Chocolate cider

 This week’s games night seemed to start early for me this week, as I awoke on Tuesday morning from a dream in which me, Martin, Joe and Ian were in a badly stocked off licence trying to buy alcohol. Ian was tempted by the chocolate cider by Thatchers while Joe had to be content with a 2 litre bottle of white wine called Sembrini that had party balloons on the label.

And then, as I approached this week’s venue, I arrived at Sam's at the same time as Adam T and Joe. Katy opened the front door to greet us. At least, she greeted Adam. He got a hug on the doorstep that lasted long enough for the silence between Joe and I to get awkward.

Once Katy was finished ignoring us, we all went into Sam’s kitchen which now held eight gamers: me, Adam, Joe and Katy as well as Ian, Martin, Pete and, of course, Sam.

Since there were eight, there wasn’t a chance for an initial communal game so we immediately split into two groups. Martin, Katy, Adam and Joe played Divinare - a rare but familiar game here at GNN, while Ian, Sam and me introduced Pete to Quantum - a very familiar sight on our tables.

Divinare played out on the far end of the table, and I couldn’t follow it’s progress although I was aware of Martin’s increasing despair and his insistence that he used to be good at this game. Katy procrastinated at one point, saying “I’m just touching cards,” to which Adam supportively replied “we’ve all been there.”

Katy 16

Adam T 16

Joe 12

Martin 0

There's no tie breaker in Divinare but Katy graciously accepts the win “because I'm a witch.” Joe found it intriguing: “I've never played it before,” he said. 

“But you said you just needed a rule refresher,” said Martin, aghast.

“Yeah…” Joe replied. And we'll probably never know what he meant by that.

As for Quantum, Pete got a rules explanation and, thanks to a fortuitous roll of dice, was able to place a cube in his first go.

Pete and Sam were the early leaders with two cubes each, while Ian went warlike, even managing to wipe out four ships in one turn (attacked three, put cube down for dominance, picked up card with two extra moves, attacked again) and I expanded my fleet to the maximum five cubes.

But late in the game, i am in a winning position. I have the Agile card, meaning that deploying isn't an action and so i actually have three turns in a row where I'm able to set myself up for a win. But each time, someone attacks me, and the chance is lost. 

Ian is too spread across the map to get a cube down (“I'm very vulnerable,” he says. “We're here for you,” Katy reassures him) and Pete still has two cubes, so it's between me and Sam when suddenly he deploys, warps and puts down a cube to win the game.

Sam 0 cubes

Andrew 1

Ian 1

Pete 2

The Divinare group had started playing Maya while we were still midgame. The only thing I remember about that is all the comments about Joe's massive rack.

Martin 173

Joe 144

Adam 129

Katy 115

And now we were all free of our respective gaming commitments, we could reassemble ourselves as our whims dictated.

Ian, Pete, Joe and myself all whimmed ourselves into a game of Wandering Towers, while Katy, Sam, Adam and Martin played Fearless. 

Shockingly I didn’t note the result of Fearless, but I did note that leading with a zero seemed to be a dick move - and observation based on Martin's “fuck orrrrf” to Sam after he kept leading with zeroes.

As for Wandering Towers, we rapidly forgot where our wizards were as we built an incredibly tall tower. 

Mid game, we checked the contents of the Raven tower to see how well we were doing and Joe was upset to see only one of his wizards in there, since he was sure he'd done two. In the Ian, Ian was most nimble, getting his fourth wizard into the black tower while no one else could manage that on the same turn.

Ian 4 wizards 

Andrew 3

Pete 2

Joe 2

And with that, Katy and I set off home. The remaining sextet played so clover. Sam texted the score: 34/36

And then they played again as a quartet, but Sam was stymied by a card that could've gone on all four sides of his clover.

19/24

And so it ended. Thanks all, another evening of dreams coming true especially since Ian told us that chocolate cider does actually exist.

Great Balls of Squidge

I arrived at Laura and Lucy's house to find Lucy and Ryker upstairs creating a huge den from magnetic boards. Down the the kitchen, Laura, Maddie, Martin, Sarah and Effie were competing in the first game of the first GNN festive get-togethers: 5 Alive, which is a card game of shedding without taking the collective total over 21. Everyone begins with five lives and a life is lost when you bust (I think). 

Martin and Laura were joint winners with 2 lives left, and Maddie and Effie had one apiece when Sarah bit the dust and lost her last one. Christmas games were officially underway and next up was one of Martin's newbies, Hold Your Ground! Here we are trying to be last-ones standing as the ground literally explodes in camera-defying ways beneath your feet. 

As this only plays up to four, Effie and Maddie teamed up and so did Martin and Sarah. Laura and I both flew solo: each turn you play two cards from a hand of four that define number of your people to move and how far they can go, after which there's a die roll to determine whether the explody-stick will move (one space; your choice) or explode the tile it currently resides beneath, ejecting the plastic people from the game: and if anyone is cut off from the central helipad tile, they are automatically lost as well. The helipad is semi-safe in that it cannot explode - but as each tile has a max limit of six, a seventh entering will push someone off. The die may also trigger a round of area-control too, where dominant factions kick off the outnumbered. It's all pretty arbitrary-feeling, but fun. Especially the explosions. 

Effie was merciless when the opportunity to screw over her parents came - the apple falls not far from the tree, Martin - and having been in a strong position they were forced out of the helipad; and out of the game. Then the girls were ejected and it came down to a straight fight between Laura and I: she just needed to roll an explosion to win: and did!  A triumph, but at what cost? Look at the desolation. 

We moved on to HIT, the lesser-seen (recently) Knizia card-flipper. Sarah and Adam shared a win in game one, then Lucy joined us for game two, which I won. Nice to revisit this one. 

After all the subversion and theft though we needed something healing and went with Cross Clues. It was a triumph: 25/25 with zero cheating. 

There's only so much healing we can take though, so we reverted to type with Prey Another Day. Sarah made short work of us here, correctly reading the table and devouring opponents to take a victory in two short rounds. I struggled into second.

We moved on to Wandering Towers. I got off to a good start with two potions filled and one wizard home within a couple of turns, but after that stagnated a bit as everyone lost track of where their wizards might be in the vast apartment complex we managed to build.

There were shenanigans. Twice I was close to ending it only to be harpooned by the architecture moving around me. Martin plaintively cried "Where the fuck am I" at least twice. Sarah shared his existential despair. Eventually I claimed a win, with Adam second and Martin beating Laura to third on the tiebreaker. We all agreed the game is bonkers and whilst Laura took herself off on pizza duty, the four of us played something much more sensible: Agent Avenue. Adam and I dug a little hole for ourselves early on - getting two daredevils whilst Martin and Sarah claimed two Codebreakers meant we had to be extremely careful about taking any face-down cards. We briefly threatened to catch them on the track, but ended up daredevilled or codebroken (I now don't recall which) into defeat. Fun though! 

Next up was Stomp the Plank, the game of pirate elephants hating on each other. There wasn't a huge amount of busting and in fact my red elephant did no plank-walking at all. That lack of adventurousness was enough to bring me a solid win. 

Then, after a wonderful foodie interlude of pizza and salads, the entire house gathered together for Midnight Party!

Martin and I had disastrous first rounds as we both encouraged Hugo out and had him subsequently eat us. The Laura-Ryker team began well by picking up +3 points, but massive kudos to Maddie who pooh-poohed open doors in favour of running around the board to the plus-three rooms. It didn't get her the win, but she looked like an action hero compared the rest of us scrambling in a sweaty-palmed panic. Mid-game Sarah and Effie had to leave, and as Katy was arriving at the same time she took over control of their team.

Laura + Ryker -14
Martin -23
Sam -27
Maddie -28
Sarah + Effie / Katy -29
Adam -32

Ryker and Maddie were fully invested now and played Block Party with us. Really lovely to have them at the table as we continuously discovered our 'obvious' creations just looked like a bunch of cubes to everyone else.

Adam surged into an early lead here, and Ryker had a handicap of only actually starting in round two. Adam built a wonderful slice of watermelon and I successfully had my orange cube identified as 'an orange' by Maddie. I knew Martin's blocks were meant to be a slide but I wasted my steal on Katy's swirl-of-colours construct, which was "obviously" a donut. Meanwhile Katy insisted Martin's slide looked 'more like Chewbacca'. You be the judge:

Everyone had a little late-game rally and for me it was enough to catch Adam and share the win. Unfortunately that was Adam's last involvement for the day as he had to head off home, so he missed out on the hilarity of what was next: Misfits. We began as a quintet: Katy, Laura, Maddie, Martin and myself. But after Ryker won Pizza Party at the end of the table he joined my team and supplied both advice and some next-level heckling, trilling "Boooooring!" if he felt the placement wasn't ambitious enough. Around here was also Ryker's amazing 'Squidge my balls' routine, which gave all the supposed adults an even harder challenge than Misfits: keeping a straight face. Or trying to.

Somewhere in all this craziness - there were multiple collapses - Katy picked up a win despite her last two pieces being cylinders. There was time for one last game before kids' bedtime and so everyone was dealt into UNO - which today I discover in fifteen years of the blog, has never been tagged here before. Ryker and I stayed as a team, Maddie and Lucy paired up, and Katy, Laura and Martin all went it alone. 

I think it's been about fifteen years since I've played it at least, but if it doesn't scream hall-of-fame it is at least a fast-moving bit of silly good fun. Despite our best efforts to harpoon them, Maddie and Lucy took the win here and the kids were shuffled off to bed as we debated what to play next, settling eventually on Rebirth. 

During our cathedral-centric rebuilding of post-apocalyptic Scotland, the children reappeared and there was a bout of snacks and swinging. Ryker was at the table when I told Martin I hated him, which I had to quickly clarify was only in the context of the game. Laura admonished me for setting a terrible example, and I realised it really was. 

Katy broke out a colossal box of Maltesers and Laura added a bowl of Celebrations. On the board it looked a two-horse race between Katy and her proliferating energy farms and Martin and his spawny card draws: the first two missions he'd picked up rewarded his initial placements. That's my excuse anyway. I tried to balance the needs of farms and missions and castles and just ended up a kind of bland fourth place. Katy looked poised to sneak the win from her arch enemy, but she'd only picked up 4 missions - and only completed three of them. 

Martin 124

Katy 119

Laura 117

Sam 111

While Laura did some further bedtime shenanigans Martin set up his other Christmas present: Bomb Busters! This is a co-op undertaking with the theme of FUSE - we're defusing bombs - and a similar shared-information system to Hanabi.

Each round we successfully 'cut wires' by matching a numbered wire from our (hidden) hand of them with one from another player. At the start we can all share information about a single wire, but because wires are laid out numerically left-to-right, you can also transmit limited info about the tiles around it as well. There's four of each number (on the first mission, the numbers are only 1-6) and if two of a number are already revealed and you have the remaining pair in your own hand, you're allowed to pair 'with yourself' and reveal them. 

After the very easy first mission, the game makes things a bit harder with extra numbers (1-8) and now coloured wires as well (see 3.1 in pic above) that need to be 'cut' in  similar fashion. It gets trickier fast, and if you're not a naturally logical puzzle-solver (ie me) it can start to feel like the only thing you can grok is the fact you know nothing. But it's more intuitive than Wordy or Message From the Stars, and I enjoyed it. Each mission ramps up the difficulty, and gives you more to navigate. To help, you also get single-use tool cards that can get you out of a pickle - I used these more than anyone!

We succeeded our first three missions but lost our last life on Mission 4. Not a bad return for four slightly inebriated cadets, I'd say, even if our alcohol-infused body parts were now scattered around the academy. It's a bit Quirky Circuits too, in the mission-focused escalation - I look forward to playing this again. Laura and I were fading a bit now though - possibly the wire-cutting tension; maybe the post-chocolate sugar-crash - and we elected to make the last game the final one of the night, so it was of course So Clover. Katy got a bastard of a red herring tile, but we managed to call it out and ended the evening on a masterful 24/24! What a great way to sign off 2024. Thank you Laura, Lucy, and all for a cracking session...

Happy new year all. Here's to some great games in 2025 - starting on Saturday!

Overstocked and Underllama-ed

This week was Laura's turn to host, but perhaps because of the heat (and Joe's being in France) we were down to five when the allotted hour arrived - as well as Laura, there were Ian, Adam H, Martin and myself (Sam). Mostly the introductory talk was about Laura and Lucy's fridge, being as it was enormous and semi-sentient, with a screen on it that could play music and order shopping. We all liked the fridge. 

But there were games to be played too, and with Katy coming later we kicked things off with Martin's new card game of 1980's toy crazes, Overstocked. There are super-simple rules here, but tricky decisions: over six rounds everyone plays one of six cards from their hand before revealing simultaneously, and they're then resolved in number order. On your turn you have a choice - add the card to your tableau, which will (hopefully) get you points, or add it to a shared tableau, which defines how much: when all cards have been played, you multiple your largest group of x on your tableau by the largest matching group in the central one.

The catch - of course there's a catch - is that the largest group on that shared tableau at game-end scores minus points, having blown it's popularity out on a wave of oversaturation. So Overstocked contains a wide seam of dickery as everyone tries to devalue each other's wares, a fact that made me encourage everyone to screw over Martin's teddies. 

Sadly, they didn't listen. 

Martin 26
Laura 25
Sam 12
Ian 10
Adam H -10

Then we had a quick blast through Cross Clues whilst Laura generously plied me with spaghetti bolognese. Fortunately I had a combo (Firefighter/Salad) which I had no idea what to do with, so I made the most of our ten minutes by eating. There were some tricky words out there, but I'm glad to say it wasn't a shocking repeat of mine Joe and Katy's four out of 25. 

I canvassed for Powerships next, hoping to break my staccato run of last-place finishes, and everyone was amenable. We went through the standard bewilderment over assembling the board, then Martin explained the rules to Laura, and we were away. 

Ian and Martin sped off early with Laura and I tailing at a little distance. Would my plan to take all the marker planets wide prove a foolish one? At the moment, it was Adam lagging at the back, and seemed to be shaping up a two horse race between Hickman and Griffiths. While Adam was first to crash, around the second marker the rest of us sped, although I - needing to roll a 2 or a 3 - rolled a 1 and my plans turned to cosmic sand: I crashed as well, and watched Adam speed by me. 

Martin made a miscalculation over the final planet and shot past it, allowing Ian in for the win. Martin recovered for second and Adam swept in third. It only remained for Laura to nab 4th with me still trying to get out of second gear on the other side of the solar system. 

Then disaster! She missed the planet (above, Laura pink) and had to turn a wide circle in mitigation. Sensing an opportunity, I (blue, above, in the distance) swept home and celebrated my fourth place like I'd just destroyed the Death Star. 

1 Ian

2 Martin

3 Adam

4 Sam

5 Laura

Katy had arrived in time to see the dramatic finale play out, and now - whilst Laura and I aired our misgivings about the idea - she joined Martin and Ian in pushing for Wandering Towers. 

In fairness, even though it was chaotic and frustrating in equal measure, it was also hilarious. I think it took us about an hour of complaining, agonising, cursing and wondering in equal measure. I was first to get a wizard in the Raven Tower, but after that spent a lot of time with visible wizards miles away from reaching it. Martin forgot where his wizards were, and Katy made the mistake of having a conversation with Lucy and returning to the table to ask where her wizards had gone. How we laughed at the idea of charity. Ian triggered the finale whilst I was away in the loo and by the time I returned I had no more turns, and Adam had already won and it was a contest for second. "I just need to roll an eight!" Martin said hopefully.

1 Adam

2 Ian

3 Everyone else, although Katy wanted it noted she had four full potions and was therefore more 3rd.

We split into two groups of three, with Adam and I introducing Katy to Llamaland (without objectives) and Laura, Martin and Ian trying their hands at High Score. 

Katy loved the llamas, especially as we weren't eating them. I loved tesselating. Adam loved winning. Although I set the pace llama-wise, Adam's cunning guile somewhat incongruously suited llama farming and even the arrival of Chai, who walked across the board, couldn't disrupt his chain of thought. 

Adam shrugged off the interruption, and I snagged another llama. Whilst Katy was concerned at my ungulate overwhelm, I ran out of options on the last two turns just as Adam's strategizing came to fruition:

Adam 66

Sam 53

Katy 49 

Whilst Ian had ousted Martin and Laura at High Score (15-13-12) and Martin had his revenge in a three-player rematch of Overstocked: 

Martin 54

Ian 20

Laura 10

Then Adam and Ian left, bound for Easton, and the four of us settled on Laura's Ebay find of Marrakech to finish. Martin was keen on the dickish version, but this was vetoed. Marrakech has plenty of inadvertent (and occasionally vertent) dickery anyway. Omens looked good for Laura as while the three of us squabbled over territory, she built an enormous, sprawling carpet across a third of the board. It was so big that we kept running away from it until there was no option but to embrace the peril. However despite a couple of hauls, we got away with relatively little taxation and struck back, carpet-wise.

Martin and Katy were soon cash-poor and complained about being oppressed. Laura and I agreed oppression was fun from our perspective. However, thanks to some spawny rolling it was me taking the honours at the end of the day!

Sam 55

Laura 50

Katy 39

Martin 19

Another GNNight concluded, then, with much fun had in the July heat. Until next week!