Session Report: Paul's Games Night

Monday night I went round to Paul's for Monday night games for the first time in ages. Mt trip to San Francisco had got in the way of a couple and I think I'd missed the one before that too.

Not long after I arrived Spence and Greg got there, and seeing as Vin can be a little tardy we set up a quick 4-player game of Die Mauer. As it's out of print Paul had knocked together his own copy, so we played with that. It's a quick and simple game of bluffing and second-guessing. Each turn the current player chooses one of their remaining pieces to play. The other players have to guess what they played. All players reveal their choices simultaneously. If nobody chose the same piece as the current player, the current player adds their chosen piece to either end of a wall that the players are building jointly in the middle of the table. If someone else chose the same piece they get to play instead. The winner is the first to run out of pieces. It's slightly more complicated that that, but not much. I enjoyed this one - good fun with enough variables to make the guessing interesting - I can see why Paul wanted his own copy. Final Scores: Spence 0, me 5, Paul 6 and Greg 26.

With no sign of Vin, we decided to play our perennial filler: Guillotine. It's chaotic, and there's very little strategy involved but I still really enjoy this one, the humour, the illustration and the speed all combine to make a really fun game. I didn't have many good cards during the game but I still managed to off King Louis and in the very last turn I got the Master Spy too, which was enough to force a draw: Spence 20, me 20, with Greg and Paul scoring 17 & 16 (though I'm not sure which scored which!).

Vin arrived during Guillotine, so the final game of the night was destined to be a 5-player, and we opted for Alhambra Dirk Henn's game of building gardens set in the medieval Moorish palace. I've played this once before at Paul's and was crushed - I just couldn't get to grips with getting the cards I needed to buy the high-scoring tiles. Once again I suffered, I managed to get an almost-monopoly on the lowest scoring Blue tiles, but could never afford the highest scoring purple and green ones. Right from the off I was lagging behind, and it was only my decent wall-length that earnt me the ignominious title of joint loser!

It was a great evening, the humour was fullsome and coarse, the games were fun and I joint won one - so a good night all in all.