Joe arrived, looked over the potential choices we'd placed on the table, and instantly plumped for Ra. We soon began and I thought I'd blown this in the first round, when I was already far behind when it came to monuments. Sam had a very strong round and looked good for the win right from the start.
Luck fell into my lap on the last round, however, when I managed to get a complete set of five civilisation tiles for fifteen points. Joe ended round three by pulling tiles from the bag, hoping for a jackpot, but instead found nothing but disasters and plagues.
Sam 60
Andrew 43
Joe 29
Joe rued his choice, saying that he usually won against the computer, but neither Sam nor I are computers as I think we proved this evening.
Next up came Alhambra. By now, Sam was ploughing through his high-alcohol ale and the whiskey was out so we started the game in bullish mood, setting up in the style of football hooligans who had, for some reason, given up an evening of attacking Chelsea fans in favour of Dirk Henn's finest. And this is where the title for the blog comes from.
Alhambra is a cruel mistress and it's not much kinder as a card game either. I constantly found myself out of sync with the cards and while Sam and Joe were picking stuff up for exact money, I was floundering. Changing our comedy voices from hooligans to Jewish mothers a la Seinfeld didn't help matters. Joe lead right from round one, and Sam looked like he might stage a late attack, it never appeared and my wall kept things respectable.
Joe 151
Sam 139
Andrew 133
By now we're really quite drunk, so there was no chance of going home without squeezing in another game before the day was done. Sam decided on a snack of pre-cooked pasta eaten out of a mug and after a little debate Coup was brought to the table as a nightcap.
Let me tell you that drunk Coup is a very different game. Decisions about bluffing that take nanoseconds when sober suddenly take about half a minute of baffled consideration, which is a bit of a giveaway. As such, in the first game, we were all quickly down to one card each before we knew it and it wasn't long until the game played itself out.
1. Andrew
2. Joe
3. Sam
The next two games were much that same: worst liar loses. Joe found that being the first one to lose a card attracted further attacks and he was out quickly both times. It turns out that Sam is Best Liar.
1. Sam
2. Andrew
3. Joe
1. Sam
2. Andrew
3. Joe
And we stumbled away, into the night which somehow didn't seem as cold as it did before. Probably due to the excitement of playing five games in an evening, I expect, and nothing to do with the alcohol spinning round our systems.
Sam leaps up to the top of the form table, although how much he'll remember about how he got there is anyone's guess.
| Points | ||||||
| Sam | 1 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 8 |
| Steve | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 10 |
| Andrew | 2 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 10 |
| Hannah | 4 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 11 |
| Anja | 4 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 11 |
| Joe | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 12 |
| Adam | 2 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 13 |
| Will | 1 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 5 | 14 |
| Jon | 3 | 5 | 1 | 5 | 5 | 19 |
| Quentin | 1 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 21 |
A delightful evening, chaps, thanks Sam for excellent hosting skills, and Andrew for excellent posting skills.
ReplyDeleteQuite amazing that we squeezed in all those games considering we didn't start til 9-ish.
Wanna play Castles of Burgundy NOW! Okay not now... Also wanna play Canal Mania. And Hanabi!
And Maharaja, and a Castle for all Seasons...
ReplyDeleteAndrew's right, I can't remember how I won those last two games, bar a vague recollection of people challenging me when I had what I said I had. Canny play on my part! I do remember getting annoyed with Joe for knocking me out with "too much relish". Sorry Joe. And getting the giggles when Andrew said "I fahking lav Dirk Henn". It was one of those nights that transcended the sum of its parts - beyond games, beyond players and into the realms of middle-aged men getting drunk.
Just want to run Scripts and Scribes past people because though I concur with Andrew that it's not Biblios (-what is?) I did quite like it.
OK so like Biblios you have 5 resources (quills, manuscripts, some other stuff) and you have the variable dice, but with S+S your strength in these resources is represented on a little board, and as you gain strength you move up the various tracks, which at certain points reward you with gold.
On your turn you roll all the dice - there's five resource dice, one church dice, an abbot dice (an extra track for getting gold and/or triggering game end) and a gold dice. You take ONE type of dice for yourself and take the action - either moving up the resource or abbot tracks, adjusting resource values or taking gold - and then (echoing the face-up cards in Biblios) hand the dice to your left. The player who now has the dice makes their choice, takes the action, and passes the remaining dice to their left, and so on until all the dice are used up.
There are three exceptions to the standard turn above and they all come from the gold die, which can trigger an auction for gold (which involves losing your presence on a research track if you win) or an auction for using ALL the dice yourself (potentially very valuable) or the possibility of re-rolling dice, which costs you gold.
The game end is all about gold so you can feasibly not finish first in any resource and still win. The resource dice values score x3 in gold for first place and x1 for second place.
So it's a bit more complicated that Biblios, but I think it has that same quality of being very hard to predict. I liked it. And because I was so drunk I can barely remember getting up in the night to see to (little) Joe!
I think what I was trying to do was a bit of Millionaire-style 'final answer?' business to shake off your challenge, Sam - but I was too drunk to realise I didn't need to because I did have the card . . .
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