As we meet at The Jockey every week, last year at Christmas we decided to enter a team for their Quiz night between Christmas and New Year.  We didn’t have a large team, but Blue, Pink, Pine, Violet and Violet’s mum were in attendance and had managed to win for the GOATS at the first attempt.  Flushed with that success, we decided to give it a go this year too. This time there were seven of us with Pine bringing along his mate, Azure.  As before, we booked a table for 8pm and, as usual, pizza was largely the order of the day with a burger, tagliatelle and scampi for those who decided not to follow the tradition.  While we were waiting for food to arrive, Green asked whether Red was going to be about over Christmas as he had some Gruyère for her. Unfortunately Azure misheard and asked who Trevor was.  Much hilarity ensued as Pine got himself in a terrible mess explaining who Red was and why he thought she wouldn’t be interested in someone called Trevor, but would love a block of cave-aged cheese!  To spare his further blushes, someone quickly suggested we played a game, which seemed like a good idea.  With so many people and so little time, the choice was limited, so we went with Tsuro.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor aleacarv

Tsuro is a very simple game to teach and play, and, although it has nasties such as player elimination, it is so quick to play that these things don’t really matter.  The idea is that each player has a “Stone” which starts on a marker at the edge of the board and a hand of three tiles.  On their turn, the active player then places a tile on the next square in such a way as to create a path in front of the stone.  They then move their stone (and any others affected) along the path to the new end.  The game continues with players taking turns to place tiles and move stones trying to keep their stone on the board and avoid colliding with any other stone; the last stone left is the winner.  This time, it was a cagey start as everyone was very careful.  It wasn’t until the draw deck had been depleted, that the first players were eliminated, with Pine  forced to play a tile that caused him to collide with Blue removing both from the game.  Purple and Azure were next leaving three players until Black was forced to take himself off the board and Green with him, leaving Pink the sole survivor.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor kilroy_locke

While we were eating Green asked about the “Monster Games” session the night before.  The evening had started with Kingdomino, and included NMBR 9, Azul and 6 Nimmt!.  The highlight had been El Grande, however, a game that we enjoyed on a previous “Monster Games” session.  This time, however, we decided to add the Grand Inquisitor & the Colonies expansion.  This adds an extra couple of elements to the game (but still no Portugal, much to Pink’s disgust).  Both Blue and Black quite liked the Grand Inquisitor component and would happily play with it again, but neither were very keen on the Colonies aspect, despite the fact that Blue had been able to use it to great effect towards the end of the game.  Pine had the last word on the subject though when he commented that he’d found it amusing that everyone had known before the start that Black and Blue were competing for first place, while everyone else was trying to avoid coming last.  It was perhaps just as well that the landlord chose that moment to hand out the paperwork for the picture round…

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor kilroy_locke

We started off badly, but quickly improved with a perfect score in the second round.  We maintained steady progress, but the team that beat the “Eggheads” would take some catching.  As the Quiz progressed it was clear that we would need a really good score in the “Who Am I?”, anagram and picture rounds to be in with a chance.  We got all three anagrams, but the “Who Am I?” was a bit of a disaster as we worked out who it was (“the big bloke from The Chase“), but couldn’t remember his name.  It turned out that that was actually enough information, but we only found that at the very end, so only got one point (his name is Mark Labbett).  Although we put in a reasonable picture round, it wasn’t good enough to make up the difference and we finished in a respectable second place.

– Image by boardGOATS

With the Quiz over, we reverted to what we do best and went back to playing board games, or in this case, a dice game, as we finished the evening with Las Vegas.  The game itself is a very simple betting game.  Players begin their turn by rolling their dice and then assign some of them to one of six casinos (one for each dice face) each of which has a jackpot drawn at random from a deck of money.  Players must place all the dice displaying one number to bet on the casino of that number, and when done, play passes to the next player.  Once everyone has placed all their dice the player who placed the most dice on a casino takes the highest value currency card, with the person in second place taking the next and so on. The really clever bit is that before any money is handed out, any “draws” are removed.  This leads to a lot of barracking when dice are played as opponents try to encourage the active player to choose their favoured option.

– Image used with permission of BGG contributor ckirkman

As usual, we included the Big Dice from the Boulevard expansion and the Slot Machine mini-expansion from the 2015 Brettspiel Advent Calendar.  The large dice are double weight and count as two in the final  reckoning.  The Slot Machine acts like a seventh casino, except that it can hold dice of any number, but dice of each number can only be added once (though a player must add all the dice they have of that number).  Since we play the game unusually slowly, we generally stop after just three rounds rather than the four recommended in the rules, and today was no exception.  Reducing the number of rounds meant that everyone had to make each round count to stay in the running, especially in such a close game.  Three players took over $300,000, with Green just $10,000 ahead of Black.  It was Blue who finished first, however, thanks largely to her judicious use of the slot machine which ensured a healthy return in the first two rounds.  And with that, it was home time for everyone, including Trevor the Cheese.

– Image by boardGOATS

Learning Outcome:  Shy bairns get nowt.