Deep Space Nein

With all the gaming over the last few days there was a chance of becoming jaded. Indeed Adam admitted that 12 and a half hours of the weekend had obliged him to take Monday night off. But thankfully by Tuesday he was back, chomping at the bit. Sadly Steve and Anja were late withdrawals but that still left Adam, Andrew, Joe and me (Sam) sat in my kitchen pondering our first move.


Or our second, actually, as while Adam ate his chips the three of us indulged in a game of Biblios, the game where you discard resource cards to pick up gold in order to buy resource cards. It is kind of counter-intuitive and for our second game (Joe's first) we still didn't really have a clue what the best strategy was. I was trying to collect just two resource colours, but whether that was decisive in my victory only the Lord knows. I think we were all under the impression we'd done badly, but I'd done less badly than the others. It's that type of game.

Sam 9
Andrew 7
Joe 2

That 20 minute warm-up back in the box, and Adam's chips making their way safely along various intestinal tracts, we moved on the the first big (ish) game of the evening: Hab and Gut. This had gone down well last night and Adam was eager to try it. We all sat stunned at his capacity to take in the two racks of secret cards without moving his head from side to side like human beings do. He merely let his eyes twitch, lizard style, as the resource markers trundled up and down the value tracks. Maybe Tom Cruise is right after all.

Hab and Gut feels like a gem; quite a find by Joe. A little like High Society, the player who donates the least cash to the church is out of the running, even if they're the richest, which put paid to Andrew on this occasion. I managed to wangle first place due to my unrelenting passion for rubber and coffee:

Sam 1130
Joe 670
Adam 580
Andrew OUT!

German stock-market engineering out of the way, we decided to finish the night with Adam's choice of Galaxy Truckers. This game of puzzle-solving against the clock, with a smidgen of strategy and a veritable cheese wheel of luck hasn't been out of the box in a while, but we were familiar enough with it - barring Adam's aliens-in-round-one faux pas - to start constructing our ships as if we'd been in space all along, adding our battery packs to our lasers in the much the same way they do at NASA, I imagine.

Adam made the early running and was in a strong position in round two. Then in round three, despite building the most ramshackle spaceship on show I hit a lucky streak a mile wide: shunted to the front in space I picked up a series of charitable cards and collected about twenty credits and 7 or 8 bits of cargo. Joe then sped past me in time to take all the crappy cards before I hit another slab of jarlsberg on the last card (open space) when I powered back into the lead and took the spawniest victory since... probably the last time we played Galaxy Truckers:

Sam 98
Adam 64
Andrew 41
Joe 30

So another fine night comes to end with Adam and I tied on the leaderboard as Joe and Andrew drop below Steve and Hannah. But it's tight.

						Points
Sam	1	1	1	3	3	9
Adam	2	3	1	1	2	9
Hannah	2	1	2	3	2	10
Steve	1	2	1	2	5	11
Joe	4	2	3	1	1	11
Andrew	3	4	2	2	2	13
Anja	2	2	1	4	5	14