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Yes! Pasta night is back! (with added American)

Tonight we skipped the voteamabob and went straight for Muffin Time, which is basically Fluxx but sillier and crazier. It looked like being straightforward... for all of two turns, then we completely lost track of what was going on as everything got increasingly bonkers. Eventually Kyle stormed to victory via a combination of me changing the rules to "the person with the largest hand wins" and Kyle playing a card that let him take everyone else's hand.

We had a bit of time afterwards, so Paddy dug out 20 Second Showdown which is pretty much what it says on the tin: there's two teams, a sandtimer that you start with 20 seconds in each half, and a set of increasingly random challenges. First team to run out of time attempting a challenge loses! It's definitely the sort of game that should come with a minimum drink limit 😅

The drive back was something of a magical mystery tour - I decided to head via Petworth (to avoid the Fontwell roadworks), only to find that the south-west exit from Petworth was closed, and a not particularly well signed diversion that took me all the way up to Haslemere before heading back down to Midhurst! Looking back at the route on a map, what I should have done at Haslemere is continued west to pick up the A3 - or ignored the diversion entirely and gone south-east towards Fittleworth and then Bury.
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A quality street chocolate and two foam stars from my sister, more chocolate, and a space fighter thing from the Lego calendar. I'll stick the foam stars on the snowmen probably tomorrow.




Minor excitement at work today - there's a bit of scrubland behind the office and whoever's in charge of it decided to spend the day clearing it. So the morning we were treated to what sounded like arguing chainsaws, and in the afternoon they collected up all the wood and shrubs they'd cut down and set fire to it. Since we've had a very wet few weeks this resulted in epic amounts of smoke blanketing the car park (you know it's bad when your eyes start to water inside the office with the closed windows). We actually phoned the fire brigade in the end to come and have a look at it! They turned up fairly quickly, though while I'm not sure if they put the bonfire out or just gave the chaps there an earful it did seem to be less smoky afterwards.

At tonight's pasta night Kyle brought a new game: Joking Hazard, created by the insanity that's behind the Cyanide and Happiness webcomic. It plays much like Cards Against Humanity (and has the same NSFW-style terrible humour), and the five of us ended up whiling away an hour or two going through the entire deck of cards creating epically awful comics (along with a few that were actually quite heartwarming - like Cards Against Humanity, occasionally the game throws out something nice for a change).
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After skipping last week due to a PCC meeting, it's pasta night again! With all four of us who could make it tonight (such is the ebb and flow of pasta night).

Since there were only a few of us, we dug out some games with smaller player limits and settled on Dominion. It was a strange game - in the random card selection were hardly any +1 Action cards and only one +2 Action (the Village card), so very little happened in each turn. But at the same time two of the action cards affected all players (Spy, Thief) and so there was still a fair bit of activity.

I bounced around a few possibilities before settling on a game plan of buying Silver to buy Gold, and then using the Remodel to turn a Gold card into a Province. It worked... but not as effectively as I'd have liked - I should have started on that sooner, and converted more Silvers into Duchies. Beth managed the win mainly through buying lots of Duchies.

Driving back, Bury Hill provided amusement again - this time not one but two cars thought they could climb the hill faster than me. Which they did on the straights (only because I was holding to 50mph), but not round the corners (which again, I take at 50mph because the Alfa can)!

Pasta night

Nov. 5th, 2019 11:24 pm
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Yesterday was pasta night with an old game and a new game!

First up is the confusingly-named 6 nimmt! card game, which is one of those games where it's possibly to spectacularly lose a round and go all the way from first to last place if you're not careful or the cards hate you. The rules are simple though a little confusing: the cards are numbered 1-104 and are worth various amounts of penalty points. Everyone gets dealt a hand of cards and then 4 more are placed faceup in the middle (forming 4 stacks). Then everyone secretly selects a card from their hand, simultaneously reveals their chosen card, and then in ascending order places their card at the end of the stack with the highest card less than theirs (i.e. price-is-right rules). If someone places the sixth card on a stack, then they pick up the other five cards and place them in a score pile. If someone can't place their card (e.g. because they had the misfortune to be dealt "1"), then they select any stack they like, pick up the cards, and place theirs as a new stack. Repeat until everyone has run out of cards, then add up the penalty points in the score piles. Then shuffle and deal a new round. First player to exceed 66 total penalty points ends the game and the lowest score wins.

It becomes easier to understand after playing a couple of rounds, honest!

Afterwards we played what Kyle described as a "toddler simulation game" - Human: Fall Flat, which is a physics simulation game a little in the style of World of Goo except with humans instead of goo. The particular mechanic here is that your character can grab onto just about anything, and by doing so move boxes, climb walls, move platforms (by grabbing the wall and "walking" the platform)... and you have to solve various puzzles while a voiceover snarks at you. Or start co-op mode and then play tug-of-war with another player.
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Let's try and update more than once a month, shall we?

Pasta night has still been happening, with a succession of games as the mood and the voteamabob takes us.

A few weeks ago I persuaded Paddy to bring Stone Age along, and played a 4-way game with Louise and Jonners as well. I find it's a very mathematical game in a way - it's all about playing the odds of the different resource sources and working out what on the board is most likely to be achievable, and what to have as a plan B or C if the dice don't go the way you want. I generally concentrate on gifts of civilisation cards and tools which tends to work out in the end. The gifts of civilisation build up quite nicely (you score the square of the number of unique cards and there's eight to collect) and the tools are overpowered combined with bonus multiplier cards... but on the flip side I do tend to be struggling for food in the late game while my opponents have usually built up on the agriculture track. Perhaps I'll experiment with a different approach next time?

Last week I played Ticket to Ride on the US map. I (in yellow) started with a set of high-value tickets that happened to mostly line up and somehow achieved all of them, though my resulting network was a bit more branched than usual due to conflicting on routes. This meant I missed out on longest route, and because I didn't draw more tickets I missed out on most tickets as well... while I think it was Jonners who got incredibly lucky with drawing tickets and completed masses of them, passing 100 points on tickets and bonuses before the trains were totted up.



And this Monday just gone, the Reduced Pasta Night Company numbered exactly 6 and so we dug out Settlers of Catan with the 6-player expansion. We played a slightly house-ruled version (open hands, no hand limit from rolling a 7) with the 6-player special building rule (at the end of each player's turn, all other players have an opportunity to build) and the game came right down to the wire. I (again in yellow) was in position to win on my next turn by claiming largest army (with two knights played and a third in hand), Louise (in green) was a settlement or two away from a win thanks to longest road, and Jonners (in brown) with three victory point cards in hand only needed one more point for the win. Martin (white) was getting close after recovering from a disastrous starting position and Matt (blue) and Vicki (red) were out of the running. And victory ultimately went to... Louise, by squeezing in one more settlement for victory!



The 6-player game changes things up a bit, especially with the special building rule - this lets one build before rolling and so take advantage of adding more possible resources to the dice roll. The larger map helps a lot with finding good starting locations and didn't feel quite as cramped as a 4-player game on the standard map does.

Dominion!

Dec. 3rd, 2018 11:45 pm
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Tonight I played just the one round of Dominion (combining the Intrigue and Seaside sets) with Matt and Kyle (while the others got stuck in to Agricola - having watched them play, I want to give that a try as well). Unusually I managed a runaway victory with 47 victory points, so go me!

We all played with very different tactics. Matt did his usual trick of turning coppers into silver and gold, which he then used to buy provinces outright out of treasure in hand each turn. Kyle put together a very effective engine for producing 6 money each turn which he spent on the harem card (costs 6, worth 2 money and 2 victory points). I however had spotted the pirate ship card and aggressively bought those, which I then used to steadily increase the tokens on the pirate ship scorecard. This worked out very well in two ways: once I'd built up about 6 tokens, the second ability of the pirate ship became useful and I could reliably buy a province a turn. And the first ability was moderately useful in slowing Matt down by trashing odd treasure cards, but utterly crippled Kyle's deck by turning his harem cards into liabilities. Since a harem counts as treasure it's vulnerable to the pirate ship ability, and the luck of the draw meant I was forcing him to trash them almost as fast as he was buying them. It didn't help when all the harem cards had been bought and Kyle's deck suddenly found itself with never quite enough money for the provinces needed to stave off myself and Matt.
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[livejournal.com profile] elemnar brought a new game to try tonight: Chain Reaction. Having played it I've got mixed views - it could work well, but I'm not sure it fits our group. Or perhaps we need less tired people and to pay more attention to the game - while members of each team are supposed to answer the question/challenge in order without help, some got carried away and shouted out answers without waiting for their turn, while others on both sides tried to give clues (not always helpfully). And half-way through we lost track of which colour was which team on the scoreboard, and we weren't counting the scores consistently between the two teams.

I think it's a game that we might end up playing every so often only to remember why we don't play it, a bit like with Munchkin. It's all academic anyway as [livejournal.com profile] elemnar is borrowing it and has to give it back soon.

Afterwards we filled the remaining time with Jackbox 5, playing first Split The Room and then Mad Verse City. Split The Room backfired spectacularly - I completely failed to split the room at all with my first prompt, and couldn't gain enough points from my second prompt to move up the scoreboard. Mad Verse City went even worse with zero points in the first two rounds. I did get some points in the final round when I gave up entirely on trying to make things rhyme though. Meh, bring back Survive The Internet!

Jackbox 5

Nov. 19th, 2018 11:45 pm
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Classic FM threw up a rather eerie choice of music for the drive back from pasta night - An Ocean of Memories, from the Titanic soundtrack. This came on as I passed Coultershaw Bridge and continued for the climb over the downs past Duncton and through Upwaltham, with the moon illuminating a few wisps of cloud in the night sky. While I don't think I've heard this song before, the wordless singing seemed very familiar (and no, I don't mean the part that's the Titanic theme). I can't quite place which piece it reminds me of though.


Back to pasta night, and tonight's game was by overwhelming popularity Jackbox 5! We started off with the classic You Don't Know Jack, which was as bonkers as it was back when we played it in the Brighton house in 2006, huddled around Nik's computer. The Screw option seems to have been tamed down a bit - when we played it before, in one incarnation it let you fire a whole slew of screws into the screen as fast as you could hammer the keyboard, covering all the answers up. This time it just flipped everything upside down, which is a bit anti-climatic when one can workaround it by just rotating your phone 180 degrees. Somehow despite trailing for most of it I managed to claim a solid victory with the rapid-fire questions at the end.

Next up was Split The Room which is strange - you get a question with a fill-in-the-blank portion, and the aim is to complete the question such that half the room will answer Yes and the other half No. You get more points for the closer you are to a 50/50 split. I didn't quite get into the swing of this one and ended up last.

We then played Patently Stupid, wherein you get a prompt to design a silly invention and then have to pitch it to the room. Whoever gets the most investment (votes) at the end wins! In the second round we all get the same prompt - for us, it was something along the lines of "When you need more salad". My invention was a...



Salad Cannon! For when you need all the salad! Sadly while it did score enough to get investment (and bonus points), Jonners stole the win with his anti-salad statement:



Finally it was time for Mad Verse City, a game of epic robot rap battles read out by some very bored-sounding text-to-speech engines. In each round you get two pairs of a prompt for a word, followed by the game generating a line with it and getting you to add a rhyming line. It does rather put you on the spot with trying to come up with words that you can rhyme and then trying to fit your rhyme into whatever insanity the game came up with. Ultimately it came down to a duel between Kyle and Louise, with Kyle looking strong but getting demolished by Louise in the final round.
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'Twas something of a wild ride to get to pasta night - the drivers around Portsmouth seemed completely bamboozled by the rain, and later I crested Bury Hill to discover torrential downpours with sporadic lightning. Fun.

Anyway, tonight we had time for two games! First up was Wits & Wagers, essentially a betting/guessing game. Someone will draw a card with a number-based question, such as "How many cups of coffee does the average American drink in a year". Everyone writes a guess for the answer on a card and the guesses are all sorted. Then, each player gets to pick one or two answers that they think are closest. Finally the answer is revealed, and those who guess right get points. You get a better reward for answers further from the median. Kyle managed to storm to victory on that one with a succession of good guesses, combined with betting heavily later on (you can bet your points - if you're right, then those multiply your resulting score).

Afterwards I unleashed the Super Mario Bros Power Up Card Game upon the pasta night group - we quickly got the hang of the rules after playing a test round, and then got stuck into it in earnest. Louise was the surprise winner here - despite being passed a whole slew of terrible cards from Kyle, she managed to build up a war chest of question block cards and held on right to the very end. I think this is one we may play again.
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We were nattering at pasta night and [livejournal.com profile] jonners99_uk mentioned that he'd been trying to teach his son to say "In the Land of Mordor". Of course, there is only one possible reaction to that...

They're taking the hobbits to Isengard! )

Things then escalated and many classic Youtube videos were deployed...

Why is the rum gone? )

VeggieTales: The pirates who don't do anything )

Potter Puppet Pals: The Mysterious Ticking Noise )


Anyway, on to the games! We were a bit thin on numbers for tonight, so Beth dug out some games that we don't often play due to having too many people and first up was Dixit. It's a nice easy game to play, with absolutely beautiful artwork on the cards, and we managed to come up with all sorts of weird and wonderful combinations of clues and cards. I have to admit, I almost want to buy this just for the art. [livejournal.com profile] elemnar managed to storm ahead early on and won with a hefty lead.

Dixit went fairly quickly so we had time for a another game - Takenoko, which hasn't come up at pasta night for probably over a year. This game is much more complicated, revolving around placing tiles and manoeuvring a gardener to grow bamboo and a panda to eat it, and the lateness of the evening showed as some of us started making silly mistakes. I didn't feel that I was doing all that well at it, but did manage to score the bonus points for being the one to end the game and when we added up everything I was joint first with [livejournal.com profile] elemnar! Go us!
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We've come up with a new game at pasta night that I don't think I've blogged about before: Cards Against Apples. Basically you combine the prompt cards from Cards Against Humanity with the answer cards from Apples to Apples, and then play with the normal rules. The combination we find works very well - Cards Against Humanity gives you better prompts to play with, and Apples to Apples makes for less awkward and more fun answers.

We've also tried Apples Against Humanity but that doesn't work quite as well. The Cards Against Humanity answers don't fit well with the Apples to Apples prompts.

After that we still had some time and I've picked up one of the Jackboxes for the Switch ('twas on offer), so we hooked that up for a round of Fibbage and a couple more of Survive the Internet. Hilariously [livejournal.com profile] jonners99_uk managed to win the final game despite not actually taking part - he'd gone to do post-pasta-night tidying, but a mixup meant his phone was still active and so he joined in without being in front of the TV. I have considered running a remote session of Jackbox as it all goes through a central server and it looks like you get just enough information in the prompts to take part, though ideally I'd want to livestream the main window as that's the only one with the scoring.
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Discussing Smash Bros at pasta night...

Kyle: ...so you know wavedashing?
[livejournal.com profile] elemnar: No, I just know how to use Jigglypuff.
Kyle: O_O

Ph34r [livejournal.com profile] elemnar when she puts on her "kid sister" face and plays Smash Bros - she will pick the girliest pinkiest character and utterly destroy you.

Today's voteamabob was very close, but placed Machi Koro (with the Harbour expansion) and 5 Minute Dungeon as joint winners. So as there were 7 of us and those games max out at 5 players, we played both! I played Machi Koro and managed to do a lot better than I have done with previously games of it at SWARM. I don't think I had much of a strategy to begin with, but ended up going heavily in on red cards (take money from the active player) and blue cards (gain small amounts of money from the bank on anyone's turn) - these initially gave a very low income and it took me a lot longer than everyone else to construct whatever card lets you roll 2 dice. However once I managed that and got a Tax Office card my deck suddenly started raking in money and I managed several rounds where I had about 25 coins to spend (and usually lost it all during the round to regain it on my next turn). I was left just needing to get the final victory card and just could not quite get the 30 coins needed for it, and ultimately Kyle manage to grab it before me. Still, second place is not to be sneezed at and I got to the about-to-win point first!
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Today's ten-minute takeover went old-school again, in particular with Evanescence's Bring Me To Life which [livejournal.com profile] elemnar and I spent the next few minutes trying to guess when that first came out. [livejournal.com profile] elemnar came up with Year 9/start of GCSEs, which would be around 2002 - wiki says early 2003, so that's not far off. Certainly I remember hearing it a lot on the radio on the bus to/from school.

It's not the first time we've played that game and been fairly close with our guesses. A few weeks back, on the journey back we were listening to Radio 2, which started playing Keane's Everybody's Changing of all things. I came up with mid-late 2004 via a chain of random memories... I vaguely recall it being out around the same time as KT Tunstall's Eye to the Telescope album. That I remember seeing an advert for at Three Bridges train station once. The advert I remembered because myself, [livejournal.com profile] elemnar, and a few friends (including [livejournal.com profile] hunter22?) decided to go to Brighton one day by train, and one of us spotted the poster and commented how it was someone's favourite album. And that journey I think was in the holidays between school and university, which would make it summer 2004. Talk about convoluted! Anyway, the answer is... December 2004 for the KT Tunstall album. That's later than I thought - perhaps the journey was over the Christmas break (it must have been during a holiday otherwise I would have been on campus and so wouldn't be at Three Bridges for a day trip)? But the real question is Keane, and that album (Hopes and Fears) came out May 2004, so I wasn't that far off after all! [livejournal.com profile] elemnar had guessed GCSEs/6th form which again would be 2004.

Actually, you know what - having looked through friends' old LJ posts (couldn't find anything in my own blog - but that made me wonder if anyone else had posted something) I'm fairly sure the Brighton trip was 22nd December 2004.

It's funny the random memories that get strung together sometimes.

Anyway, pasta night. We had a full house today so ended up with two games: a large game of Machi Koro (which [livejournal.com profile] elemnar played) and a smaller game of Terraforming Mars (that I played). Last time I played Terraforming Mars I managed to eke out a win thanks to amongst other things managing to not only slam a giant ice asteroid into the planet, but gain corporate sponsorship for it. This time I drew both those cards again but at different times so I didn't manage the same hilarious combo. I did however get several "slam an asteroid into the planet" cards during the game, each one bigger than the one before... but ultimately it didn't work out, and I lost by quite a few points. I think I need to concentrate more on basic terraforming and the resulting immediate victory points (which also turn into increased money), instead of trying to set up a combo involving half-a-dozen cards that all ideally need to be played in order for best effect. The final game board had very few of my markers on it as a result.
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Tonight's pasta night was a bit different - instead of digging out a board game or two, the voteamabob overwhelming selected Jackbox! So we gathered round the TV with a collection of tablets and smartphones, and gave a few games a try (they're all fairly quick games to play).

First up was Bidiots, wherein everyone scribbles stick figure art and then enters an auction to bid on the art for various buyers in the hopes of turning the most profit. And, being a Jackbox game, part-way through the option to quite literally screw another player (by forcing them to bid) appears. Jonners and I mutually screwed each other in the hope of gaining lots of points for ourselves, but also inadvertently gave each other points as the artwork we bid on turned out to be high scoring.

Next was the Trivia Murder Party, wherein we all fail at answering trivia questions, fail at not getting our adorable sackcloth ghosts killed, and then fail at escaping the haunted mansion (except for Jonners who successfully fled the mansion by getting the last question right). The trivia questions were surprisingly hard in that one and I was first to get my ghost killed - got the first question one, then choose poorly on the try-not-to-die minigame.

For a change we moved away from Jackbox and instead tried Use Your Words, a fill-in-the-blank game. This felt a bit lacking compared to the Jackbox equivalents, but it had its moments - one of the modes is complete-the-subtitle wherein we get a few seconds of a B-movie clip to subtitle.

We then returned to Jackbox for Guesspionage, wherein Jackbox have used their vast network of surveillance robot hummingbirds (or perhaps just lots of online surveys) to work out the answer to such questions as "What percentage of the world has laughed at a Garfield strip?". The active player guesses a percentage, and then all the other players guess if the true answer is higher or lower - the active player gets points for accuracy, and the others get points for guessing right.

After that it was our old favourite from last time we played Jackbox: Survive the Internet. This one has a few different rounds but they all follow a similar theme: first off everyone gets a different prompt to submit a comment (or hashtag, or review). Then all the comments get shuffled, and each player gets shown a different one and picks what post (or tweet, or location) would make that the most awkward comment. Then it's off to voting, and you get points for the best burn (with whoever answered the original prompt getting a reduced amount of pity points). I don't know what this has that Use Your Words lacks, but this feels much snappier to play and much more fun.

Finally we gave Bracketeering a try - essentially it's a showdown where we all contribute to a bracket on a topic (such as "what is the worst bedtime story to avoid giving your child nightmares") followed by a series of duels where only the best answer may win. To mix things up you get to try and predict the result of each bracket for more points.

All in all a completely bonkers evening! It reminds me of playing the original You Don't Know Jack games at the Brighton house, all those years ago.
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Pothole count: 36. At least. I know I avoided a few when I was overtaking lorries (the lefthand lane has more), but I also encountered one that was a good few car-lengths long which must count as multiple potholes. On the plus side the Highways Agency are about to start resurfacing chunks of the A27, but on the minus side that means nightly diversions along the A259. Eh, that can't be worse for potholes.

Tonight's game of choice was Apples to Apples, which the voteamabob throws up every once in a while. In theory it's a fairly civilized game... in practice, it all depends on what the cards throw up and what everyone is happy with. We do have a house rule for this (and Cards Against Humanity) that you can discard and redraw cards that you find too offensive, and it seems like we've gotten quite good at judging what level of insanity different people in the pasta night group are comfortable with. In this group we usually end up trending towards crazy and surreal humour instead of becoming crude/offensive - after all, why pick a really offensive thing-card when "YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS" is an option?

And sometimes the cards just end up being plain weird. This collection appeared on one of Matt's turns, and as he read out each card he commented that they were forming a very strange story...



We ended up playing beyond the official 6-card winning threshold for our group size and kept going for an hour or so of total play time - the winner was I think Jonners with Beth second (or was it the other way round - I'm not sure?), while myself and Sarah were joint third.
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Potholes encountered on the A27 between Chichester and Bedhampton: 33. Yes, I counted them (the ones I drove over/through at least) - well, there's not much else to do and I'm convinced they're getting worse daily, let alone weekly. I'd swear that on the way to pasta night I found potholes that weren't there two days ago...

Anyway, didn't I used to update a blog here or something? Somehow it's been over a month since the last proper update. I keep doing blog-worthy things and going to blog-worthy places while just never getting round to actually typing up any of the drafts I start writing in my head. But I'm back from pasta night, in front of the computer, and [livejournal.com profile] talismancer has updated more recently than me... so here's a semi-random pasta night post!

Not sure what I'll do with other older half-written posts - there's a few that I ought to complete and will probably backdate to whenever the events therein occurred.

We were a bit thin on the ground tonight because of various reasons, so tonight we only had one game going: Colt Express, as being one of the few games we had that tops out at 6 players (Forbidden Desert was suggested, but vetoed as it officially tops out at 5 and probably isn't balanced for 6). With 6 bandits running up and down the train there was much chaos and thwarting of plans, not to mention an angry sheriff and rebellious passengers. I played Belle who has the special ability to not get shot or punched if there's another bandit that could be targeted (and just now, typing this sentence I've realised that I completely forgot that for the final round and really should have done the complete opposite of what I did - should have stayed in the crowd instead of trying to get out of punching range. That probably cost me the win in the second game).

We played two games of it. In the first round Matt stormed ahead with a very successful tactic of heading for the carriage full of jewels while leaving everyone else to squabble over the rear couple of carriages, then continuing to the end to try for the briefcases. Beth on the other hand (playing as the Ghost, who gets to play their first action card face-down) went for maximum chaos and scuppered several plans. The second round became more hilarious - Matt and I both went on top and headed for the front of the train. I tried to head down and discovered the sheriff, who opened fire, forcing me back to the roof. The sheriff then got moved by someone else and Matt headed down, collected the briefcase, returned to the top... and I punched him to force him to drop the briefcase, collected it, and then legged it towards the rear of the train. However it was not to last - the end-of-round action moved all players to the top of the rear carriage, I made the mistake of moving instead of staying put, and Jonners very successfully second-guessed my actions and managed to swipe the briefcase through persuading everyone else to move the sheriff to his advantage. Cheeky!

It's a game that requires decent visualisation skills - to really succeed at it, you have to keep track of which visible actions have been played, where all the players (and sheriff) could end up, and what they could actually do (as while you have to decide what action you will take in the card-playing/programming phase, you get to pick the direction/parameters of the action while resolving it. So someone playing a move action gets to pick the direction after all cards have been chosen). Each round involves everyone going round about 4 times to select an action, and to mix things up some turns have the actions played face-down so you have to guess what the players might do. I find I often lost track by the final turn though as long as you can keep track of a few players it's usually possible to not lose all your loot.

Pasta night

Jan. 8th, 2018 11:22 pm
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After Christmas and New Year it was finally time for Pasta Night again! Today (well, a couple of weeks ago now that I finally write this - this post is backdated to Pasta Night) was the day of new games - one group (Beth and Jonners?) brought Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle and I brought RYŪ (picked up from The Works as it looked interesting and was on offer). The Harry Potter game from what I could tell was a co-op game playing the role of the heroes making their way through Hogwarts and trying not to get splatted by various death eaters. It seemed to result in a hilarious epic fail somewhere around book 5, and is definitely one I want to have a try at.

Today however I gave RYŪ a go, along with Jonners, Matt and Louise. The tl;dr summary of it is that a dragon is coming! This is a Good Thing as it's a friendly dragon, so each of the five tribes is going to build a dragon of their own to welcome the dragon. They all have a different idea of what a dragon looks like: one tribe has a sea serpent, another a tree dragon, the third some sort of jetpack dragon, the amazon tribe a cool-looking dragon skyship... and the lizards are building a swap dragon made out of hot-air balloons. The mechanic boils down to acquiring resource cubes to be able to buy segments of your dragon, with a side order of collecting merchant/smuggler tokens to spend to help acquire resource cubes. The twist is that the main way to get cubes is by exploring a player island which results in both you and that player gaining resource cubes. Oh, and if the white cube is drawn then there's immediately a sealed auction where the winning bidder gets to immediately build their dragon.

It was something of an odd game - Jonners got a quick lead thanks to aggressively bidding in auctions for the first few dragon pieces, then slowed down a bit as the others equalled or outbid him (if there's a tie then no-one gets a dragon segment). I think we all got up to 4 dragon pieces and were just trying to get the last few cubes needed - the final segment is more expensive to construct. As it happened Jonners got their first. I think I would have been a turn or two behind him, and I can't remember how close Matt or Louise were. Definitely a game to play again now that we've got a better understanding of the rules.

After that since the Hogwarts battle was still ongoing Jonners dug out yet another new game in the form of Camel Cup. This is a deceptively complex game involving betting on a camel race - oh, it looks nice and easy with a simple mechanic, except the trick is that the camels can form stacks and when a camel move it takes any camels on top with it. The maximum move of a camel is only 3, but with the stacking it's quite possible for a trailing camel to gain half-a-dozen or so places overall and overtake the whole lot. Working out the probabilities of which camel to bet on when is very complicated, and while one can defer the decision by rolling the dice to move a camel that both advances towards the end of the round (each camel moves once per leg and once all camels have moved the per-leg bets are resolved) and gives the next player more information to use to decide. Generally it quickly becomes clear which camels can't win the leg, but working out which of the remainder is most likely to win is another matter entirely...
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I've taken to listening to the radio on journeys to and from pasta night - heading there I usually get to listen to Radio 1's Ten Minute Takeover somewhere around Chichester, and until recently my soundtrack for the return journey was the Huw Stephens show. Normally that's a mix of pop and rock, but a while back Huw Stephens picked something a bit more atmospheric...


Forest Swords - Congregate (official visual)

Now traffic is normally very light on the trip back from Jonners' given the late hour of the evening, but on that night the roads were unusually clear. It was rather eerie listening to that as I passed Portsmouth at 11pm, wondering where all the other cars were.

Advent Tea update:

Detox (tastes... interesting, couldn't work out what was in it)
Lemon Drizzle green tea (rather sweet, I think I prefer the non-Drizzle variant)
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Pasta night was replaced with Christmas night yesterday - it was the only Monday before Christmas that we were all around on! I say Christmas night, but the theme was actually cheese night with a collection of finger foods, two cheese fondue things, and a Christmas tree shaped cheese and Marmite straw tear'n'share thing. Om nom nom...

We also had a white elephant gift exchange. Our rules were that each gift could be stolen three times - on the third steal it became locked and the lucky winner got to keep it. We had an interesting collection, including a couple of kids games (they were very popular), a glow-in-the-dark moustache, a tin of baked beans (blame Beth for that), a literal white elephant plushie ([livejournal.com profile] elemnar's contribution) and I failed to hold onto a chocolate duck and instead "won" a copy of Damon Hill's autobiography.

And since it's advent, myself and [livejournal.com profile] elemnar have also started on each other's advent calendar. I can now reveal that hers consists at least partially of interesting teas from Arundel's Tea and Biscuit Club and Portsmouth's All About Tea. Mine also contains teas, at least one chocolate coin, and a bizarre plastic half-a-snowball with wheels and a surprised face. So far I've enjoyed:

English Breakfast tea
Turkish Apple tea (puts me in mind of Graze's toffee apple snack)
Smoky Lapsang tea
Strawberry and Cranberry infusion
Garden mint infusion

I wonder what tomorrow's pocket contains?

Stone Age

Nov. 27th, 2017 11:24 pm
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Today's game was Stone Age which I've played a few times now - we're playing that almost as often as Ticket to Ride these days (in fact those of us who weren't playing Stone Age did indeed play Ticket to Ride). It's a very mathematical game - the basic mechanic is deploying workers to gather resources to buy victory points, but there's a lot of thought involved in working out the best way to maximise your potential victory points. The complication comes both because the resources are luck-based (each additional worker improves your chance of getting a resource), and because a lot of points aren't calculated until game end and are multipliers on your current victory point items. Paddy, for example, got an additional 35 victory points at the end as multipliers on built huts, while I gained 64 from collecting a complete set of gifts of civilisations. And some items multiply spectacularly - I tend to go for tools, as with the right cards they both act as bonuses to resource gathering and give substantial amounts of points at the end.

And then just occasionally the dice are on your side, with once particularly productive roll allowing me to buy a hut with 7 gold (worth 6 each) for a total of 42 points - the highest single scoring item in the game. That took me from 4th to 3rd place overall - unlike in previous games, I didn't do particularly well on any of the endgame multipliers and acquired very few points during the game. Paddy and Jonners have wised up to my like of tools and blocked me from getting many of them!

May 2025

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