Everyone had already arrived and was waiting in anticipation when Blue and Pink arrived with piles of gamers crackers, Christmas tree decorations, party poppers, paper parcels, mince pies, festive cakes (with carrot meeples on top) and GOAT Award voting forms.  Food quickly followed along with a volley of noise as people tried to pull their crackers and party poppers first so the contents didn’t land in their supper.  As people munched, there was some discussion about the games played and voting forms were filled in.  In the absence of Green, Pine kindly offered to act as returning officer and collate the statistics.

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While cake and mince meat parcels were shared round, toasts were offered by Lime to the organisers, and in the memory of Burgundy.  He is much missed and will never be forgotten, but we always make a special point of remembering at this time of year, especially as the Un-Christmas Dinner was his last games night with us.  The GOAT Awards were then announced.  Moment of the Year was when Pine got the end game rule wrong for Tonga Bonga, so that Pink thought he’d won, but then didn’t.  The GOAT Poo Prize for the least popular game of the year went to Ca$h ‘n Guns—not a game the group plays often and its only outing over the last year was at the New Year Party.

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Then it was time for the Golden GOAT.  Previous winners were ruled out, but other contenders included Akropolis, Kavango, Flamme Rouge and Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails.  The clear winner of the 2024 Golden GOAT Award, however, was Stamp Swap.  There was much discussion about how this was the third winner from Stonemaier Games (after Tapestry last year and Wingspan in 2019) and how we should invite Jamey Stegmaier, to collect the award in person.  Email correspondence over the following few days suggested that while it was unlikely he would be able to come to GOATS, he will be in the UK next year and just might make it as far as Oxford.  In the meantime, he has highlighted the award on his website.

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With the festive business over, the group broke into three to play some games.  Pink, Blue, Black and Jade began with the “Feature Game“, Courses De Rennes (aka Reindeer Races), a fun little game where players control a team of four reindeer, racing along four different tracks to try to get the highest-scoring tiles.  On their turn, each player can either draw two cards (with a hand limit of seven) or play as many cards of the same type as they can to move one reindeer along one of the tracks.  The cards are numbered and have suit that corresponds to one of the tracks (or are Elfy, and “wild”).  If two and a three of Gifts is played, the player may move one of its reindeer along the Gift track.

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If a reindeer lands on the same space as another reindeer, it slides forward a space.  If that is occupied too, it continues to slide.  If, however, the owner cries “Thump!” as it lands, the reindeer slithers an extra space forward.  The first reindeer to arrive at the end of a track claims the highest value token.  The game ends when two of the tracks have run out of tokens.  Pink too the first points, and with it a strong early lead.  A few rounds later, Jade took the last token from one of the tracks and with it ended the game.  He got very unimpressed looks from Black and Blue as he gifted victory to Pink, so once this was pointed out, Jade revised his move and play carried on.

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Ultimately, however, it didn’t really change things as Pink still took victory with twenty-two points.  He was long way clear of Jade who won the tight fight for second with fifteen just one point ahead of Black who, in turn, took third by a single point.  Everyone else was still playing, so the group looked for something else to play.  Black had won a copy of Ticket to Ride: Paris in the raffle and, although it wasn’t very festive, it seemed appropriate to give it an outing.  Some of the GOATS had played this mini-city variant of the popular train game earlier in the year when we marked the Olympics with sport and France themed games.  However, none of the current quartet had been part of that group.

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The rules are much the same as all the others (take two cards from the market; play cards to place pieces on the map; collect Ticket cards to score points at the end), but like all the variants, Paris has a special rule.  When players claim a red, white, or blue track, they get a card, when they get all three colours they get four “Tricolore” bonus points.  When the game first came out, there had been comments about how this felt very bolted on, but in practice, it was much more interesting than it sounded.  This time, the in game scoring was quite tight, though Blue, with her trains across the city centre got her nose in front and led by six points.  Tickets can make a huge difference to scores though, as they can give a lot of points, both positive and negative.

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Black, Pink and Jade all picked up similar points for their completed Tickets (ten, eleven and eight respectively), though Jade was unlucky and unable to complete his last one.  Blue, however, made good use of concurrent routes and scored a massive twenty-four points for hers giving her something of a landslide victory with a total of forty-six.  It was much closer for second which went to Pink who finished with twenty-nine, two points ahead of Black.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, Purple was leading Ivory, Plum and Byzantium in one of her favourite Christmas themed games, Christmas Tree.

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This is a fairly simple little card-drafting game played over thee rounds, where players are “decorating their Christmas Tree” with diamond-shaped cards, where players score points for the Objective cards everyone contributed to a central pool at the start of the round.  This time, the group played from the advanced set of Objective cards (including all three levels) although the first round, the cards were all levels one and two.  These gave one point for each blue or “nobbly” ornament, four points for each pair of ornaments of the same colour and shape arranged in a vertical pair and six points for three specific shapes in a given arrangement.

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The first round started off slowly with everyone looking to fulfill some of the Objectives—everyone was successful, but Plum and Byzantium got off to a better start.  Plum placed her first Gingerbread man and then concentrated on placing vertical pairs although she only managed that once.  In the second round the Objectives were from the more complicated sets, including six points for three specific colours in a given arrangement, six points for the same three shapes or colours in a set pattern, or eight points for four ornaments with the same point value arranged in two set formations.  This time, Byzantium significantly out scored everyone with multiple objectives scored multiple times and, as a result, built a big lead.

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Plum used one of her Biscuits to move baubles around to make a row of four contain the three colours of glass bauble.and thus scored well, whereas Ivory was focusing on picking up high value Sweets and surrounding his Gingerbread men.  The final set of Objectives included six points for a set arrangement of certain point values, eight points for four ornaments with the same point value arranged in a particular arrangement and five points for each row in which the total points of the glass were above the given amount. Finally, there were two points for each Gingerbread man, with bonuses of six and three points for the player with the most/second most Gingerbread men.

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In the third and final round, Byzantium again out scored everyone, scoring multiple times for the set arrangement of certain point values.  At this point, Ivory was full committed to Sweets and Gingerbread men, especially knowing he was putting in the Gingerbread man Objective, which he scored well for.  Plum and Purple also scored well in the final round, with Plum following a strategy similar to Byzantium, whereas was Purple was collecting sweets like Ivory.  It looked like Byzantium was going to win by a large amount, as he was fifty points ahead of everyone else and was scoring more than anyone else for Lights and Baubles too.

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Ivory’s focus on surrounding his Gingerbread men gave him over fifty points and with more than thirty for his sweets he finished with one hundred and seventy one points, pipping Byzantium to victory by just two, with Plume in third some twenty points adrift.  The puzzly nature of the the game had gone down well and with the Christmas theme everyone had enjoyed playing Christmas Tree.  On the next table, the festive link was much more tenuous, however.  Teal, Pine, Sapphire and Indigo had chosen 6 Nimmt!, because there was a twelve in it, representing the Twelve Days of Christmas (or perhaps they had just wanted to play the game and if you can’t play a daft party game at Christmas, when can you?).

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6 Nimmt! is a popular game with the group at any time of year, though it is usually played with more than four people.  Either way, the game is very simple to play, though tough to play well.  Some say this is because there is a lot of chance in the game, but they are usually the people who do badly…  The idea is that players simultaneously choose a card to play and these are then added, in order, to the rows of cards on the table.  The player adding the sixth card, instead, takes the first five cards into their scoring pile.  Usually, we deal out half the cards for the first round and the rest for the second and the winner is the player with the fewest “nimmts” (or points), at the end of the two rounds.

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This time, however, the group decided to play the multiple-hand variant where each hand has ten cards, and the game ends when someone’s score passes sixty-six.  And that was Sapphire, who finished with an exceptional total of ninety-five.  The winner was Teal with forty-four, however, who was just two points better off than Pine.  The other games were still ongoing, but there was still time for one last game for this group (who were joined by Navy) before everyone went home warmed by the Christmas Gaming Spirit—and their choice of game was Coloretto (apparently this is a  festive game because it includes red, green and gold Chameleons).

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This is another simple filler game, where players either take a card and add it to a truck, or take a truck.  Each truck can take a maximum of three Chameleons, with players collecting coloured sets.  The largest three sets score positive points (according to the Triangular Number Series), while all the others score negative points.  In this way, the bigger the series the more additional cards will score, so the aim is to collect three large sets and ensure the others are as small as possible.  This game was really tight, with Sapphire claiming victory with twenty-seven and Teal and Indigo tying for second on twenty-four.  And with that, people began to drift off, many not to be seen until 2025.

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Learning outcome:  GOATS love a Cracker!