When Blue, Pink, Orange and Lemon rolled in (late thanks to the delights of the Oxford traffic and garden watering), Plum was already there.  A gamer with Gweeples in Didcot, Plum was a friend of Burgundy’s that members of the group first met at his funeral about six months ago.  While she finished her tagliatelle, Blue and Pink waited for their supper to arrive, and everyone admired Pink’s Pornstar Martini, the group revisited Tsuro, which Orange and Lemon had enjoyed so much on their first visit, last time.

– Image by boardGOATS

While setting up, Pine arrived and needed a quick reminder of the rules, but that only took a moment:  players have a hand of three tiles and, on their turn place one of them in front of their stone and extend it’s path, moving their stone (and any others) to the end of its path.  Players are eliminated when their stone goes off the board or collides with another stone—the last player on the board is the winner.  First blood went to Blue, who took out Lemon and Pine, but that was collateral damage as she had no choice and went off the board herself at the same time.

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Pink was next, being trapped and left with no option, and then just Plum and Orange remained to duel it out.  There was very little space left on the board and the writing was already on the wall when Plum went off.  That left Orange a worthy winner, especially as he had a tile to spare too.  Teal arrived and while Blue and Pink fed, he led everyone else in a game of No Thanks!.  This is a game we’ve played a lot in the group and is a very clever design but like all the cleverest games, has very simple rules.  Played with a numbered deck of thirty-two cards, the idea is that on their turn, the active player can take the card in the middle or pay a chip to pass the problem on to the next person.

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The next person has the same decision:  they can take the card and the chip, or pay a chip, and so on.  At the end of the game, a player’s total score is the sum of the face value of the cards they took and the player with the lowest number wins.  There are two key points that make the game, however.  Firstly, if a player has consecutively numbered cards, only the lowest card in the run contributes to their total, which means cards have different values to different players.  Secondly, nine cards are removed from the deck, which adds jeopardy on top.  The game can play out in several different ways.

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The player or players with the most chips are always in control, until one player is left with so few chips or runs out completely, that they are forced to take cards even when they don’t want them.  This can prevent players, even those with lots of chips, from getting the cards they need to close runs causing the strategy to back-fire, and leaving those with the most chips with the most points as well.  This time, Orange and Teal amassed a huge pile of chips each, but both managed to avoid ending up with multiple high scoring runs.  Then someone dropped a chip on the floor giving Pine the opportunity to recount the tale of how he dropped a chip between the floor boards and how it is still there despite everyone’s best efforts.

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This time, the dropped chip was recovered successfully and the game ended without further mishap.  Orange and Teal took first and second respectively, giving Orange two in two games to match Lemon’s achievement at the start of last time.  By this time, the feeders had finished feeding and everyone else had arrived, so it was time for the “Feature Game“.  To mark the start of the Tour de France later in the week, this was to be the Peloton expansion for the cycling game, Flamme Rouge.  Flamme Rouge is a fast-paced, tactical bike-racing game where each player controls a team of two riders: a Rouleur and a Sprinteur.  The aim is to manage the first rider to cross the finish line.

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Each rider has a deck of cards, and Players move their riders one at a time, by drawing four cards from the rider’s deck, choosing one to play, and recycling the rest.  Once every player has picked cards for both their riders, players simultaneously reveal their cards and, starting with the cyclist at the front, each rider is moved in turn.  After all the riders have moved, slip-streaming takes effect, with groups that have exactly one space between them and the group in front moving forward to remove the gap.  Finally, every rider that still has an empty space in front of them is deemed to be riding into the wind and takes an exhaustion card which goes into their deck—these are bad because they are slow cards and block up plays’ hands.

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At the start of the race, everyone’s Rouleurs have the same cards, and everyone’s Sprinteurs have the same cards.  The Rouleurs have lots of cards with a similar face value, where the Sprinteurs have some cards that are faster and have a higher value, which are offset by others that are slower and have a lower value.  Players have to balance how they manage their riders and make the most of the slip-streaming opportunities.  The game is modular with the option to add hills to the base game.  The Peloton expansion adds extra riders (so that the game plays up to six players), cobbled sections (aka “Pavé”), Feed Zones, and rules to set up a break-away.

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Unusually with so many people, rather than splitting in to three groups playing three different games, we split into just two with both playing the same game.  Since the Grand Départ was due to take place in the essentially flat Denmark this year, both groups largely played without hills, but included cobbled sections (à la Stage 5, from Lille to Arenberg, a week later).  Cobbled sections change width frequently and are generally narrower than normal road, but perhaps more importantly, riders can no-longer benefit from slipstreaming but still get exhaustion cards.  The slightly larger group, led by Ivory and Teal also decided to start with a break-away.

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Their chosen route was Stage 11 of the stage race and took in three sections of Pavé.  The first of these was shortly after the start, the second after the first hairpin and a short slight up-hill ramp, and the third was after a second hairpin and a little chicane.  Teal and Lime made it into the breakaway and they stayed away for most of the game.  Being at the front “pushing air out of the way” all the time is tiring though, and inevitably, they picked up a lot of exhaustion cards.  That meant that as the Peloton was bearing down on them, just as the finish line was in sight, they didn’t have the energy fend them off.

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As a result, Black and Pink, who had been sheltering in the middle of the group slid across the line just ahead of the gallant breakaway, who were definitely candidates for the day’s combativity award.  Black took first place, having spent most of the race doing as little as possible and saving it all for the final sprint.  While saving energy is a good tactic, Purple took it to a different level picking up no exhaustion cards at all, though she wasn’t able to turn on the burners in time to take advantage of it.

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The smaller group, led by Blue and Plum rode a simpler route based on the Avenue Corso Paseo ride, with a cobbled section in the middle between the two hairpin bends.  With most people in this group new to the game, they decided to keep things simple and eschewed the complexities of hills completely, sticking to a pan-flat course, and kept to the standard roll-out used in the base game.  First Orange and then Lemon rode off the front while Pine and especially Blue were repeatedly under threat of being spat out of the back of the peloton.  Most rounds seemed to end with Blue breathing a sigh of relief as she managed to hang on and Lemon laughing as she picked up yet another exhaustion card.

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Once the riders had passed the Pavé the speed picked up and Blue and Pine started to try to move forward in the field.  Lemon who had led most of the way “bonked” and “hit the wall”, and as a result, was unceremoniously dropped.  It was tight, but Pine’s Rouleur was first over the line just holding off Plum’s first rider who took second followed by Pine’s Sprinteur who took third.  It had been a close and quite attritional race, but despite the fact there were fewer riders with a shorter parkour, the race finished at much the same time as the other one.  So races were compared and there was a bit of chatter about other options as people packed away.

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Ivory took himself off for an early night, as did Teal, but those that were left were keen to play on, albeit not for long in some cases.  Inevitably there was a lot of discussion about what to play, but when Ticket to Ride got a mention, Pine and Lime were keen to give the London version a run out, and were quickly joined by Pink and Purple.  Ticket to Ride is one of our favourite games and we play a lot of different versions, short and long.  They all have the same basic structure, but different layouts on different maps, and often with a little rules change.  In summary, in the original game, players are connecting cities across the USA.

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They do this by collecting coloured cards and then spending those cards to place trains.  Players score points for placing trains and also for completing “Tickets” by connecting two cities together by any chosen route—the further apart the cities, the more points they are worth.  The game end is triggered when one player has only two train pieces left and at the end of the game, the player with the most points is the winner.  The original game takes around an hour to play with the full compliment, but more recently, there have been a number of smaller, lighter versions available.  They have the same rules, but players have fewer pieces and the maps are more congested, based on cities like New York, Amsterdam and later this year, San Francisco.

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This time, however, the version chosen was London.  In this edition, players are placing buses to mark routes, and in addition to scoring points for claiming routes and Tickets, players also score points for connecting all the places in the same district. Pine won the “name the people on the front of the box” competition and went first.  Lime crossed the city travelling from Baker Street to The Tower of London while both Purple and Pink did the same but from Buckingham Palace to Brick Lane, and via different routes. Pine had a northern route and a south route that looked like they would join up in the middle, but didn’t quite make it.  He did manage to claim a district though, the only player to do so for a district of any significant size.

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It was very close between first and second, though there was a bit more distance to Pink in third.  In the end, Lime just pipped Pine to victory by two points.  Meanwhile, there had been some debate between the other five as to what they would play.  Blue suggested introducing Orange and Lemon to one of our old stalwarts, 6 Nimmt!, but it wasn’t one of Plum’s favourite games.  So instead, Blue and Black introduced everyone else to …Aber Bitte mit Sahne, a clever but simple little “I divide, you choose” game.  The idea is that one player is The Baker who divides the cake into pieces and then everyone else takes it in turns to take a one of them.

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Each slice of cake has a type, a number on it and a some cream.  When a player takes cake, they can choose to eat it or store it.  For all eaten cake, players a point for each blob of cream.  For stored cake, however, the player with the most of each type will score the number of points associated with that type.  The clever part is that the number of points is equivalent to the number of slices of that type in the game, so the more common types which are harder to get a majority in are worth more, but they also have the most cream, tempting players to eat them straight away.

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It is always difficult for the first couple of players to take the role of Baker, but this is exacerbated with five players.  Blue went first, then Black.  It was only a couple of rounds in, that the twinkle appeared in Plum’s eye as she realised how clever the game was and expressed her approval.  It was quite tight in the early stages with players staking their claims to different sorts of cake.  There was competition for kiwi and redcurrent, but others went largely un-stored (and therefore eaten).  After everyone had been the Baker it was time to see who had the most of each and add up the scores.  Black got lucky with the chocolate as everyone else was greedy and ate theirs.

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Unfortunately, there was a rules misunderstanding and Orange thought he would get points for every slice he kept if he had the most of that type, so we’ll have to play it again soon so he can try again.  This time though, Black who had been very abstemious and eaten none of his cake, ran out the clear winner with thirty-five points to Blue’s twenty-nine and Plum’s twenty-seven for second and third place respectively.  Ticket to Ride: London was still underway on the next table, so as Orange and Lemon had not played it before, Blue got out Dobble.  We’ve not played this in the group for years, but it is a fantastic little Snap-based filler.

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The idea is that every card has several pictures and each card shares exactly one match with every other card in the deck and using this principle, there are five possible Snap-based games.  Black decided discretion was the better part of valor and opted to spectate while Plum had a significant drive so headed off, leaving just Blue, Orange and Lemon.  They started with a pile of cards each and the winner the first to shed their pile onto the central one.  The game was all very well, but there was a vocabulary check as, although Blue said they could play in Ukrainian, Orange and Lemon were game to give English a go.  Once the items had been identified, the mania started.

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As it was a trial game, the piles weren’t carefully measured, but Orange quickly got the hang of it and in spite of the language differences, managed to shed his pile first for yet another victory.  From there, the group did the reverse and started with one card and grabbed progressively matching cards from the middle.  This can be quite savage, which is why Blue opted for the gentler game first.  Still, everyone was well-behaved and nobody got scratched.  The tension and concentration was palpable though and Ticket to Ride finished and Lime and Pine left with only a a cursory grunt from those playing Dobble, before Blue just edged it to win the final game of the night.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome:  Tour de France coverage is available on ITV4.