Tuesday 18 September 2012

Their hands met in a crowded tile bag

The latest stage of Project Arthur (turning Sally from games widow to games enthusiast via subtle NLP, opportunism and high-pitched wheedling) took place on Friday. Sally was keen - all things being relative - to play Biblios, but in an effort to expand her gaming horizons I set up Ingenius, the abstract game of making colours go next to other colours the same colour.

Initially able to contain her enthusiasm, Sally grew into the game and indeed seemed to recollect playing it before - something I don't recall myself, but then my retention is fairly flimsy.


Something we both struggled with was the scoring - do you score the number of symbols in each string, or the number of connections between them? I think it's the latter, but either way I kept staring at the rules like an uncomprehending dolt, something that still resonates today.

In our game Sally made the fatal error of letting one of her colours (green) fall way behind the others, and it was the greens I sought to cut off in order to preserve my win. But I made the even-more-fatal-error of not realizing she'd snuck it forward just enough to go past my own green marker - hence I was hoist by my own petard as Sally won with a low score of 11 Green to my 9.

I don't think it was the game to turn Sally but it didn't put her off either. Games are definitely a source of fun for her, just a slightly different type of fun (see her ironic post title above)...

2 comments:

  1. I don't think I'll ever get Jacquie into games. TTR was ok but RTTA nearly ended our marriage........

    In other news I had Bracknell James over at my house last night for a spot of games. We played a couple of games of Nile which I won. Although to be fair the first one was a gimme as he had misremembered the scoring and thought you just had to get the lowest score. Which can be a hindrance if you are actually trying to get the best score against all categories.

    We finished the night with old favourite Alhambra where my almost complete wall of 21 and domination of the smaller scoring buildings saw me rack a score of 152. I'm not sure if that is a record though.

    ReplyDelete
  2. 152 sounds pretty impressive even for 2 players. Nice one!

    ReplyDelete