The Festival of Lights

The most recent Gathering of Friendless coincided with Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights. This festival commemorates the legendary time when Rama returned to Ayodhya after helping Vishwamitra destroy the demons of the Dandaka-van and demolishing Ravana's army at Mithila using the power of the Brahm-astra. You must remember that. Anyway, it's something like a Hindu Christmas, and with our household being as Hindu as it is Christian (i.e. not at all), we lit some candles and got some Indian sweets and celebrated Diwali. That makes sense, doesn't it?

So the subtitle of the Gathering of Friendless episode was "The Festival of Lights". As the only "light" games I could think of were Nacht der Magier, which only takes 4 players and is played in the dark anyway; and Khet which is a 2 player game; we completely ignored the light theme.

We started with a two-team game of Bamboleo while waiting to see who might arrive. CyberKev made a mathematical mistake and took his team down very efficiently, leaving the team of Aaron, Hubertus and John to win 21 points to -1.

We'd all played Trans(Europa|America) but only a few of us had played the Vexation expansion, so we then played Vexation with TransEuropa. When I read the rules of Vexation I was sure I'd hate it - why take a great game and make it malicious? - but it's not malicious at all, it just has blocking. That I can cope with. Most of us didn't get the hang of the expansion at all, with the game only lasting two rounds, with Aaron on 12, me on 10, and nobody else above 1. Even Scrabblette, who is very good at the Trans games, did very badly.

We progressed to one of CyberKev's favourites, Frank's Zoo, which apparently takes up to seven players. There were six of us, and it seemed to me that the game was significantly weaker with six than with four. It wasn't likely that there was a pair of anything in someone's hand, and I found it hard to judge what might be a good play. Scores were very even for the whole game, with Scrabblette eventually winning on 24 and last place being up to 15.

We then played something we'd been hoping to play for months - Mystery of the Abbey. This is one of the four games I rate a 10 (Scrabble, Trias and Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation), and I don't often play it. CyberKev argues that it's too chaotic and the card-passing takes away from the deductive aspect; but I say that if the card-passing has much of an effect you're not very good at the deduction. Last time we played this at Critical Mass I stole the win from Scrabblette so there was some tension at our end of the table - she determined not to let it happen again, me determined to be even more cunning this time.

Very early in the game we discovered that all of the Fathers were in people's hands, so they didn't do it. There weren't many clear clues for a while then until the second round when the event at Mass was that novices were confined to their chambers. For this event each player places a novice in front of their cellula. Scrabblette didn't have one, so there were 5 novices on the board. A few people asked questions about the other novices and I realised that with 5 on the board, one in my hand, one in Aaron's hand, and none with anybody else, that there were two missing. There was one card in the Parlatorium, so the killer must be a novice. A good deduction I thought, but way too obvious and I was sure everybody saw it.

CyberKev immediately went to the Capitulum and revealed that the killer was a novice. I was trying to figure out how I could figure out which novice. I tried to get around to see as many of the face-down cards as I could in the round, but only managed to get to two of them, one of which I knew about already. That left 4 novices I hadn't seen. Then Scrabblette went to the Capitulum and revealed that the killer was a brother. HUH?

Scrabblette had figured out that there were 8 novices in play, so therefore the killer couldn't be a novice. Except that there are 9 novices. One of those completely stupid screw-ups that happen from time to time. But the best part was, at the second mass she was protecting her brother cards and so passed me a novice - the one from the Parlatorium. That narrowed it down to three! I was first player in the third round and hot-footed it to the Capitulum! I wasn't really clear who the killer was, but I had a suspicion that Hubertus had novice Guy, and I knew which of the other two novices Aaron didn't have... so I guessed that was the guy. Further questions between other players while I was on my way only served to confirm my guess, and when I arrived at the Capitulum I accused the correct killer.

In the post-game analysis, I think it was the novice in my hand that saved me. Nobody knew who he was, and Scrabblette, who was definitely smart enough to Figure These Things Out, was off on the wild goose chase with the brothers. Nobody else quite cottoned on that my novice was the last one who wasn't the killer, and maybe they hadn't seen the novice cards outside the cellula in the second round either. In the end, it was an honest victory to me, which is satisfying but not as much fun as stealing a win from somebody else.

The final game for the evening was Unspeakable Words which is becoming a comfortable favourite, even though we do keep discovering new rules. It's a quick and easy word game, and despite the die hating me I always enjoy it. As often happens, Scrabblette thrashed us.

My stats program tells me that this day was my best day of gaming ever. Here's hoping we can continue in that vein!

By The Time You Read This, I May Be Dead

Dear Fellow Gamers,

By the time you read this I may be dead. I fear that someone is planning to take my life. I fear that someone is Scrabblette.

We played St Petersburg earlier this evening - Scrabblette, the kid, and I. In the last week Scrabblette has defeated me at Taj Mahal and Ingenious, whilst I have defeated her at Mystery of the Abbey, Goa and Blokus Duo. She also won Techno Witches when we played against sister and BIL. You'd think she'd won her fair share of games. Apparently not. I am now accused of playing a game once and moving on to something else just when she's learned the strategy, and I have been threatened with all manner of gruesome deaths.

I think she's still annoyed about Settlers where I took the Longest Road card from her the turn before she was going to win. Certainly she was annoyed at the time. But then she may also be annoyed about Mystery of the Abbey where I accused the right monk with a 1 in 3 guess when she'd correctly deduced him. I was called a "robber", "thief", "pirate", "pilferer" and "pickpocket" for that one.

Tonight after my glorious victory 129 to 79 to 51, she has gone one step further. I don't know how she's going to do it. Tomorrow morning you may find my head on one set of railway tracks and my knees in the other. Next week you may find me starved to death in the shower cubicle after it has been sealed with masking tape. Or, she may just eat me alive. I don't know how it will happen.

I'd like to leave my Tichu decks to CyberKev, Hamsterrolle to Mikey Hayes and C&C Ancients to Ozvortex. My Settlers 3D chest should be auctioned to raise geekgold for newbies in Africa, and Ryan Walberg can have his choice of my Knizias as a token of my esteem. It's been nice gaming with you all.

I love youse guys. :cry:

My 10s

I'm trying to work on the stats here! I've got everything I need - time, working computer, red wine... but boardgamegeek is down or busy or something. Aaargh! So instead, I'll blither on about the games I have rated 10. No point wasting good red wine.

So a strange thing happened last week. I decreased my rating for Domaine from a 10 to a 9.5 in recognition of the fact that at the moment I don't feel like playing it. I haven't figured out why that is, maybe it will come back into favour when I do play it. This article is not about what's wrong with Domaine, this article is about what's right with the others.

I find myself wanting to play Scrabble. I swear, it's nothing to do with the seductive nature of the ladies at the Scrabble club. I like the game. Finding words and anagramming really work for me. Memorising word lists doesn't, which is why I'll never be a great Scrabble player (actually, I have another 40 years I suppose, it might happen), but I really do like the struggle of finding a decent word worth decent points and getting the sucker on the board.

I really like Mystery of the Abbey as well. I like deduction games a lot, maybe because I often do well at them. In fact there aren't enough of them around. Cyberkev disses MotA, saying too much card passing goes on, but as part of the game is to know what cards to pass I don't find that a problem at all. And I love, absolutely love, the meta-game where you can ask other players "are you going to accuse..." and then try to steal the win from them. Not to mention that the bits are beautiful, and I'm a tart like that.

Lord of the Rings - the Confrontation is an absolute genius of a game. I forgot how much I liked it till I played Ozvortex a couple of months ago. The sides are so different, and it's so beautifully balanced. Yes, you do need to know every detail of the rules to play really well, but I just wish I had a handy opponent who would play frequently. My kid doesn't like it :-(. He will when he grows up, and then I'll unlock his bedroom door. Ungrateful wretch.

My final 10 is Trias. It has fairly crappy bits, though dinomeeples are cool. But I like the way you can drown other people's dinos, and sometimes they like that, then you fill the verdant shore with happily grazing dinos sneering into the water at the struggling swimmers. I'm sure if I was good at it I'd be able to look at the board as a map of low and high potential zones and be able to identify optimal fault lines, but until then I will just stick to opportunistically drowning the opposition. Maybe that's why I like Tongiaki as well.

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.