Can't Stop (28th)
Der Ausreisser (14th)
Devil Bunny Needs a Ham (21st)
Drahtseilakt (28th)
Fair Means or Foul (14th)
Guillotine (21st)
Matschig (28th)
Meschugge (28th)
New York, New York (7th)
Pater Noster (14th)
Rheinländer (7th)
6 Nimmt! (7th)
Space Beans (28th)
The Big Cheese (14th)
The Great Balloon Race (28th)
Twitch (14th)
Um Reifenbreite (21st)
Undercover (7th)
Chris was off in America this week and Mick was busy with his own "Housecon" (I dropped in over the weekend and will devote more time to it next time). Anyway, that left us with just four players.
We didn't know where in America Chris had gone, so we kicked off with New York, New York, a new game (, new game) for me. Each player has 12 cards showing city sections in his/her colour, numbered 1 to 12. These are then shuffled together and some are dealt out to the players, the others being drawn as play progresses. On your turn, you must place a card. If there is already another card of that colour in play, you place the card on top of it, otherwise you start a new pile for that number. After all cards are played, there are twelve piles and the top colour on each pile scores between one and twelve points for the player of that colour. So naturally you want to get everyone else's colours into the bottom three positions of each pile, leaving yours on top. A good, short game, although you are somewhat tied by the cards you draw. I only had two of my colour, and one of those was only a two - if other players have your colours they will tend to go at the bottom of piles. The way the deal went meant that the last player had an advantage - leading to a win for Soggy. Result: SO, GL, TC, GC.
Before anything else got started, I suggested we play Undercover. This is a game I borrowed off Chris to see what it is like and it has taken me a couple of months to get a game of it. Chris warned me, however, that he thought it was pretty poor. The group generally didn't like it, but I think a lot of this might be down to holes in the rules. Whether this was because of a poor translation or the rules are thin anyway, I don't know. Result: GC, SO, TC, GL.
And so, on to a current sure fire winner - Rheinländer. I still like this game very much, but I've got to get out of the habit of concentrating on becoming Archbishop. It's a strategy that is great when it works, but appalling when it doesn't. Tonight it didn't - meaning everyone else got to score loads of points while I was fighting for bishops and the game ended before I could catch up. Soggy complained that he only hadn't won because one of my moves had wrecked his plans - I wouldn't mind if only it had helped mine! Result: GL, GC, SO, TC.
We rounded off by playing 6 Nimmt! and, just to exploit a night when I was playing badly, they insisted on the variant where you only use cards numbered from 1 to 11 times the number of players and you deal out ten to each player. This means that almost all the possible numbers are in play and you can't rely on luck so much. No good for me then. And when you add in Soggy's avowed revenge play for the game of Rheinländer (which I also lost, if you remember), I was on to a loser from the start. Results: SO, GC, GL, TC.
The return of Mick meant that we were back up to five players this week - ruling out the stack of four-player games that I had taken. Still there were some interesting new experiences in store for me (including winning!).
First up was a new game from Cheapass that Garry had brought in - The Big Cheese. This is the smallest Cheapass game I have seen - a few cards in a small plastic bag. But what a good game it turned out to be. I think it went down fairly well. I did well because I seemed to roll higher on the die more consistently than the other players and we were playing with one d6. Results: TC, GC, SO, GL, MH.
Next, back on to an old favourite, Fair Means or Foul (Adel Verpflichtet). This is one of my earliest German games and I still rate it higher than Settlers of Catan, a later work by the same author. Mind you, I couldn't get seem to get the guesswork/bluffing right this time round. The masters of that were Garry and Mick and the game was a two-horse race for the second half, with those deservedly battling it out for the final win. Result: GL, MH, TC, SO+GC.
I then took the opportunity to introduce the others to Twitch (apart from Garry, who was involved last time). This is the game of fast reflexes and challenges that we played a few weeks ago. Basically, cards are played by players from face-down stacks and each card indicates in some way who is to play next. If the wrong person plays or the right person doesn't play quickly enough, other players can play their challenge cards, forcing the victim to add the discard pile to their stack. It is one of those games that can leave your nerves on edge if you're not careful. I fell victim to being too eager to challenge other players, ending up losing the challenge on most occasions. Last time, we graded non-winning positions, this time we didn't. Result: GL, MH+TC+SO+GC.
We then got on to a game that allowed me to demonstrate my powers of prediction (or lack of them) - Pater Noster. On having the rules explained, I boldly announced that I would be completely last at this because it relied on card-counting type skills that I don't have. As it turns out, though, nobody seems to have enough of those skills for this game and it relies much more on guesswork that I would have...er...guessed. Nine tiles containing pictures of people (in a pater noster lift) are placed face down in two columns of five with one space. Each player has a set of cards showing the same people (in different poses). Each turn a pawn is placed onto one of the tiles and each player simultaneously plays a card, indicating which picture they think is on the tile. The tile is turned over and anyone who got it right places that card in their 'done' stack, the other taking the card back into their hand before the pawn is moved on and a new tile is guessed at. At first, obviously, no-one knows what any of the tiles are and it is pure guesswork, but as time goes on you get to know which tiles are which. Or at least you would if it wasn't for the extra rule - each time a tile is looked at, it isn't replaced where it came from, but in the space in the two-columns-of-five layout. This means that your plans to learn the positions of the tiles are confounded by those tiles being slowly shuffled throughout the game. All in all a much more enjoyable game than I was expecting and one which, despite my prediction, I won. Result: TC, SO, MH, GC, GL.
We finished off with Der Ausreisser, a card game that I had played a hand of a long time ago and not been very impressed with. The theme is that of cycle racing and the cards all have numbers from 39 to 50, indicating the speed for this round. One player sets the pace and wears the yellow jersey. Other players have to play a card within two speed points of the pace, or play a card faster than the pace, taking the lead and the yellow jersey, or drop behind and pick up tokens indicating how many seconds behind you are. Once you drop behind you are basically doomed, and you have to play faster than the pace to try and lose your tokens, but pick up more if you are even one speed point behind the pace. The idea at this stage is that you work on damage limitation. When I played it before, three things stuck with me: firstly, I don't really like games that punish players who are falling behind (emphasising the lead of the leading players); secondly, if you get the right cards you are going to do well, if not you are going to do badly; and thirdly, most of the time there is little choice what card to play, especially if you have dropped behind. The first two points were answered somewhat by playing five hands instead of one - the luck spread around a bit more, and even I had one excellent hand that no-one could keep up with (although most people felt I must have picked up Mick's hand instead of my own...). That made it more enjoyable, although you could just as easily get five bad hands during the game. The last point, though, about lack of choice of which card to play, is still a valid criticism I think. Anyway, everyone else seemed to enjoy it. Result: MH, TC, GC, GL, SO.
Essen weekend. Mick and Garry had gone there. Chris was still in America. There were only three of us because Soggy had brought Jonathan along.
We started off with an old favourite that hasn't been played for a little while: Guillotine. I never seem to do well at this game, but that doesn't stop it being an excellent fun game. Result: SO, TC, JO.
And then on to an altogether more enjoyable cycle racing game than Der Ausreisser: Um Reifenbreite. I got off to an excellent start and mid-section, but somehow blew it all at the end when I kept rolling low and Soggy staked everything on a last minute dash, and succeeded in getting one of his riders first over the line. His fourth place then ensured that my second and third were not enough to win. Drat! Result: SO, TC, JO.
We did start a game of Devil Bunny Needs a Ham, but ran out of time before we could get very far. I expect Soggy would have won if we'd continued anyway - it was that kind of a night.
We should get a few more players next week, and some new stuff from Essen to try out! I'm hoping Garry got my e-mail before he left and will be bringing back some goodies for me...
Only four adults and three children this week - I would have hoped for a few more the week after Essen! Still, never mind, the two members who had visited that Mecca had turned up with lots of lovely new stuff. On the down side, Garry hadn't read his e-mail before going and had therefore not brought back any of the games I wanted. Any future anti-Garry bias in this column will be perfectly understandable, then.
There was a fair bit of just looking at the new stuff at the beginning - at least there was for me. Some of the others filled in with a game of Can't Stop - Sid Sackson's classic game of gambling for a little bit more in the same vein as Pass the Pigs. Mick was keen to point out that he won, despite that fact that all his opponents were children... Result: MH, CL, SC, BH.
Actually, while Mick was involved in that, he was keen to show us a card game whose name escapes me. There are a set of cards with the words 'red', 'blue', 'green' and 'yellow' on them (but in German, adding an extra level of complexity). The words are also written in one of these colours, although not necessarily the colour that the word says. A card is turned over and, based on the result of a die roll, a point is awarded to the first player to play a card which either: is the colour that the word on the first card says; has the word of the colour that the first card is; has neither word nor colour matching either word or colour on the first card; or is the opposite of the first card - i.e. it has a colour matching the word on the first card and a word matching the colour on the first card. As only the first correct card played earns the player a point, there is a danger of playing a wrong card, for which a point is deducted. The game was a bit like Twitch, but with the added element of brain-damage as well as the nerve-damage of that game. We never got a full game of this, as people tended to try for a minute or two and then start crying. I'll add the name here when Mick reminds me what it is. [Editor's note: Jim Sutherland subsequently wrote in and pointed out that it is called Meschugge].
The first of the new games that I actually played was Drahtseilakt - which translates as Tightrope - from the ever-prolific Reiner Knizia. The game doesn't have anything to do with tightrope walking, but is about balance. It seems a simple and fun game. Further playing may show it to be too simple to maintain serious interest or to have more depth than is first apparent. Result: TC, GC, MH.
Next, we tried Space Beans, the latest from Uwe Rosenberg. This one I liked from the start. It is from the same school as Bohnanza - the game that shot Uwe to fame in the first place - although it doesn't have the trading that was the main feature of that game. In this version, you have two beanfields, one face up and one face down and the cards are numbered from 1 to 9. You can only sell the face up field and, when you do, you check to see if you have the card matching the umber of cards in that field - for example if you sell a field of five orange cards, you only score if you have a number 5 card among them - and then you score that many (5) points. You must play to one, and only one, beanfield on your turn, using any cards in your hand. Before that you may draw two cards and it is after playing cards that the interesting part comes in to play - and a great replacement for trading it is. Any cards left in your hand after your turn, get passed to the player on your right to become his/her hand next turn. Meanwhile, it is now the turn of the player to your left. This passing on of the cards makes you want to avoid drawing cards unless you have to, because you don't want to pass on any good cards if you can help it. At the same time, you have to make sure you have cards you can use because if you can't add to current fields, you must sell your face-up field, even if it pays nothing. Garry seemed to spend a lot of time taking advantage of this rule in the first game - so much so that he ended it without having cashed in a paying beanfield... Serves him right for not reading his e-mail. He got the hang by the third game, though. Result 1: TC, MH, GL. Result 2: TC, MH, GL. Result 3: GL, TC, MH.
Meantime, the other had played a game of The Great Balloon Race, an excellent game that I had come across at Furrycon (watch for a report real late but real soon now...). They were not too sure of the result as three of them claimed the win at the same point. At least they all agreed that Geoff was late. Result: BH+CL+SC, GC.
They followed this up with another card game. I think the German name is Matschig, translated as Muddy. The game involves playing soil and water cards in equal quantities to make mud and then 'flinging' this at other players, who try to defend themselves with umbrellas. Result: BH, SC, CL, GC. I get the feeling that Geoff isn't as hard on these kids as Mike is.
See you next week for the last games night before MidCon in Birmingham. Another reason I need to get my Furrycon report finished.