Christmas Games

I hope you all had a great Christmas, how ever you chose, or were able, to celebrate it. 

We were able to get family together -  our children and their partners, plus my new daughter-in-law's brother. And with that many people in one place it meant ... games.

Last year we played pool at my niece's pace on Christmas Day itself. we were unable to go there this year, but Mrs Kobold proposed an alternative - Carrom. This is an Indian game similar to pool/billiards, but using round disks which are hot by a flicked striker disk. We bought a board many years ago - before we were married I think - but hadn't had it out in years. And my daughter's partner also had a board, so we had two games of doubles running in parallel.

We failed to finish either of them; carrom is a game where penalties mean that pocketed pieces are returned to the board, and we were so bad that pieces were being retured to play as fast as we could pocket them. Still, we had a great time.

Our game was hindered somewhat by the board. My daughter's partner's board was quite old, and is probably past its best. My daughter had read that, in order to smooth it off, you could sprinkle it with cornflour. She had a curious idea about how much cornflour to use. By the end of the game we all looked like we'd been snorting cocaine.

After the carrom we opened presents - more about what emerged later. After that it was time for a nap for me, but some of the others played Skull.

And then I woke up and it was on to the main event of the afternoon - Elon Musk's iPod Submarine. Here are the rules: 

People picked it up pretty quickly, and despite some early reservations about how well it would work we had a great time, and played for a good two or three hours. Our problems ranged from from 'A Skyscraper Is On Fire' and a 'World Drinking-Water Shortage' to 'Not Enough People Adopting Puppies' and 'Elon Musk Had Lost His Memory'. The favoured solution to the latter was 'Do Nothing'.

But that stage of the day it was time to get on with some cooking, and then eat the resulting enormous roast dinner. We had also been joined by our tenant and our next-door neighbour. 

That left nine of us playing The Cat Game. This fun, Pictionary-style, game kept is going for most of the evening, until my son, his wife and her brother had to leave. 

The rest of us switched to a push-your-luck dice game called Greed.

And that saw us through to the end of Christmas Day.

Before my daughter and her partner left on Boxing Day we played a game of a an Egyptian-themed tile-collecting game she'd picked up in a charity shop called Tutankhamen. well worth the $3 she paid for it.

And then we had another go at There's Been A Murder. It took us four tries to catch the murderer, but even the failures were fun.

After that there was just Mrs Kobold and I. We decided to look at a game we'd got from my parents (or, at least, pre-emptively bought with money we knew we'd get from my parents - Flamme Rouge

I really fancied some kind of racing game, and had seen this in a shop a few weeks ago. I looked up reviews and play-throughs and felt that it was just the sort of thing I was looking for. Each payer has two cyclists - the steady Rouleur and the faster (sometimes) Sprinteur. On a turn each cyclist plays a movement card from their type-specific deck, then all players move their cyclists along the course. If there is a one-space gap between cyclists towards the rear of the pack and those further forward, then the rear is moved up due to slipstreaming. The combined pack is then moved up if there's a one-space gap in front of it. And so on. Any cyclist with a space in front of them after this gets an exhaustion card added to their deck. The game is very much about managing your limited hand of movement cards, and co-ordinating the movement of your two cyclists to gain maximum movement for minimum effort. 

On Boxing Day we simply played a two-player game. Today I found some AI rules, and we were able to add a couple of NPC teams, which make the game a lot more interesting. And finally we played with ascents and descents, which make the card management even more difficult.

Mr Wednesday liked the box.

My son  bought me the European implementation of 'Ticket To Ride', which Mrs Kobold and I also managed to play today. That's certainly a game which needs more than two people, but at least we understand how to play it now.

So that was our Christmas - mostly games.

How about you?