added into the mix.

crappy, and punitive

I started well, then Ian surged ahead mid-game, before finally we were both overhauled by Chris, who trotted out a convincing winner:

Chris 34
Sam 28
Ian 27

And at this point - 11pm - Chris left for home, with Ian and I breaking out the whisky. We finished with another new game - Lanterns: The Harvest Festival, making it an evening of semi-colon games. (someone can joke about this in the comments if they like). This is a rather sweet tile-laying game where thematically you're floating lanterns out onto a lake, and mechanically you're trying to collect Lantern cards to cash in for dedications (dedications: victory points).

geometric lake

When you place a tile every player gets a lantern card of the colour facing them on the tile. But if you match colours with any adjacent tiles, you get bonus lanterns. And if you match colours and have a floating platform on the tile, you get favour tokens, which can be used to trade one colour lantern for another. As the dedication tiles demand sets (four of a kind, three pairs or one each of the seven colours) these can come in very handy.

It's sweet, but not without an edge: you can see what your opponent is after and place a tile in order to give them a colour they don't need, or even none at all, as lantern tiles are finite (only five of each colour in a two player game)

endgame

Ian won a tight contest in the first game, and I took the honours in our second. The clock was now
beeping midnight, and we ended honors even. A fun couple of hours, even if 10pm is maybe not going to be a regular start time...