The Mine Shaft Gap

Venue: Richard’s place.
Present: Brian, Richard, Brad, Pat, Alex, Paul.
Played: Finstere Flure, Schwarzarbeit, Blue Moon, Goa, Nexus Ops, Katzenjammer Blues, Sechs.

Six players again tonight, dividing easily for game options available and coming back together for cards at the end.
Pics as usual by Brad.

Finstere Flure: The starting five were wrapping this up just as I arrived. About half an hour.
Results: Pat won, then in order Alex, Brian, Richard, Brad.

Schwarzarbeit: Dubuious deduction and careful card-watching for particular players
A curious little deduction game by Friedemann Friese, very loosely themed around illegal immigrant workers in the games publishing industry. Actually the ‘illegal workers’ part kind of works, but the only reference to the games industry is in the names of workers. No doubt Friedemann’s little joke with his audience has been commented on before, but for those who haven’t seen it, the game consists of character cards who’s first and second names start with the same unique letter of the alphabet, eg., Friedemann Friese (although that’s not one of them). Those followers of FF’s work will be aware of his penchant for choosing similarly alliterative game titles (in particular with ‘F’s), so one shouldn’t be surprised with the cute embedding of his personal trademark within the game like this. I didn’t pay close enough attention to the first names, but the surnames were all (or mostly) well-known game designers. I recall seeing Knizia, Rosenberg, Moon, and Henn, for example. But no Friedemann or Friese for the ‘F’ card, ‘though.
Anyway, the rules and game play seemed a little strange at first, but the results gradually became more clear as we worked through the draw deck. You accumulate points by recruiting worker cards that eventually prove to be non-illegal, but get even more by denouncing those that prove to be illegal. Brian seemed to go crazy with denouncements, but only one of these proved to be false. So despite the penalty suffered for this one slip-up (and a bonus for me to be the first to act on it), he was able to comfortably claim the top spot at the end.
17 mins rules, 48 mins game play.

Results: Brian: 21. Pat: 18. Paul: 17. Brad: 10.

Blue Moon: Reiner’s 2p predecessor to Blue Moon City was played by Alex and Richard, in parallel with our Schwarzarbeit game.
66 mins total. Richard: 3, def. Alex: 1.

Goa: The way of the sextant
After some to-ing and fro-ing, three of us happily settled on the resource generation and management intricacies of Goa. I was especially keen to try and improve on my past performances by paying more attention to the sextant cards this time around, a strategy that seemed to work well for Pat in previous playings. The early part of the game was unremarkable in terms of outcomes, although I did begin to sense that Pat was already edging away. He was earning a slightly disproportionate number of first-turn wins (and hence bonus actions), and was already running a high turn-over of sextant cards.
On the other hand I was frustrated that I couldn’t get more of these myself and make them useful, and found myself once again chasing commodity production, colonist cards, and the colony tiles. Brian seemed to be keeping pace with me on colonies and advances, although he’d chosen a completely different strategy - race up (or rather down) the money advance track, and stay liquid for the tile auctions.
The second half of the game got gradually worse for me - I think I won an average of less than one tile per turn in each auction, and scored maybe a total of two bonus actions through limping ahead on the advance tracks, etc. I resorted to trying to get roughly equal advances across the board, which I realized later was mathematically and obviously dumb with respect to points scoring. In the mean time, Pat went from strength to strength, and despite one brain-melting turn (I don’t think I’ve ever seen him take so long to make a game turn decision before!) was at the bottom of three of five tracks, had all four colonies, and had sextant cards coming out of the proverbial. The result is almost too embarrassing to report here.
17 minutes rules rehash, 98 mins playing time.

Results: Pat: 61. Paul: 39. Brian: 34.

Nexus Ops: Insectoids and other translucent critters doing three-way battles across different terrain types.
90 minutes in total.
Results: Brad: 12. Richard: 10. Alex: 10.

Katzenjammer Blues: A quick filler for Richard, Alex and Brad while us Goans finished off.
None of the players were overly impressed with the experience, and unfortunately bad puns followed. According to Richard, Alex won by whisker. Pat said that if it was any consolation, he thinks that KB is a dog of a game. Sigh.

Sechs: I assume this is the correct spelling of the game that I (and I’m sure others at the table) had been referring to as ‘Sex’. This is a neat trick-taking card game that works with exactly six players. The rules are nowhere to be found on boardgamegeek or other obvious sites, so for the record I recount them here quickly.
Use a regular deck of cards with two jokers, which both have the value 7.5. Aces may be played as the lowest (1) or the highest card in their suit. Six hands in the whole game, with each player having one turn dealing. All 54 cards are dealt at the start of each hand (9 each), and in clockwise order from the dealer’s left, each player in turn first declares whether or not they intend to play a misere hand. Play then starts again with the dealer’s left, who leads any card they choose (or they may pass). Following players in turn may choose to play a card to the trick or pass. If they play, they must follow suit, including a joker if they have one (and if they choose to play it). There is never any trump suit. The winner of each trick takes the cards won and arranges these face down so all players can see the count of won cards. The hand ends at the end of a trick in which a player has no more cards left, and the score for each player is then tallied. If a player has not played misere, they score the product of their won cards times the number of their played cards (ie., 9 minus how many they have left in their hand). But here’s the catch: If they’ve won 10 or more cards (not tricks), first they remove whole sets of nine cards so that they have a remainder of nine cards or less, and this remainder is their won cards number. So the maximum a player can reach in any one round is 81 points, and this is a perfect score. If a player has called misere and succeeded in winning no tricks, they score exactly 9 x no. played cards. A misere caller who has won one or more cards during the hand has bust and will score zero points for the hand. The highest score at the end of sechs hands is the winner.
This was an intriguing game of trade-off and group-think, and right up to the last hand looked like it could have been won by any player.
66 minutes.

Results: Pat: 360. Brad: 350. Richard: 336. Alex: 336. Paul: 322. Brian: 314.