Working 8 to 3

At one stage it looked like there were going to be eight of us last night, but we lost Andrew and Adam T to illness and Katy to a massage. "Don't get a massage on games night!" Martin lamented, as another gamer failed to materialise. But by the time we heard the latest breaking fallen-member news, we were already knee-deep in fun. Martin had been first to arrive, with a big enough window to beat me at Panda Panda: taking the first round on his second turn. We were mid-second-round when Ian and longtime absentee Andy Bate arrived: I suggested we abandon it, but Martin thought we could finish the round, and promptly won. 

We weren't sure how long before Adam H arrived, so bashed out a quick Wanted Wombats. Martin won with $20k - Andy and myself didn't have a dime at this point. 

Then Adam H arrived! At this point we were still assuming Katy was coming so chose a shortish game in Skull Queen, the risk-taking pirate trick-taker, which Andy realised after it was set up that he had at home. A quick refresher and we were away, with Martin leading the early running with his knack of capitalising on the double-move cards, no matter who played them. "You dirty bastard" I told him, and Andy sagely reflected that some things never change. 

It was a tightly-fought contest, with everyone close enough behind Martin after round two to give him pause. And indeed, I drew level with him in the third and final round to tie on 68 points. However to my right Ian's pirates all finished at the tip of his board, hauling him in a whopping 32 and with it, the pirate crown:

Ian 79
Martin and Sam 68 each
Adam 63
Andy B 50

By this time, we'd heard that Katy's escapades had put her into a soporific state and she understandably didn't want to walk a mile to trade insults with a bunch of middle-aged farts. So Andy introduced us to the only game he'd brought with him, in an impressive show of restraint: 6 Nimmt! Baron Oxx. 

As with 6 Nimmt, you're trying not to take cards because they are points and points are bad. As with 6 Nimmt, we choose a card to reveal simultaneously and place them in ascending order. But after that, things are very different. 

The cards all have big ox heads on them of varying colours, and when you place your card you now ignore the numbers at the top entirely and can place your card in any row where the last-placed card has an ox head that matches one on your card. If your ox heads are all blue, you need a blue ox head. If you've different colours, you may have a choice. 

If your ox head doesn't match any colour, it's like placing a lower-than-visible number in the ancestral game: you take a row of your choice. If you're forced to place the six card, you also take that row. But there's another danger too: the sixth ox head of a matching colour also pressgangs the row into your unwanted points haul. There's four rounds of four cards each, lots of disaster-impelled chagrin, and after that you discover that Adam only took a single card the entire game. 

Adam 2
Ian 32
Andy 33
Sam 34
Martn 60

Some things really do never change, do they? 

Andy had time for one more short game so we all piled into the front room and argued over what it should be, with Adam Martin and I debating the merits of Tsuro before I suggested we ask Andy if he liked it. "It's okay" he said diplomatically. We played No Thanks. 

It was kind of nuts, with Ian running out of money and forced to take the 27 just before Adam - who had the 26 and 28 - picked it up. Despite this, Ian put together a crazy run of something like ten cards and I harpooned my chance of second place by sending the 34 around when Andy was out of cash, leaving me with the 33 and 35, and this paragraph being maybe one of the nerdiest ever to grace the pages of GNN. But even if I'd kept it, I still wouldn't have caught Ian. We debated whether it might be seen as a co-op victory, as we'd expended more than a breath or too giving him 'advice'. But as it wasn't intended to be helpful, I think this is Ian's win. 

Ian 16
Martin 40
Adam 45
Sam 60
Andy 69

Andy now had to go so we were down to a four. Adam suggested Steam Power and the rest of us were amenable, so we set up and I explained most of the rules to Martin, even getting them largely correct. At Martin's request, Ian kicked off so he could see what the three of us got up to on our first turns. And Ian displayed the inherent dickery of Steam Power as he carved a path across the middle of the board, creating an east-west supply chain that all of us would at some point use, gifting him an ongoing income for the next hour. 

Adam took to the northwest, delighting at the points-rich white-cube cities there, and Martin and I nestled beneath him. Ian seemed to spend so much time building track I wondered if he was leaving his contracts too late, but he knew what he was doing. As the factories emptied and opportunities dried up, Ian's hoarding of the entire northeast and it's desirable red cubes led him to a narrow win:

Ian 47

Adam 46

Sam 43

Martin 42

All fuel to the fire of Joe's turn-order-favouritism suspicions, as the points finish matched the turn order. There is a thread on BGG about this, but I can't be bothered to read/summarise it, sorry. 

Next up was Llama Llama, as my flirty mentions of FlipToons went unheeded. This uses the same deck as Panda Panda but when Martin explained it to me I said it sounded like Panda Panda with a migraine. I think Andrew has explained it previously on here but I - admittedly now onto the whisky - found it initially bamboozling, and naively went for a a huge score I was *never going to pull off. But once you're through the door, the game has an easy rhythm to it and I went from 3pts in round one to 48 in round two. But none of us could catch Martin, even though at one stage he ended a round with the *impossible hand and couldn't score it. 

Martin 102

Adam 72

Sam 70

Ian 42

Adam now announced he really had to go, and cycled off into the night leaving the three of us. We poured some more whisky and now did play FlipToons, to a dramatic finale.

There's some nonsense theme about casting an animated show but basically each round you deal six cards in a 2x3 grid and then calculate their fame, before spending said fame to either/both recruit new actors from the market or dismiss your underperforming actors who are getting you precious little fame. The catch of course is that as your deck grows, your inconsequential am-dram dudes may come out and your high class stars remain trapped inside it: so it's a deck-builder, and, unless you want to spend multiple actions putting actors out of work, a luck-pusher at the same time. 

As soon as any player hits 30 fame, there's one final round where the most flipped fame wins. Martin looked in the box seat here for the vast duration of the game, and indeed hit 30 points before Ian or I got particularly close. But in the finale Ian's actors let him down and Martin and I tied, causing a play-off. Martin's elephant - big ego - undid him here as it flipped his biggest point-scorer face-down, and I pipped him by a point. 

Sam

Martin

Ian

It was time for So Clover and whisky. We started with a 4 on my clover, dropped to a 3 on Ian's and then back up to a 4 on Martin's, which looked the worst night of your life, or maybe the best if you could remove Gordon Ramsey. A tricky end and not helped by me drunkenly wondering whether owls are birds or not (apparently they are). What can I say, it had been a night. But So Clover is always fun, regardless how of zoologically deranged you are. 

Dolphins aren't fish though, I'm pretty sure of that. 

A Steak in the Ground

With a plethora of drop-outs, hosts Anja, Steve, and Louie only had a trio of hardy gamers turn up at their doors last night to keep the orange flag flying: myself (Sam), Katy and Martin. After some brief chat, we quickly split into two groups, conscious that both time and players (Louie had to go to bed in an hour, and I didn't want to stay too late) were in short supply. Louie began setting up Robot Quest Arena with his mum and Katy, whilst Steve sat down with Martin and I to play Pioneers. 

While the Robots began barging into each other and snaffling up new powers, I talked Steve and Martin through Pioneers, which seems satisfyingly simple - at first. Each turn has three phases: get income, buy stuff (roads or carriages) and then move the stagecoach, 'delivering' pioneers from said carriages to matching spots on the board. Each spot has a bonus of some kind, so short-term it's about emptying your carriages (for points) and grabbing the rewards.

Long-term though it's also about building a network of roads; as your network (of your own roads) with the most pioneers in (of your own colour) will score at the end of the game as well. We all had to stop ourselves moving pioneers placed on the board and remember to add them from our carriages, and I think Steve and I had about three do-overs with minor gaffes to correct. Meantime the robots were getting a little hot under the metal collar, as Anja was heard announcing she would rivet-gun Louie, and he repeatedly grapple-hooked - if that's a verb - his enemies to fling them around the board. 

In Pioneers, we approached the endgame. I was optimistic that my biggest network was going to move me far enough up the track that I could claim a debut GNN victory: although Steve's carriage-focused points haul was strong, his pioneers were disparate. The stack of carriages we never thought we'd get through was running perilously low, but I ended the game by placing my last road. 

Steve and Martin had one last turn, and Martin's final move got two Farmers down, and it was enough to snake him ahead of us both!

Martin 59
Sam 57
Steve 55

While we were indulging in a post-mortem on the excellent mechanics and possibly not the most thoughtful theming, Robot Quest Arena came to a conclusion, with yet another win for Louie!

Louie 32

Anja 24

Katy 23

He went off to bed with the glow of victory whilst we played Wanted Wombats. What can be said about this strategically-rich game of wombat gangsters that hasn't been already? Well, Katy could have won when she predicted the $10k card and then banked it. She offhandedly said the next card would be a $5k though, and it was! So instead of Katy winning, I did. 

We played again and this time Steve took the victory. He was very pleased. 

After Steve's little dance we broke out Ito, the Wavelength-in-a-card-deck game of civilised discussion and occasional ranting. Our first spectrum was Important Things In Life, and we failed in the opaque space of subjectivity and pictorial representation as we discovered that we valued doilies more than slugs, but less than Eurovision. "Nobody is listening to me" Anja lamented, after her preferences were overruled by more shouty and obstinate folk at the table (me and Martin). 

We went again Things You Might Find Under a Rock, and were confident that Anja's steak - medium-rare, with pepper sauce - would be the most unlikely of our confections, only to discover it was only 55. To be fair though, at least a steak fits under a rock, and would be less surprising than finding, say, Andrew. Anja might have put a steak there. (And she did propose moving it lower, but we didn't listen). 

Our last salvo was Things That Are Hard To Do Alone, which went a disappointedly smutty direction. Anja's clue of synchronised swimming could not possibly be done with anyone else. An excellent high-number clue! But can sexual intercourse be done alone? Martin, resident latin scholar, pointed out the prefix 'inter' was a telling one. We flipped the cards to discover after successfully getting masturbation, singing and tree-hugging in ascending order (insert great weekend joke here) we'd placed these overtly plurality-based activities the wrong way around in our field of dreams... they were numbers 98 and 99! 

Great fun though, and a lovely way to end the evening. Thanks to all, especially our hosts, and particularly Steve for sacrificing his beloved Turkish Delight. After Katy and I both said we hated Turkish Delight, we ate five of them. 

Windy Plops

Adam was our host last night as Katy, Joe, Ian and myself arrived at the magic hour of 7.30pm - well, actually, Katy was there earlier and had a strange tale about a mystical shadow that she told us out on the deck. However, it cannot be shared in full here, as we were sworn to secrecy on the details just in case any strangers read the blog. 

We stepped inside and began the evening with Ito, a kind of micro-Wavelength in that each round - and a game is a single round - has a spectrum from 1-100 (for example, Things You Might Do When You're Happy) and everyone is dealt a number card and must give a bespoke clue for their number. We discuss and arrange the cards face-down in what we hope is ascending order, before revealing, in the hope we are right. 

In four attempts, we were never right, often beginning well before falling away catastrophically. Our most confusing spectrum of the night was Popular Board Games, as our subjectivity needles were all over the shop. Everyone apart from Adam felt Snakes and Ladders was far more popular than Carcassonne. But Snakes and Ladders was his clue - we should have listened. In Things That Will Last Until the End of Time, I immediately regretted my clue of YouTube, but we successfully decoded that the video platform would be less durable than the Concept of Sausages (- Joe). Martin joined us for the last couple of games of Ito, which seems to have a high quotient of accusation in it for a co-op game, but then I guess a modicum of righteousness is not necessarily always a terrible thing. 

Martin pulled Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves from his bag and we set up, optimistic that the game would come into its own with 6 players rather than the trio of last week. Certainly there was more tabletalk, which was good, but the verdict after a couple of rounds was that maybe six was one or two too many. It was fun while it lasted though, and Katy took the mildly-asterisked win - as Martin took Explainer's Curse right in the face.

Katy 63
Ian 45
Joe 41
Adam 28
Sam 24
Martin 1

The reason we stopped a little early was that Steve, bereft of moustache but equipped of tooth, had arrived and it was time for the evening's main courses. There was some hopeful proffering of various titles before we eventually settled on the equally various win conditions of Living Forest for Adam, Katy and Steve...

And Ian was talked through the vagaries of Free Ride USA by Martin and Joe. The latter began his business in the east, Martin more westerly, whilst Ian and I - leery of being too isolated - started track-laying in the swing states. 

Martin's criticism of Free Ride was that it feels like it should take an hour but play is closer to 90 minutes, and I kind of get that. For me though turns are - usually - so quick that I can forgive the playtime because of the pace. Notably here Ian ran low on cash, I picked up long routes, and Joe seemed to be - to our dismay - the recipient of a lot of short routes that popped up just as his train chugged into a nearby station. Because of that, I at least was anticipating that he might be the man to beat. But I was very wrong. 

Martin 119
Sam 113
Ian 105
Joe 103

Another Explainer's curse? Joe had a lot of completed routes, but little cash. Living Forest was yet to reach its sudden-death finale, and the tension was palpable, if somewhat undermined by the regular invoking of the phrase 'windy plops' - so we busted out another newbie from Martin: Viking See-Saw. He doesn't make many dexterity games, but this is a Reiner Knizia title. 

We all begin with a bunch of stuff in front of us:

And on your turn you must add one of your stuff to whichever side of the viking boat is titled upwards - onto to deck proper: you cannot use the two central areas with the brown blocks (chests) in. The goal is to be rid of all your stuff first - an instant win - but if you cause the boat to tilt, you have to take anything that falls off it, plus a chest the from the middle. What adds an additional level of intrigue is the fact that the bits and pieces you add vary considerably in weight: the large plastic gem is considerably lighter than the bronze cubes, for example, which weigh quite a bit. 

Martin came a real cropper here as his very first turn caused the ship to flip over, and the same thing happened to him later. Joe and I also took a hit each, which meant the cantilever king, Ian, sailed to victory:

Ian: all stuff gone 
Sam and Joe: one thing each left
Martin: had loads of stuff left

By now Living Forest was over, and Katy - lamenting - and Steve - stoic silence - were both coming to terms with Adam's tree-based victory. I mean, they knew the risks when they sat down, but sometimes that just makes it worse, I suppose.

Adam - King of the Forest
Katy and Steve -  Jacks of all Trades.

Arthur materialised before us and wanted to play Wavelength, but the hour was such that Adam had to veto and take him upstairs to bed. While we waited on his (Adam's) return, we first played Wanted Wombats, new to Steve, Katy and Ian, but quick to teach and almost as quick to play. 

Katy and I managed to pull off a $10k draw, but I bust on each subsequent turn, whereas Katy didn't.

Katy $15k

Sam $10k

Ian and Steve $3k

Martin $1k

Joe $0

Steve then took his leave. Adam hadn't returned yet, and the word was that he wasn't imminent, so we cracked into So Clover. There was some moderate harrumphing over words but we got off to a good start with a couple of sixes and kept going in that vein. It was so exciting, I forgot to take pictures here but we came a cropper in the last clover - Joe's - through no fault of the clue-giver as we failed to combine circle/base with Joe's clue of Standee. A shame, as that would have given us a perfect 30/30, but no mind. Adam hadn't reappeared yet but as he had seemed tired earlier, we decided to vacate the premises and, hopefully, see him next week. Thanks all!

Flip off

Tonight was my first games night for a while, and I was keen to get back around the table after a stressful day which included an interview for my own job. I managed to crowbar board games into one of my answers so we'll see how that turns out. 

Assembled at Joe’s house was Sam, Ian, Adam T, Joe, Martin and newcomer Jo, making their introduction to the group thanks to Martin.

The seven of us sat and pondered our options: A jovial seven player game, or “a real game.” In the end we chose Flip 7. “It's the greatest card game in the world,” insisted Joe. “If you like pairs,” countered Adam, “prepare to be disappointed.”

It is basically Pairs but with numbers instead of fruit (1 to 12 cards of value 1 to 12) and a few special cards to spice things up: you can give a Freeze card to an opponent to stop them in their tracks, or there’s the Take Three card that you can give away or use on yourself.

Despite the photo, pointing at opponents isn't an integral part of the game

As for the game, I scored sensibly on every round whereas Ian, for whatever reason, scored nothing at all. Martin came painfully close to winning the whole game (we set a target of 100 points) with only his second hand, going bust with a hand that could have scored 110 if he’d survived. Jo, on the first card of their first game in their first games night, went bust immediately. “Welcome to Games Night!” said Martin. If that weren’t enough, Jo crashed out early again with a pair of fours. But Adam took the win, with only three scoring hands in the five rounds that we played. Nice work.

Adam 101

Andrew 88

Joe 80

Martin 39

Jo 24

Ian 0

As the game ended, with the verdict of the game decidedly split, we rearranged ourselves into two groups. Four of us (Joe, Jo, Martin and Sam) played Ride the Rails. Ian, Adam and I played Impusle. This was Ian’s first game in ages. In fact, the three of us last played each other on 25 September 2019. Amazingly, we even chose the same colours.

I built a lot: actually having every available ship on the board at one point, but I was stymied by the complete lack of move commands, meaning my deadly fleet mostly floated menacingly just out of reach.

Adam built a little points engine of Draw, Mine and Trade and then Ian attacked Adam, until Adam only had one ship left. With this lone cruiser, Adam retaliated and won - allowing himself to re-establish his fleet on the board.

I reach 14 points and, with my mega-fleet, should be in a winning position but I am stranded in space, picking up peanuts for my lone ship on the Sector Core. Ian attacked me while Adam got his factory working again and was able to go from last to first.

Adam 20

Andrew 16

Ian 15

Ride the Rails was still underway. I had listened in only long enough to hear Martin persuade Joe to join him by investing in yellow while Jo and Sam teamed up with orange shares.

We played Misfits, but I was already flagging after a stressful day. Ian began the game in a feisty mood, placing a triangle painting upwards on the table. After that, gravity did the rest. None of us escaped with at least one collapse and by the time Ride The Rails had ended, we were nowhere near finding a winner.

Scores on Ride The Rails

Jo 285

Martin 259

Sam 252

Joe 219

At this point I left, too tired to continue.

*Sam takes over narration

Joe and I were both mildly bamboozled by Ride the Rails' impressive opacity, but I think everyone enjoyed it. Now down to a six in Andrew's absence, we broke out some silly card games Jo had brought, the first of which was the wonderfully named Galaxy Cat Extension. 

Here we simply take turns to flip cards, before assigning them to anyone (including yourself) around the table, with goal to have matching cat cards making cats, and maybe some cat bodies in-between them if you're really lucky. And luck plays a definite part, as outside of Short Cats and Buddha Cats in the mix, that's pretty much the entire game. There was a lot of giving of unwanted feline gifts until the final count-up (I think when the deck ran out) at which point I found myself galaxy-bound:

Sam 16

Joe 6

Adam 4

Ian 3

Martin and Jo: both zero

Next up was the even sillier, although it may not seem immediately possible, Wanted Wombats. We also take turns to flip cards here, but now only for our own benefit. The deck is made up of £1k, £3k, £5k and £10k cards and before you flip you announce what you predict you'll get. If you're wrong, your turn is instantly over. If you're right, you can either bank it or push your luck with another card, and so on. 

This game prompted a lot of laughter, as it seemed 90% of the experience was going 'Oh shit' or variants thereof. If I recall correctly someone actually called a £10k (there are only two in the deck) and Jo rallied from their explainer's curse in Galaxy Cat Extension to take a win here. We played again and almost-namesake Joe took the win. At some point my son Joe was texting me as well and it got a bit confusing. 

Then Adam T departed as well and as a quintet we busted out way through For Sale. I'm not sure how but I took a win here - not like me - and then I departed as well. Not sure if the others played anything at the end?