Wednesday 19 July 2017

A very happy non birthday

This week our co-host, Adam, was the almost-birthday boy and he'd asked Sam to bring A Feast For Odin as his yearly GNN treat. Sam did so, but Adam found little in the way of fellow gamers who wanted to join him.

Initially, there were eight of us. Adam, Hannah, Katy, Matt, Joe, Sam, Martin and me. With Ian expected later, we hesitated over anything too involved. Martin and Sam went for a short two-player game 13 Minutes, while the rest of us had a rip-roaring six-player game of Santo Domingo.

After a brief explanation of the very few rules to Adam and Hannah, we were off. My brilliant opening move was slightly ruined by it also being Katy's brilliant opening move: trading goods for points. Between us we’d lowered the exchange rate.


It's a cunning game, taking the theme of getting stuff to get other stuff and giving it an element of bluffing. I think we all said afterwards how much we liked it, with Joe perhaps enjoying it most.

Joe 30
Matt 29
Katy 23
Andrew 21
Adam 20
Hannah 14

As for 13Minutes, it was a convincing win for Martin, although Sam said the real victory was avoiding nuclear war.

Martin 10
Sam 4

So, as an eight, we decided to honour the newly crowned Spiel des Jahres, Kingdomino, with two consecutive games. We didn't play the same tiles - unfortunately that idea didn't occur to us until halfway through, but there was a tacit agreement that the two games were in competition.


It was Adam's first game and, despite my terrible position in clear last, I offered the birthday boy no sympathy when my last move was to take a piece I couldn't place just to stop Adam.


Joe 64
Martin 54
Adam 51
Andrew 31

On the big table it ended:


Sam 55
Matt 47
Katy 46
Hannah 36

Which makes Joe the best and me the worst. We ended with a spirited discussion about the pronunciation of Kingdomino. Was it "King Domino" or was it with the emphasis on the penultimate syllable, as if the English word Kingdom had taken the Italian suffix of -ino meaning "small" which would certainly be apt. Perhaps we will never know.

Ian was sure to arrive soon, so five of us chose Ticket To Ride: Pennsylvania map for our evening's entertainment while the other three planned to get through a quick game of Honshu before Ian got here.

As it was, though, Ian arrived while the rules to Honshu were being explained, so he had no choice but to join them, since TtR wouldn't expand to six.

Ticket To Ride is famous as a gateway game, but any sign of convivial competition were put to one side in a tense game. The map we chose had the added tactic of picking up shares in train companies, with end-of-game bonuses for those with most shares in certain companies.


Katy began in high spirits. Perhaps too high as both I and Hannah mocked her gleeful delight. This prompted a spell of silence from the good doctor. She later insisted she wasn't sulking, but wanted to see if she could play a game without speaking for five minutes. And she could. In fact, she lasted for seven minutes, beating her previous record of five minutes that she'd set two minutes previously.

Adam's usual tactic of collecting cards until you have half the deck in your hand was used to good effect, as he avoided time consuming short links and built expansively, picking up low scoring but unpopular shares as he did.

Katy went big on route cards. Alas, too big, since she picked up two more just before I noticed out loud that Adam could end the game in a few moves.

At this point everyone panicked. Well, I did. There was no way to complete both my high scoring routes in time, despite Hannah's noble tactic of building the link that would end the game if Adam had built it. Katy ended with -30 points. Meanwhile, Joe and I, the two early trailblazers, ended back near the caboose.


Adam 166
Hannah 122
Katy 118
Andrew 99
Joe 94

As for Honshu, it expanded across Adam & Hannah’s blue coffee table, until Ian’s and Sam’s cities were seperated by a wafer-thin corridor.


Martin 63
Sam 60
Ian 58
Matt 52

Then they played Polterfass, the game of passive aggressive beer distribution. I know little about this game, except for Martin getting a worst-case scenario when he settled on supplying 26 barrels of beer and his three opponents ordered 9, 9 and 8, leaving him with nothing.

Matt 75
Martin 61
Ian 45
Sam 36

By now we were together again. We chose 6nimmt as the finale of this week’s event. Hannah went to bed, so the remaining eight stood around the table, cursing every step of our zombie-laden way.


Sam went for a high early card in rounds two and three and got caught out both times. Ian commented that he thought it was seibennimmt when he ended up taking a row. And one round had a gap of about seventy between the two available places, offering a range of equally bad strategies. I went Dirk for one of my choices in round one, and I regretted it. Stupid Dirk.

Katy 26
Martin 45
Ian 52
Adam 55
Sam 57
Matt 63
Joe 72
Andrew 79

And so the evening ended, with the promise of thunderstorms in the air.

Thanks all. It was a good one! And happy birthday, Adam.

6 comments:

  1. Sam is getting to be a good judge of my taste, predicting correctly that I wouldn't hate Honshu but neither would I rush out to buy it. The building is much more interesting than the 'trick taking', even more so if we'd noticed a rules misapprehension - you can tuck new cards under as well as overlaying them.

    I love Polterfass.

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  2. Ticket to Ride! Wow it's been a long time. And wow I played badly. It was brutal.

    I enjoy Santo Domingo a lot, I'd like to try the 'winter' side next. Imagine how quick it will be when we play a game and no one needs to learn the rules!

    How does 13 Minutes work then?

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    1. I'm still not entirely sure how it works, but the rules are someone plays a card and if it's a card that belongs to your side of the cold war, you get to take the action if your opponent played it, before they add cubes to the 'battlegrounds' - the cards on the table. If you play a card if your own you can either take the action, or add the cubes.

      Whenever you add cubes the battleground slides across the table towards you, as the balance of power tilts in your favour. And you want to end in control of the most battlegrounds basically.

      I love Polterfass too, though I've come a distant last both times I've played it. I like Honshu but agree with Martin; it's not a trick-taking game by any stretch.

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  3. Yes I think the one play of Honshu I had with Katy and Ian we felt the trick-taking was a little flabby.

    13 Minutes sounds like it has the same Twilight Struggle influence as 13 Days and The Cousins War...

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    Replies
    1. It's 13 Days: the microgame. Possibly an abstraction too far...

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    2. Yes the abstraction actually reminded me of King of Siam. Only - on the first play, to be fair - it didn't seem as interesting.

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