Helmet by moonlight

 This week’s games night was heralded in the sky by a full moon veiled behind gossamer thin clouds, giving my walk to Sam’s the air of an 18th century oil painting. Ignoring all the traffic, of course.

At Sam’s it turned out we were five in number: Sam, Joe, Adam, Katy and myself. When I arrived, they were in the middle of Destination X, and Adam was hiding somewhere among 6 locations. We had cards in our hand, allowing us to ask certain questions while Adam looked up the answers in a book.

Of the 6 locations, Sweden was very much the odd one out, with the rest being islands or archipelagos in the Southern hemisphere. 

We soon outed Adam from his hideaway in Mauritania. Katy wanted to try another round but the overall consensus was to love on to something that was a bit more like a game.

We chose Vegas Strip. A recent arrival to these shores, it's similar to Las Vegas in that players are trying to control casinos but instead of the vagaries of dice, you can chose what value you place on your turn.

You also have a colleague who is aware that you have deemed two casinos “rigged” or “secure”. In a rigged casino, only the highest valued player wins the $15m bonus, whereas in a secure, everyone except the winner gets the money equal to the value they had in that casino. The way that the two team mates share knowledge is by an exchange of cards, being told “this is rigged,” and “this is secure. “

Since there were five of us, one of the three teams was made up of a single player. I round one, this was Katy who couldn't get a grip on the game and, with no team mate to work with, felt quite frustrated. She ended round one with 6 points while the rest of us were in the mid-20s.

In round two, I was the solo player and, initially I also felt out of my depth, just putting down figures at a whim. But soon I thought I saw some patterns and by the end I had won one casino and done well in a couple of others.

Round three, I was one of the players given two casinos and had to decide which was rigged and which was secure. I was actually given the same two casinos that I’d had in the previous round so I just gave them the opposite role as before and gave the two cards to Sam saying “this is rigged” and “this is secure.”

Except I hadn’t swapped them. I didn’t realise until the end, when the round was scored, that we’d been playing with different priorities. It didn’t benefit either of us, so no harm done, but I was disappointed I’d messed up, especially since I’d spent most of round three thinking that Sam was the best bluffer in the world.

Adam 76

Andrew 67

Sam 63

Joe 51

Katy 43

Next Katy was in the mood for So Clover, but Sam thought it too early. Instead we played Fun Facts where we have to answer questions like “How well dressed are you, on a scale of 0-100.” Our answers were meant to be secret but Katy complained that she could see mine quite easily. I told her not to look and she likened that to someone putting their cock on the table and then saying “guys, stop looking at my penis!”

Katy and Adam had two rounds in which they chose 43 and 44 for their answers, one of which being how much you’d pay for a really high-class meal in a restaurant. We got 5 out of 5 in one round which was “How much do you enjoy abstract art”

Final score 29 “nice score, you’re hitting your stride.”

Hitting our stride.

After 15 years, we’re hitting our stride. Because, as Sam pointed out to me later, Friday marks this blog’s fifteenth birthday. That’s insane. That means I was in my thirties when we started, and that can’t be right. But anyway, here we are. Well done everyone.

After I left, they had a game of So Clover which contained the word “helmet” three times! Crazy days. 

Oh, and Sam and Joe had kicked off the evening with a two-player game of Can’t Stop. Just as well they played before Katy got there, since it’s almost prompted a seizure before, due to her literal inability to stop.

Another lovely evening. Thanks all.

Cat on the Table

We - Joe, Martin and myself - arrived at Steve and Anja's a little late, but just in time to catch up with Pete at the front door. He wasn't sure if he was in the right place, an affliction that also seemed to clasp hold of Joe as he'd initially driven past the house and turned right, headed for who knows where. Eventually Louie let as all in and we were treated to the sight of Steve in marigolds.

Then Adam arrived. He went into the kitchen and then arrived again, causing speculation about how many times he might continue to show up. "Imagine if Adam T was here" Ian ruminated, pondering how many Adams we might end up with. Steve finished disposing of the dead bodies and joined us at the table, where Martin flourished his new card game, Llama Llama, and I flourished - sort of, the box is bigger - my new edition of Magical Athlete. With little ado we split into two groups: myself, Louie, Adam and Steve racing the aforementioned athletes and everyone else Llama-ing. I unfortunately missed the explanation because we were preoccupied with magic. 

Louie's first racer was the Skipper, who is always next to go if someone - including themselves - rolls a 1. And boy, did we roll a lot of 1's. Adam - to Louie's right - had about 3 turns the entire race, but did pretty well anyway thanks to his Suckerfish grabbing the backsides of other racers. We flipped the board for race 2, where the previously-simple track now has setbacks and booster spots. Adam took the win here, leaving Steve's Big Baby for dust. Then Louie won race 3 thanks to a surprisingly fast Zeppelin and we were set for a grand finale. Grand for most, anyway. Anja arrived in time to watch me roll four 4's in a row, each time landing on the go back 4 space. My special ability was copying a previous winner - I copied the skipper, but everyone decided that rolling 1s was now passé. Adam won the race...

...and the game!

Adam 12

Steve and Louie 10 each

Sam 7

Llama Llama had finished too. I had remembered to bring a notebook for a change and happily scrawled everything down. But I forgot to bring my notebook to the studio this morning, so who knows what it all says. Pretty sure Martin won, though. We had a quick reshuffle with Ian joining myself, Adam and Steve for Monkey Palace. Joe bravely took on teaching Silos (previously Municipium) to Martin, Pete and Anja. Louie went to bed. 

Adam schooled us at Monkey Palace. He shrugged off being last in turn order and developed an engine that saw him generating several arches early on. And he seemed more capable than any of us at spotting where they might go - I think we all accepted his advice at one stage or another. It seemed genuinely helpful, too, but our contributions to the palace rarely matched Adam's, who would launch each turn with an impressively pre-fabricated element that seamlessly slotted into place. 

On the other side of the table, Silos sounded as dickish as advertised. Judging by the expletives being directed his way, Martin seemed to be doing well. Joe called him a bastard and at one point Anja lamented "Why me?" - although it transpired she was his closest competitor in the end. Maybe that was why. Monkey Tennis Palace wrapped up with no-one too surprised at the victor:

Adam 5million

Steve and Sam 30 each

Ian 26

My very last turn hauled me in 12 points, thankfully. Torture and rage was continuing in Silos at this point, so we bashed out a quick play of Vegas Strip. 

Despite appearances, this is not a Vegas-esque boisterous dice-chucker, but more a canny table-reading situation, with temporary alliances in each round and some insider knowledge on (one of) which casinos are rigged - winner takes all - and which (one of) casinos are secure, in which case everyone but the winner gets their investments. Ian had played it at the weekend and found it somewhat inscrutable, but was game for another go. Adam and Steve both found the vague greys closer to charcoal though, and one round took us half an hour. As the entire game (three rounds) is only meant to be 40 minutes, we packed up at this point. Ian won this, as his and Adam's teamwork eclipsed mine and Steve's: their scores were in the 40s and ours considerably less, and Steve's promise of showing me 'How clever I am' was, as yet, unfulfilled. 

We also stopped because Silos finished now too, with Martin earning the victory-triggering fifth medal, Anja poised on 4, Joe with a couple (I think - see notebook tragedy above) and Pete entirely bereft of medals. The jury seemed to be out on the game, with Martin alleging that the new theme (aliens instead of Romans) and the new aesthetics (bonkers instead of beige) were both wrong steps for him. 

Anja had to temporarily corral Lennon bedwards, so whilst we were polishing off Vegas Strip, the remaining Silos trio played TowerBrix, where they collaborate on a construction with each player having a rule the tower must obey in order to succeed. They seemed to succeed until Joe revealed his second card at which point he was barraged with insults. "Joe fucked it up" Martin clarified to me. 

Vegas Strip was now mercifully back in its box and we now had an open table waiting to be covered with what my autocorrect likes to call Maples. Adam left - just the once - and Martin pointed out that TowerBrix plays six, so we all doffed our metaphorical hardhats and got stuck in. Steve and Martin however found that they could not agree on the construction at all, and kept moving something only for the other to cry "No!" in indignation. Rarely, they would come to terms on something, only for someone else to say "That doesn't work for me". Thank God actual architects don't work this way. 

Around now two more people joined us at the table. Anja was happy to watch the unfolding bickering, whereas Molly felt it had all gotten a bit out of hand and we just needed to chill the hell out. 

At one point we pretty much gave up our chances of success, before someone - I forget who, possibly Pete - built again from the ground up and we stumbled into something we all agreed on. Hurray! 

But with time ticking away, Joe had '15 minutes' to play one last game. We spent the first five of them making the same joke about a number of games that we couldn't play in this time - a quick Wallenstein? etc - before finally settling on Flip 7. Steve announced - I'm not sure if it was because of the game - that he was now going to bed, so our hosts were now effectively Anja and Molly. 

I don't think Pete had played before, but he was treated to a succession of unlikely bustings, notably on a pair of threes, as others - at first Ian and Anja - sped off into three figures. Martin heroically began busting too and went from in contention to in dudgeon remarkably fast. I had a mid-game surge and collapsed, and  in the penultimate round Joe flipped seven to make Anja - now poised on 197 - conceivably catchable. But it didn't happen - he busted in the ultimate round and Anja won convincingly, something like 227 points. Nobody else broke the 200 and Pete and Martin were back in the 70's (points, not years). 

That was that. Molly barely moved as we packed up and said our goodbyes... until next time.