Fun lovin' Kribbelners

This week saw the well-oiled machine of GNN execute a pin-point 180 degree turn as initial host, Adam, had to hand over the duties to Sam at the last minute. Well, at the last couple of hours or so, but you get the point.

This left Sam fretting as the change in venue sparked off a number of late cancellations. Did this mean he wasn't popular? But in the end the exodus wasn't as big as he'd first thought and eight of us were in attendance tonight.

We started as a four: me, Sam, Ian and Joe. We began with Animals On Board, joking that just setting the game up would set off the doorbell. It did, and it was Martin.

Animals was replaced by Abluxxen. Early on, Sam asked if a hand full of different numbers was bad. Martin confirmed that it was.

The game ebbed and flowed, with Ian surprising us all by putting down a trick with three jokers in it. That was quickly abluxxed by Martin, if I remember right, which might have been the key move.

Martin 21
Sam 11
Joe 11
Andrew 5
Ian 5

By now, Adam, Katy and (after his cameo last week) Steve had arrived. The eight of us split into two groups of four. I pointed out Ponzi Scheme in Joe's bag, and a triumvirate of eager players volunteered themselves. I'd been keen to try it, so I happily joined them.

The other four went for The Networks. The game of schedule planning for a cable TV station. Or something. I understood very little since, from where I sat it was a long way away and upside down.

Ponzi Scheme, though, was much nearer. And the right way up. Unfortunately, I didn't understand it either. The rules are simple but the gameplay can be very opaque. Trying to work out a value for industry tiles in the trade round is a bit like licking your finger and holding it in the air. Not much to go on.

Joe stated he just wanted to stay solvent until the end, since that had never happened before. Katy bought industry tiles with glee, insisting I take a photo when she had three of three types.

Martin had loads of tiles and then, the next time I looked, he only had a few. Possibly due to the large number of "bear markets" that were triggered, meaning we have to lose a tile.

But Katy couldn't sustain that level of tile ownership and I felt less than inclined to try and extend my game any longer than necessary, so we ended up failing simultaneously. Martin won, despite Katy buying a tile off him to try and get Joe to win, but Martin's had a huge reserve of cash which got him four points. It was enough to give Martin another win.

Martin 8
Joe 4
Katy and Andrew BUST!

I found it all a bit dull. It was as if I was playing a game of Mornington Crescent, were people ostensibly follow some rules, and then there's a big reaction at something, the joke being that nothing has actually happened. That's exactly how it felt. Can't see me playing again. Pity, but there you go.

The Networks was still underway, so we brought out Polterfass. Clearly not my night for bluffing, mind-reading type games.

Surprising final round, though, with Katy and Martin poised to win. Katy, the customer, had 72. Martin, the barkeep, had 70. Katy only had to bid three and hope for a return, and then she'd win. But she bid zero, expecting Martin to be a mean bartender and not roll again, hoping to take advantage of Joe or my greed. She was half right. Martin didn't roll again, leaving eight pints to share. But Joe and I bid only one! No one went bust and Katy rued her choice. It was enough to give Martin another win.

Martin 76
Katy 72
Joe 50
Andrew 18

The Networks was still being played. In fact, by now, they were all standing up and checking the rule book. Serious stuff.

We went for Kribbeln, the game where Martin cocks a snook at Lady Fate and gets away with it. We all said his second Krib of 34 was a mistake, but then he pulled at 35 out of the bag in the later stages while the rest of us struggled in the high twenties and low thirties. It was enough to give Martin another win. (I should probably just have that sentence assigned to one of the F-keys on my keyboard. It would save a lot of time.)

Martin 25
Katy 19
Joe 17
Andrew 17

Finally, The Networks ended and we could clear the table (leaving behind one purple cube that no one could identify the source of). The game ended:

Adam 253
Sam 251
Steve 247
Ian 227

The eight of us played a rousing game of Pairs. Well, not really. My game slump continued, even in victory. I was on 14 points when I managed to fluke a first place, getting me eight points and pushing me past the 21-point mark. A huge anti-climax: I hadn’t even realised I was close to winning. The other notable event was Adam deciding to stick after he'd only been dealt one card (got him five points, though).

Andrew 22
Katy 15
Joe 14
Martin 13
Ian 11
Sam 11
Adam 10
Steve 8

Then the Eastonites left en masse, leaving the rest of us for one last game. Since I’d had such a poor evening, they let me choose the final game and I went for Unearth. But even then, I failed to get very far.

Sam 28
Joe 21
Katy 17
Andrew 16

Not a great night for me but I’ll write this off as an aberration. There’s always the weekend!

Sho' Nuff

With last night's Shogun still tingling my brain, Stanley and I cranked out a game of The Networks this afternoon. The idea is we are running competing TV channels, and choose shows to fill three slots between 8pm and 11pm, raising both cash and - crucial for winning - a larger audience share than your opponents.

My channel was VCK

Abetting this shows are adverts or stars that will garner more audience or cash, and there are also Network cards that are essentially McGuffins - a little fillip here or end-game bonus there. 

I'm wary of games that pass themselves off as funny, but to be fair to The Networks it makes no claim of being 'hilarious' but did provide some comedy - at one stage my channel had An Hour of Shouting at 9 and Get To Know Your Lower Colon at 10.

Mmmmm

This goes on for five seasons as your older shows lose audiences and get consigned first to reruns, and then the archives. Twas ever thus...

I'm currently the undefeated Cube Quest king in our house with something like ten victories in a row, but I simply can't defeat Stan in anything heavier than that, it seems, and he trotted out with a debut win:

Stanley 140

Sam 136

It was a lot of fun. I would happily have played again, but Stan had been pushing for us to play Shogun, so after tea we sourced a 2-player variant from BGG: where some areas are uncontested and both players take two special cards, instead of one. Other than that though it was much the same deal (except we played the rice rule correctly this time) and with the rules fresh in my mind I explained them a little more clearly today!

Black cubed areas remain off-limits

Too clearly, perhaps. Competitive dad came out and I really wanted to win this one, but I was defeated by both tactical play on Stan's part and a couple of awful cube tower moments that had me cursing Dirk to the skies. At the end of the first year I led by a single point, but Stanley's blue armies were amassed and ready to attack.

Winter isn't coming

We broke for tea, and realised we were being watched through the window by a snail.

Then the second year commenced, and we went toe to toe. I thrice pulled out the attack-with-a-single-army manoeuvre but though it did thin Stan's forces out, it wasn't enough. And in the autumn of the second year I stupidly didn't bother picking up money, forgetting - somehow! - that I needed it to build buildings!

A couple of tactics worked well - while Stan was busy in the middle of the board I claimed majority in castles around him. But my forces kept being attacked and the game ended with a convincing debut win from the boy. 

Stanley 41

Sam 35

Another whupping

I think I may leave it another four years next time. 

Hello AP my old friend

Saturday, and whilst the boys watched Pee Wee's Big Holiday, I talked Ian and Chris through the rules of Shogun. Andrew joined us - he and I had both played Shogun and its predecessor Wallenstein, but in the dim and distant past, with regular ass-whuppings at the hands of Anja, Adam, Steve, and Dan Clamp as I recall. But although it's a real brain burner - the post title comes from Ian invoking Art Garfunkel - the rules aren't actually terribly complex, and we set about populating feudal Japan forthwith. (Andrew here, just to add a little historical something: the names were the old names for Japan's regions, click here to see Chris' favourites Bichu and Bingo in all their historically accurate glory!)

Like Wallenstein, Shogun plays through two 'years' of the country, and in three seasons of each year you choose which of ten actions to assign to which area you control - or hope to control, if some Daimyo type hasn't nabbed it off you. Some actions allow you to strengthen, or confiscate money or rice from the local populace - good for building or feeding, but bad for popularity - too much confiscation leads to revolt.

Is this farmer revolting or raving?

Some other actions allow you to build buildings - theatres, temples or castles - and only two of the ten actually let you do what everyone is really wanting to do, which is attack.

Me(black), Chris (yellow) and Ian (blue) fancy our chances in Kozuke

I had what looked like a strong starting position, with several areas clustered close together. But sat in the middle of them was Ian, with five armies. He and Chris also managed to establish some mini-strongholds in the easier-to-defend areas of the board, whilst Andrew and I were more central. As the opening year played out, I realised I was doing what I'd always done previously, which was playing too conservatively, anticipating attack instead of expanding. So I tried to drive Ian out of my territory, only for his paltry single army to defeat the incoming four!

Ian surrounded by Sam

Andrew I seem to recall did spread himself a bit more, but suffered at the hands of Chris. Come the mid-game scoring at the 'winter' of the first year, he and Ian were miles in front, whilst Andrew and I languished far behind them. It had turned into a battle for first and a battle for third.

Unfortunately for Ian, his money ran out and in the final season of the final year his options were minimal. Chris and Andrew both took areas from him, whilst I finally broke the pattern of consolidation and managed to spread myself a bit around the board - enough to nab third, whilst Chris surged far enough ahead to see off Ian, who despite his worries had still scored substantially for all his buildings.

The final board

Chris 40
Ian 35
Sam 29
Andrew 27

Post game photos of people taking photos!

Whew! It was now three and three-quarter hours since we'd sat down to play, but as that meant it was only 10.45, we were all up for another game, and played Unearth: the game of digging up ruins and collecting stones. It was, Andrew said, "the ideal game to play after Shogun" as on your turn all you do is roll a die. You then place it on a Ruin and hope that when the ruin's value is reached by all the dice present, yours is the highest - claim the ruin, collect sets of ruins, score points. But if your dice roll is low (a one, two or three) you take a stone, and build with it. If you build a stone circle you can place a Wonder in it for points at the end of the game. Get dumped from a Ruin and you get a Delve card, which gives you some little fillip during play.

Stan and I had played the day before and thought it just ok, but it came into its own with four - lots of room for screwage and pushing people around - a Cosmic Run with added interaction really.

Andrew and I tied on 26 points, but Ian took the win with 27!

Ian 27
Andrew/Sam 26
Chris 21

A nice filler to end the evening after a totally brutal Shogun!

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!

Matches of the Day

Saturday! Andrew rolled up to the house at 7.30 and Stan joined us for the first game of the evening, which was Ninjato. Stanley had won something like seven in a row of this game, both two-player and with his friend Peppa. It was entirely new to Andrew, and though the mechanics of it are pretty straightforward, the tactics require a little familiarity with the game. Stanley shot off into an early lead at the first scoring round as Andrew had no Envoys (good for scoring) and I only had two second-places behind the Ninja Master.

But it was early days, and we had time to recover. Ninjato requires you to go raiding in order to get treasure, in order to pay for either Envoy cards (good for scoring rounds) or Rumour cards (good for end-game scoring). But both are fraught with danger - in the raids, you may come up against an undefeatable sentry, and in the scoring, you may be out-Envoyed or simply find your Envoys aren't much use.

I managed to haul Stanley - who forewent his usual Rumour-based tactics - back to claim my first win of the night, and also Ninjato itself. Stan clung onto second as Andrew had a debut third place against two grizzled old-timers. As he noted, it's quite a combative game: opponents can see what clans you want to score and simply oust them from the board, making your Envoys almost worthless.

Sam 95
Stan 69
Andrew 66

The dethroned Ninja King now had to retire to bed, so Andrew and I went for another new game to him - Roll Player. This slightly oddball affair takes the best part of role-playing games - the creating of your character - and makes it the entirety of the game, as you roll dice and try to match colours and numbers to your backstory, character and alignment. Interaction isn't high but brain-burning is certainly present, as you try to give your character high enough scores to nab points, whilst also getting the colours of the dice in the right place too.

It was an exceedingly close-run thing too:

Sam 27
Andrew 26

Next up was NMBR9. I utterly love this game - I didn't think you could improve on Take It Easy but I think NMBR9 has pulled it off. We played a 2-plauer variant of going through the deck twice to use all the pieces, and I managed a substantial win:

Sam 256
Andrew 128

Before we played again, with the standard rules, and managed a draw!

Andrew/Sam 71

Next up was Biblios, and what a corker it was. Andrew made it clear he wasn't going for browns as he kept putting the value down. I didn't have any browns when he first did this, but then I kept picking them up! He also managed to feed me 2 gold on a regular basis...

I knew he was after blue dice so tried to stay quietly competitive, but it was in vain: despite picking up three of the five dice, Andrew ended the evening as Mr Biblios:

Andrew 8
Sam 7

He also ended the evening as Mr Push It, as I somehow threw away a 10-7 lead to see Andrew finish the night with two straight victories!

Andrew 11
Sam 10

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...

Seven games, only five results

Due to the staggered times that some of the regulars would be arriving, twice this evening a game was chosen and set up, ready to begin, when a knock on the door signalled a change of plans. The two unlucky games were Santo Domingo (complete with rules explanation from Joe) and Coloretto.

But what about the games we did play? And who did we play them with? Joe hosted, with Katy, Ben, Martin, Andy and me the early arrivals. Ian and Adam were expected later. We began with a short roll & write game called Twenty One. In it each player has a unique score sheet showing a number of rows of coloured dice, each with a value. Working from the top, each player has to use the similarly coloured dice rolled that turn to write in number on these dice, with the proviso that that number must be lower or equal to the one on the sheet. Direct hits will score you a bonus when you complete the row. You can fill in as many as you like, but you must fill in one, even if it is to cross one off completely when the dice roll means you have no legal moves.

Joe had played a few two player games recently with one of his daughters, but I think the overall conclusion was that it doesn't work well with so many players. It's a bit of a luck-fest, since there's no way to keep tabs on what everyone wants.

Katy started well and probably thought she had it in the bag until Ben started cranking out rows in the twenties and thirties. And then Andy snuck in at the end to grab second.

Ben 97
Andy 85
Katy 84
Joe 81
Martin 73
Andrew 62

Not sure why it’s called Twenty One, though.

At this point we set up Santo Domingo, only to be stopped by Adam making his way slowly down the stairs. This gave Katy what she'd been begging for all evening: someone who'd support her request for Ponzi Scheme. "It's been six weeks!" She cried, trying to appeal to our better natures. With Adam on board, Ben followed and Joe agreed to be rules explainer. They set up at the bottom of the stairwell, for a change, and got to work.

Adam's beer

New gaming table arrangement

Martin, Andy and I pondered about a quick three player, and chose Coloretto. Martin was confused by Joe having two copies. He chose "the nice one" (Joe's words) but got confused mid-set-up by the different designs and put it away and then went back to the classic original. And then Ian arrived.

And so we embarked on the Grand Tour of Flamme Rogue. A three-stage road race that needs an app (or a printed score sheet) to keep track of the placings.

It was great. Among all the jostling in the peleton, Martin's sprinter seemed remarkably prime to exhaustion while my rouler often found himself stuck one space shorter than the card I'd played.

In one example, Ian cleverly put his leading cyclists, two abreast right at the start of a hill, meaning my two cyclists got stuck behind him. I called him "le coq blocquer" for his spoiling tactics, but he seemed unconcerned at my anguish

Ian's two cyclists stop me in my tracks

Talking of anguish, midway through our game, Katy called me over to the Ponzi game to take a photo of Joe losing quickly. I did so, but just as I left, Joe handed a black envelope over to Adam with a gleam in his eye. The game didn't end then, so I assume Joe's secret deal was a success.

Ponzi Scheme did finish before we did, though, with both Ben and Joe going bust in the same round.

Adam 10 points
Katy 6 points
Ben -$1
Joe -$200

“That was brilliant,” said Katy. They went on to play Animals on Board.

Flamme Rogue was hotting up, with the third stage in full swing. It was a bit of a nightmare, with a long winding uphill struggle towards the end. The final standings across all three stages were:

Martin 9
Andy 7
Andrew 5
Ian 3

Martin's unused cards

What an encounter. And really quite tense all the way through. No one seemed happy with their cards at any point. In fact, I seem to recall the moaning beginning at the first corner of the first race! But what is sport without moaning about fate? If you don’t complain, it just means you don’t care!

And Animals on Board ended

Katy 40
Adam 38
Joe 31
Ben 28

Then Ben departed. We tried to convince him to stay with Fuji Flush, but his willpower was too strong. Instead, the remaining seven of us watched as Joe got out the absinthe for our final game of the evening.

I was in a good position for the win fairly on, with three high cards in my hand. But I was thwarted and had to rely on good luck to get me some new high cards. I got a 19, and played it just after the deck was recycled since I assumed that the 20 must still be somewhere inside it. Right? Wrong. Ian had it! Le Coq Blocquer lived up to his reputation as he played the 20 that he’d only just picked up from the reshuffled deck!

But I couldn’t be stopped. Martin played 9 and I joined him. Katy played 11 to try and stop us, but then Ian beat her card. Frustratingly (for them, not us) Adam also had an 11! We would have been beaten had Ian not stepped in. But he did, so we did.

Martin 0
Andrew 0
Ian 1
Joe 1
Adam 3
Andy 3
Katy 4

Phew! What an evening. But, then again, aren’t they all?