'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

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).

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.

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.

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.

We were nattering at pasta night and 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. 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 elemnar! Go us!

Discussing Smash Bros at pasta night...

Kyle: ...so you know wavedashing?
elemnar: No, I just know how to use Jigglypuff.
Kyle: O_O

Ph34r 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!

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.

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 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.

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)

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!