Red 7, The Mind, Space Alert - 17 December 2019

A bonus games session for James, Kieron & Lucas following some Christmas carolling in the street.  A few fund hands of Red 7 which Kieron called a halt to as only Lucas and I were winning.  Then a couple of games of The Mind where (as previously) we couldn't get past Level 6.  Highlight was an extended Mexican standoff between Lucas and Kieron, where the former had card 99 and the latter had 100.  Lucas successfully played his 99 after Kieron started snoring, and we won that round.

Then we played the first training mission of Space Alert which we've played once before but I clearly failed to blog about it.  This is a collaborative space exploration game with Robo Rally-like cards to program the movement and actions of your character in a frantic real-time 10 minute mission, as your spacecraft scans the area whilst being attacked by space anomalies and aliens, as announced by the accompanying app.  After laying out the cards, the round is resolved at a slightly slower pace to see what actually happened.  The spaceship took a fair bit of damage but we survived our first mission.

I really like this game but both times now we've played with three players and an android (to make up the numbers) and it's really hard to coordinate that fourth character effectively, so I'm keen to play with four or five of us in future.

Peloponnes & The Mind - 26 September 2019

A full house this evening for another great game of Peloponnes where David, yet again, drew the population growth civilisation.  There was a lot of money floating around in this game but with a famine and an earthquake before the last feed, food stocks were hit and some populations took a dive.  Final scores were Adrian 27 population and 30 prestige, James 33/21, Stuart 18/20, David 15/29 and Andy 12/16.

We then tried out a new game called The Mind.  This was a nominee for the 2018 Spiel des Jahres and won the critic's prize.  Essentially very simple: from a deck of cards labelled 1 to 100, players receive a hand of 1 card (then 2, 3 etc in following rounds) and, without communicating, they have to empty their hands in numerical order.  Get it wrong, lose a life.  With four players, try to complete Level 8 before losing four lives.  There are also shuriken cards which can be used to enable each player to discard their lowest numbered card, but we didn't quite work out how to use that to best effect.

We got as far as Level 6 a couple of times and were steadily improving how we played, learning what how long to wait for particular gaps between cards.  The group thinking does synchronise as you play.  Similarly, when it goes wrong, it tends to go wrong again quickly.  But when it runs really smoothly, it does feel rather good.  A fun little game for the end of an evening.

David - your potential exploit about discarding 100 is discussed here.  I guess it's probably better to play out and hope not to lose life, rather than definitely throwing one away...