by Tony Boydell
If there ain’t no gamesin your neighborhood
Who ya gonna call?
GAME-BATESONS!
If you need your fix
and it don't look good
Who ya gonna call?
GAME-BATESONS!
I ain't ‘fraid o’ no games
I ain't ‘fraid o’ no games
I was at a very loose end on Wednesday and, on the off-chance, sent a brief begging email to Ben & Becky. Luckily, the former had sufficient portable Ale to see him through a session and the latter got off swinging her enormous carillons early enough to come and play with me.
Fit the First: Sumeria
A devious little filler with the slightest of rules sets but a high-calorie implementation of play. Your options are straightforward: put a piece ON the board somewhere, take a piece OFF the board from somewhere OR move a piece along a chain of pieces to the first empty space...somewhere. After any of these actions, you are required to adjust the order of some area tiles. At the end of a round (3 turns), the top three positioned area tiles score you chits - chits are scored pyramidically at game end. 29-29-less than 29, with me winning on tie-break.
Fit the Second: Agricola
Unsurprisingly one of the main draws of this evenings 'Meeple Booty Call', my copy of Uwe's (and the World's) finest creation simply HAD to come out of it's hibernation. Oddly, having spent a few days sleeving all of the cards a couple of years ago, the plastic protectives had become sweatily-sticky and less shuffle-able than I'd have expected: that's CHEAP carto-condoms for you *sad face*. Now I'll have to de-bag the buggers...
Still, this minor gripe aside, we pressed on unperturbed: Ben cheekily boasting a cost-reducing combo that meant the resource-eating food-providing Majors set him back but 1 item, while I opened up with the unassuming wood carver (1 wood discount on everything). The drill is well known and, as often happens with a Major-based/card heavy focus, Ben neglected the 'farmdamentals' of his small holding and hobbled in a disappointing third on 28 with Becky pipping him on 29 (always a good result for Mrs B) and my own monstrous 'normality' of a layout netting a bowel-puncturing 44. I thought I'd 'sneaked' the win in this one, but 44 isn't so much a 'sneak' as a full page advert in Variety with television tie-in and a 'Blimp over the City'.
Fit the Third: Snowdonia
Becky is more admiring of this than Ben who, like a scratched vinyl LP, gets stuck on the same complaint: 'There is no good second action for the last player on Round 1'. This is patent tosh, bunkum and horse-water of the most obvious and refutable kidney - you may not have the action(s) you WANT, but there's always plenty to do! Anyway, Ben set forth on a Surveyor-based stratagem of station building and wandering through the scenery (with accompanying, appropriate contract cards) for a fine 103 point finish. Becky struggled a little more in competition with me for track building, but excavated like a good 'un (despite a game beset with fog and rain) for a mid-90s finish (a personal best, I believe, patronisingly). For myself, nipping in first for the 9VP train and four pieces of track (with Contract cards I could capitalize on) lead to 109 of your finest veeps and making it 3 for 3 in this evenings agendum.
Fit the Fourth: Braggart
Those familiar with the exploits of the Ross-on-Wye boardgamers will know how much we adore Kyle's colourful and hilarious end-of-the-nighter. It never fails to amuse and entertain and is deserving of a place in everyone's collection! The high- (and low-) light of tonight's boasting nonsense was my very own:
Simon the Lonely Ogre is our North, our South, our East and West, our working week and our Sunday rest, our noon, our midnight, our talk, our song; we thought that Simon would last for ever: we were wrong.
The cries and howls of dismay that emanated from the brace of Batesons was deafening - threatening the glasswork and the wakening of the Boydell young! Ultimately (and fittingly, I suppose), this bragging ruse failed to elevate me from last place where I should be bloody-well-ashamed-of-myself.
For an opportunistic punt, this turned out to be a pleasing evening of brainwork.