The Stronghold Rebuilt: Christmas Games

Tuesday 27 December 2022

Christmas Games

I hope you all had a great Christmas! And especially hope that your figure, rules, books and gaming collections were expanded in a way that was satisfactory to you.

I only got one game this year, but that's fine because really I have too much of most things these days. However my wife got a few new games, so we had plenty of stuff to try out over the break.

First up was Calico, which Catherine decided to buy with some birthday money she had. We got this out on Christmas Day. As you can see, it has a cat-theme, and was therefore designed for Catherine.

In Calico you are making quilts, using a selection of hexagonal tiles which come in combinations of six patterns and six colours.

Grouping together sections of the same colour allows you to add buttons. Grouping together sections of the same pattern attracts cats to your quilt who will sleep on it. Both of these things earn you points.

Attracting a real cat doesn't earn you any extra points, although the first player is the person who most recently petted a cat, so Aloy got some frantic attention early on ...

Each board also has three bonus score tiles, which look complicated, but aren't. These reward you for setting up combinations of patterns and/or colours around the particular scoring tile. You can score for the combination in just colour or just pattern, or go for the extra points of doing it with both pattern and colour.

Part of the way through the game, and I was feeling confident.

My finished quilt. It all went a bit wrong towards the end, when (naturally) I needed tiles of particular patterns and/or colours and they stopped appearing from the bag. That's my excuse anyway. I came last.

Maya won it, by managing to get maximum points of all of her bonus scoring tiles.

I think Maya got a score that was almost equal to mine and Catherine's combined.

The game has a special 'Master Quilter' tile you get to hold as a trophy if you win. You are then obliged to have your photo taken.

Catherine and I then had a go at another of her gifts - a word-game called 'A Little Wordy', from the people who brought us 'Exploding Kittens'.

This is a fairly simple two-player game. Both players draw eleven letter tiles from a bag and secretly construct a word, of any length, from them, making a note of it. You then hand the tiles you drew to your opponent, and take it in turns to guess what word they might have constructed using them.

So here's my word (FONT) and my notes on what I know about Catherine's word - it ends in 'E', it's not GLEE or EXILE, it contains an 'L', it doesn't contain an 'H' and it's more than four letters in length. But how do I know all that?

I knew those things because on your turn you can either guess the opponents word, or activate one of eight clue cards that are dealt out at the start of the game, and which require the other person to give you certain pieces of information about their word. Each card you use gives the other person victory points, however (as does incorrectly guessing their word). And the winner is the person who not only guesses their opponent's word, but concedes the fewest points doing it.

It's a quick and simple game, and we enjoyed it. Catherine also played a few rounds with Maya whilst I cooked Christmas dinner.

Our neighbour joined us for dinner, and we played a couple of games afterwards. The first was Kitttins, which is a very quick and simple game involving the stacking of cat meeples into shapes determined by a drawn card, and was another of Catherine's gifts. It's very much a dexterity game.

Here's a winning stack. You play a round until someone completes the pattern shown on the card. The first person to win three rounds wins the game.

That entertained us for a while, but we decided to get out something more cerebral, and opted for 'Rear Window'. Since our neighbour hadn't played before we left out the murder, so it was a simply a matter of me (the Director) leading the players to the correct solution with no subterfuge involved. They still failed to guess the correct occupant/attribute selections, though, although to be fair my inability to convey that the lady in Apartment D was an Athlete contributed to this.

So that was Christmas Day done with - our neighbour went home, we did two video calls to family in the UK and our son and his wife who are currently in Indonesia, and then went to bed.

Maya had asked to play the buddy-cop RPG Partners at some point over the holidays. This is designed for two players with no GM, but we decided to do it with three - Maya and Catherine would actually play and I would manage the mechanical side of things, tracking who led each scene, making notes and drawing cards and random words.

They created a detective series set in a shopping mall called the Sunnyview Retail Village, and called 'Village People' (the theme song was Village People's 'Hot Cop', naturally). Neither of their characters were actually official detectives - Catherine's straight shooter was a retail worker in a department store, whilst Maya's wild-card ran a cat-grooming service (yes, MORE cats) and operated MLMs on the side.

The mystery was the death of the mall's head of security, who was found drowned in the ornamental fountain in the main atrium. Naturally the police were investigating in the background, but we ignored that - our two intrepid amateur sleuths were also on the case and quickly uncovered a sordid network of affairs. However despite them looking to be the key to the murder, it actually turned out to be the victim's hairdresser who had killed them (albeit accidentally) with the motive being something to do with the upcoming prestigious 'Clippies' awards, and some illicit back-street hair-dressing operation that the security guard was threatening to expose.

And so onto the final game of the holiday - Scattles. Some friends of ours had recently been to Europe on a camping trip and had mentioned a game that involved throwing a baton at a group of skittles. Catherine tracked down a set (in the local Target, so not much detective work required) and bought it for me.

It's fun - we played for a good chunk of Boxing-Day evening (until the mosquitoes woke up)

The rules are simple. You throw a wooden baton at skittles set up about six feet away. They are numbered 1-12. If you knock down one skittle then you score its value. If you knock down multiple skittles then they are worth one point each. Knocked down skittles are stood up again, at the point where they ended up, so over time the targets get spread out. You win when you reach exactly 50 points. If you exceed 50 points then your score is reduced to 25 points and the game continues.