Crocodile Tears

Never, ever, give Scrabblette Jagermeister after 9pm. Particularly if you've just soundly flogged her at Cleopatra and the Society of Architects and she's in one of those bouncy, dangerously physical moods. With the kid to cheer her on, and armed with an obelisk, she can be dangerous.

Anyway... I got home this evening and Cleopatra was on the coffee table. Not the actual gorgeous Queen of the Nile, the game. Which is fortunate because she's been dead a long time. Scrabblette thought it looked interesting and had taken it out to read the rules. As she likes abstracts and word games, a Days of Wonder title was maybe not really her style, but as the kid can play it we decided to give it a go. Scrabblette learns much better by reading than by listening so she quickly read the rules while I organised the bits. There's a lot of bits in this game.

I explained to Scrabblette about the tricks you can do with the mosaic and the scribe, and sure enough that's what she did - she used the scribe to build a very nice sanctuary. I myself built two very nice sanctuaries but I had to buy two mosaic tiles at a time to do it - very nice combos which earned me more than 15 talents each while giving me a net decrease in corruption. The kid was playing totally wild as always and was looking like he would earn the most corruption easily. He understands the rules of games, but almost always chooses a really bad strategy.

In this case his really bad strategy got him eaten by crocodiles. At least it wasn't me. He would have had 50 talents, compared to Scrabblette's 51 and my 70. Scrabblette then threatened to string up a rope between the obelisks and hang me from it. In fact, Scrabblette was driven to tears by my habit of merciless wins, but they were only crocodile tears.

Boom boom.

BTW, if you notice that the quality of writing of this blog changes, it may be the case that Scrabblette and the kid and my dog have quietly murdered me and continue to post so as to not arouse suspicions. If I stop being faintly amusing and slightly sarcastic, look for these other signs:

• Extraordinarily good writing, enormous vocabulary and hyperlinks to The New Yorker - Scrabblette is writing my blog.
• Extremely bad spelling, smilies and hyperlinks to MMORPGs - the kid is writing my blog.
• Extremely bad breath, smelly tennis balls and hair everywhere - my dog is writing my blog.

In other news, when I post a story about my mother dying, it's not a joke. She's extremely ill with Lou Gehrig's disease which you do not recover from. I can't say she made me a gamer, but she made me a reader and I still remember the first time I beat her at Scrabble. She is at the stage in the disease where the paralysis of the throat could cause her to suffocate any day. But for the rest of us, life goes on.

To Scrabblette's family and friends who read this blog - has she always had a tendency towards violence? She is alive and well and just because she's not writing to you doesn't mean I have her tied up in the bed room. Though I might, at times. She is well looked after and well loved by all of us here. She gives us Schmackos every day and we lick her fingers to thank her.

Fed to the Crocodiles

We had a good session at BookRealm last night - Shingo visited all the way from Israel, and we played 3 different games that I really like. We started with China which I have owned for about a week. After my disastrous attempt to win using advisors at ConVic, I decided to try to win using houses. Of course, I was soundly beaten by CyberKev who used the advisor strategy. One day I will figure that game out.

Then Walter arrived and RealmKeeper sat out while the rest of us played Cleopatra. We played this last week and had a good time, so this week we knew what we were doing a bit better. There wasn't a lot of corruption being taken - people seemed to be more cautious about the number of cards they took into their hands. I had a plan to spend up big and get enough talents to be contending for the win, then try to minimise my corruption intake towards the end of the game. However once I had 40-something talents the game ended very quickly anyway. I had 11 corruption and 54 talents (including unused merchants). Sadly I had the most corruption, being even nastier than Walter who had 10. I was fed to the crocodiles, and CyberKev won the game with 41 talents. If I hadn't had 2 tainted wood cards in my hand at the end of the game, I would have won by a long way. Bugger.

We closed up with Bazaar. I was tired and couldn't focus, I don't know what other people's excuses were. Somehow I managed to win despite being unable to formulate the devious plans I remember making last time I played.

Overall, an excellent night's gaming. I'd happily play all of those games again tonight.

July in Review

Well, what a good month of gaming has just been completed! I recorded 83 plays, again my second-highest total ever. Nacht der Magier was 10 of those because it is such a cool game and I only bought it at the beginning of the month. There were also the many many games played at ConVic4 early in the month. It looks like I won't be writing any more reviews from there, it was all too long ago.

Apart from ConVic4 and my gaming birthday party, gaming highlights of the month were:
* two Tuesday night gaming sessions with my sister and her kids. I am trying to make a new tradition of playing games with the kids on Tuesday nights.
* first play of Cleopatra and the Society of Architects at BookRealm
* the game of Mystery of the Abbey at GWAN
* my solo play of Runebound 2e with the Scepter of Kyros expansion where you have to fight a horde of giants
* new games acquired including Hive, I'm The Boss, Hare and Tortoise, Saboteur, Cleopatra, Xactika, China, Balloon Cup...
* my first ever trade - I sent Alhambra to Lindsay Scholle and he sent me Escape From Atlantis which at least has a chance of being played.

Also, what does this mean? I'm not sure yet.