New Years' Eve Games

We were invited round to our friends Jon and Claudia in order to see in the New Year, and from the start it was clear that this was to be an evening of boardgames. Cei and Michelle joined us for the first couple of hours, before having to take little Eli home to bed, so we had plenty of players for our first couple of games.

We started off  with a couple of eight player games of Tsuro. We thought it would make for a cut-throat game, but in both games players lasted a lot longer than we thought.

Early stages of the first game, with all eight players still on the board.

A couple of turns later, and the numbers have been whittled down. I can't remember who won.

In the second game we ended up with only four cards left to play, and seven players left in the game. This meant that we ended up with players unable to take their turn. I don't think that we did anything wrong to get into that situation, but who knows?

Anyway, we fudged something, and somehow Catherine managed to be the only survivor when the dust settled.

I didn't get pictures of our second game - we played one eight and one seven player games of Secret Hitler. 

In the first Michelle, who barely understood what was going on, was Hitler. Myself and the other Fascist in the game played on the other players' perception of her to carefully steer her into being Chancellor to win the game.

In the second game I ended up as Hitler. The other players decided I was a Fascist early on, and kept me from being Chancellor, and both Liberals and Fascists got to fill up the board with their policies. It came down to the last turn, and fortunately we had a secret Fascist president who gave their Liberal Chancellor two Fascist policies to enact and then refused to support the veto they proposed, to give the Fascists a win on policies.

So it was a win for the Fascists in both games.

Cei and Michelle had to go at that point - a baby can only handle so many hours of grown-ups playing games before he needs food and bedtime.

We next played a single game of Sushi Go Party, with seven players. This was quite fun, although five players were unfamiliar with it and we had to take each person through the scoring each turn. With hindsight I should have chosen some less complex menu items. But we had fun. This was the position at the end. Catherine (light green) grabbed a narrow win over me (black) by three points, thanks to her love of dessert.

We switched to Barenpark after that - a Tetris-like game of building up a bear-themes zoo. I've played this once before, but still found it a bit of a struggle. And that was reflected in the scores - the experiences players Marco and Eric finished ahead, Catherine and I struggled to average mid-table scores and newbie gamer Lachlan came in last. This is a game of planning, and you really need to try it a couple of times to understand how early decisions affect the later stages of the game.

My rubbish zoo.

Finally we ran a couple of games of Flamme Rouge. In the first we had five players, but added a Peloton bot to round it out to six. I set up a simple sprint course, but added a short ascent/descent section and also a short cobblestone section just to liven things up.

Here's the start, with the Blue peloton team taking an early lead.

We chased the bots throughout the first half of the game. This was the stage just before a couple of us attacked, and chased them down, forming a leader pack.

We burned out a bit by the end. The Blue bots ended up in the middle of the pack whilst Black (Lachlan) somehow took the lead with his sprinteur and eventually won the race.

I didn't get any pictures of the second game, which was one of the courses from the Peloton expansion featuring a couple of ascents and descents only. As we reached the finish line we toasted the New Year, played the last turn and finished gaming for the night. 

So Happy New Year, and thanks to Jon and Claudia for hosting an exhausting but fun evening of games.