Well the year of the Ty/Ricky Freaky Friday continues as Ricky once again cancelled and Ty once again stepped up and made it to game night. Ty told us a startling fact tonight; he said he'd missed a staggering 40% of SSC nights in 2018. I knew he missed a lot but I didn't realize it was almost half. It's a good thing he turned it around when he did; we were close to kicking him out and replacing him with someone sexier. Well done Ty.
Unfortunately, Ricky seems determined to outdo 2018 Ty by sucking even worse in 2019. If I sound salty, it's only because I miss 2018 Ricky and I want him back.
Enough of this, on to the games!
Since JoJo deferred his picks last week, he was still up in rotation for bringing games. His first selection was an odd one; we usually finish the night, not start with:
12 plays
We all thought this to be an odd choice to start the night, then we realized that JoJo is starting a new year with his crazy 360 challenge thing; you may remember he had nights where he needed to play a game that starts with the letter P or has a squirrel on the cover or pink player peices; crap like that. I don't know what the category was this month but he clearly wanted to make sure Hanabi got played.
If you can figure out the connective tissue between the four games we played tonight is, please let me know in the comments and I'll send you a coupon for a free burrito or something.
We also learned that the challenge creators have asked the Bear to create a challenge for one of the months this year so if you see the 360 requirements in July are games with
Bears
Red player pieces
giant dog-slobber stained cards and
Japanese school-girl tentacle-p*rn, you'll know that's his month.
Anyway, as I was saying, Hanabi!
Tiles! Piles of tiles!
We're finally starting to get our group 'language' for Hanabi and we were looking a little better than last time, even with the addition of Ty who you always have to keep an eye on in co-ops in case he's testing out his own personal hidden traitor variant.
Ty was not the problem tonight, however. We were several rounds in and, again, using the strategies we'd cultivated, I alerted Joe that one of his tiles was a '4' because I was afraid he was about to discard it since he'd had it for several rounds without getting any info on it. He then immediately said "I'm playing this one!!" and slammed it down without even looking to see that there was literally no spot to play a 4 of ANY color, regardless of what color he thought it might be:
Stupid, Stupid JoJoBear.
We were all dumbfounded to say the least.
After that boner, it all kinda went downhill. We did the best we could but there's just no bouncing back from something like that. You just have to move on.
...and move on we did; on to another game we were probably playing for dubious 360 Challenge reasons:
New to me
Muse is another party-ish game where you divide into teams (I had Ty) and try to get your partner to guess which one of the 5 Dixit-like cards is the one the other team gave you by giving a (usually) one-word clue. The unique wrinkle here is that they also give you a card which limits what that clue can be; it might say, for example, that your clue has to be a piece of clothing or a color or you might even have to make an expression or strike a pose.
The art on the cards is mostly fantastic and you could easily add in Dixit or Mysterium cards to the game if you wanted to; the little clue restriction cards are really what make the game unique and fun.
On the first round, Ty was the clue giver and I looked up to see him doing this:
That wasn't a clue-pose; that was his brain shutting down trying to figure out how to give me a clue that would help me.
Then, on their turn, Brody did this:
Then, later, on Ty's turn again, he turned into an insane deer for some reason:
I don't know what the f*ck was happening to my friends but this little game was breaking them.
Finally, JoJoBear went insane:
Actually, this was his clue to Brody: he had to strike a pose but I had to include it since he looked so stupid.
In spite of his brain lock, Ty and I were winning up until the very end where our available choices for clue restrictions on Joe and Brody were both super easy and they were able to come back and win.
Fun game and it let me get pictures of everyone being weird so I like it even more.
Next up:
New to me
I'm a big fan of this designer's previous worker placement game Raiders of the North Sea and I've been eager to check this one out so, yay JoJo!
In Architects, you place a worker to take an action and the more workers you have on that action space from previous turns, the better the action will be (+1 resource for every worker you have there, etc.) That's pretty cool already but the really unique part is you can take an action to capture all workers of one color in a space and then later throw their wooden asses in jail to collect a bounty. So it becomes a pretty aggressive worker placement game; you can try to make big payouts on your turn, but you risk making yourself a juicy target for rapscallions looking to make bank by incarcerating your workers.
In case there was any doubt, we all did this ALOT.
The same artist and even the same iconography as Raiders. Shem Phillips be consistent!
Each character has asymmetric starting abilities and resources (which I always love.) I started with this innocent-looking, sweet old lady. Little did I know she was an aging Jezebel, a treacherous harlot who's shady past was soon to bite me in the ass, big time.
Yeah she's harmless looking now, but she was apparently quite the little whor* back in her college days according to her pics on Medieval Facebook.
I should have known she was trouble when I started with waaay more gold than anyone else but also waaaay down low on the virtue track. I was so low in virtue, I wasn't even allowed to assist in building the church.
Let that be a lesson in remaining chaste, ladies.
I decided to embrace her shady reputation and focus on the Black Market actions and drafting people that helped me in those endeavors as well. Unfortunately, I was pretty bad at it; I think she's a pretty tough character to play when first learning the game (also, I suck at the games.) The worst part was, at certain points in the game( when all the black market spots fill up and when certain numbers of buildings are built) it triggers a black market phase where you reset the market and get penalized for having dudes in prison. Unfortunately for me, everyone in the Black Market goes to prison before evaluating the penalty.**
**Unless JoJo taught that wrong (please tell me he taught this phase incorrectly; not counting Hanabi, we haven't had enough opportunities to berate him lately)
Anyway, this was bad enough for me but it became triple bad when Brody developed an engine that gave him a crapload of points for triggering said Black Market phase. At one point, Brody triggered it sending my homies to jail and then Ty triggered it AGAIN on his very next action which penalized me again for the same friggin jailbirds. I was effectively shut down for the rest of the game; All I could do was to focus on burning off my huge collection of debt cards and trying to not look too salty.
You won't see many green workers on the building track and if you squint, you can see me way back there on the virtue track
The Brody engine was unstoppable and he beat us pretty badly; I finished way way behind everyone else. Brody felt so bad about how badly I got hosed in that game, the next day he texted me a totally unnecessary apology. It was a nice gesture but I don't take games that seriously.
Also, text apologies are total bullsh*t; give me chocolates and flowers or GTFO. It was really all Ricky's fault anyway; he always plays green and if he'd bothered to show up, he'd have been stuck with the dirty ol girl not me.
I really liked Architects in spite of my crappy performance; I think I like it better than Raiders of the North Sea which is saying a lot.
We had a little more time and JoJo still had 360 boxes to check so next we played:
4 previous plays
We discovered this cool party game at GenCon 2 years ago and we really enjoy it. You play in teams and try to get your partner to guess the word by alternating writing a clue on the board but the opponent gets to guess first. You also have a secret clue which only your partner gets to see. It's simple but really cool trying to get your secret clue work in conjunction with the public knowledge to help trigger the answer without tipping off the other team.
I'm showing this because I can't show the clue board with our team names. We are childish and filthy.
The two clue-givers are instructed to roll the dice together to choose a word.They interpreted that to mean they had to hold hands and literally roll the dice together.
I was trying to get a shot of them throwing the dice together but they are too quick to be caught on film doing anything too un-masculine.
Brody and I are usually in sync for these kinds of games (don't challenge us to Codenames if you know what's good for you) but I pulled a major boner in the tie breaker round. Well, actually Ty pulled the boner but my boner was even bigger then his boner. The correct phrase was "The little engine that could." Brody had given me the secret clue of "train" and Ty had previously written "Should" but I thought it was a misdirection and I was pretty sure the correct answer was "Thomas the Tank Engine" but I was waiting for a little more confirmation. Then Ty slipped up and wrote "Could" then realized his mistake (can't use a word that's in the phrase of course)they were laughing at his stupidity and they asked if I'd seen the word before he erased it. I admitted I did but then proceeded to say "Thomas the Tank Engine" anyway because I'm stupid. JoJo then guessed correctly of course and they won.
I blame the late hour and all the salt that was still in my eyes.
...and Ricky.
Anyway, it was a great night of games; thanks for reading!
PawPaw
