Category: Meeting report

Gill retains top spot despite WHP

Not content with hogging the News headlines for the last three months by holding on to the top spot, Gill is about to generate more by getting married! By the next meeting she’ll be Mrs Wilson. We at the SBGA wish you all the best on your wedding day Gill, and thanks for removing one of the two sets of GG initials from the membership list, henceforth you’ll be known as GW.
The new Thomas Enterprises main game Cops & Robbers showed some promise, but had bugs that needed squashing, for example the huge price difference between some properties such that the less valuable ones were simply bypassed while everyone targeted the expensive ones. One part of the board received the bulk of the traffic which we think can be improved by moving the jail to the opposite corner from the police station. I’m sure El Prez will take those issues on board. It was somehow appropriate that it was won by Wayne himself, followed by me then Tara.
The backup game Slam was also a new El Prez original that is simple, went quite quickly and had no discernable faults in its first outing. It was won by Genelle (the last remaining GG) followed by Nicole and me.
We had one absentee – Mark being out of the country, and an honourable mention goes to Louise for the other WHP.

Gill regains the upper hand

Gill turned up to the May meet after missing the previous two and made short work of her challengers, breaking the 3-way tie at the top by winning Trivial Pursuit with 4 cheeses, then coming 2nd in Uno, opening an 80 point lead on the pack that was baying at her heels in April.Mark did well to come 2nd in TP after a 3-way tie (3 cheeses each) was broken by a quiz-off with Rob coming 3rd. Mark’s 50 points have lifted him out of Wooden Spoon position, overtaking Louise. Tara also made points by winning Uno and now she’s coming 2nd but only 10 points ahead of Rob. Gill was quite chuffed to win TP, wallowing in the knowledge that she finally beat Rob at his favourite game. Genelle and Louise both WHP.

We had two absentees from this meet – Wayne had to attend a crisis meeting at the Musical Society, and Nicole apologised for last minute notice, she had a deadline looming that involves painting designs on 40 leotards! This allowed us to play Trivial Pursuit individually – no teams.

In June it will be Wayne hosting at Jannali, and he has picked two new games of his own making. Cops & Robbers is a “fast paced action game with robbers committing crimes, taking hostages, creating sieges and battling 4 law enforcement agencies”. The backup is Slam – a cricket-based card game.

Thanks to you all for your tolerance of our pup Daisy May – here she is looking apologetic for snuffling in Louise’s bag and finding a pack of tissues and a work card key, both now slightly chewed. Eventually she settled down and went to sleep, leaving us in peace.

Gill absent and still not overtaken, BUT…

Gill, you know, that person on the top score, couldn’t make it for the second consecutive meet, however there are now THREE players tied on the top score of 175 – Gill, Genelle and Rob! Only 5 points behind on 170 is Tara. Take a look at the line graph on the home page – it makes interesting reading; you can see Gill’s 125 points in February rocketed her to the top where she has since flatlined. Nicole‘s 125 in January rocketed her to the top, but that lead only lasted till February. Half the membership is now jammed together at the top of the ladder! Wayne‘s Shire Buyer win has lifted him out of the Wooden Spoon rank – that honour now falls to Mark who has been flatlining since February. Louise narrowly avoided slipping into last place by coming 2nd in Smart Ass, thus overtakling Mark.

The main game, Wayne’s Shire Buyer had it’s 2nd outing since it was new in 2012 – it was Genelle’s first SBGA game experience back then. Being relatively “new” meant that certain anomalies were revealed during game play. Wayne put a lot of effort into avoiding the Monopoly syndrome in which players who go broke must sit out the remainder of the game till there’s only one player left. Unfortunately it fell to poor Nicole to reveal that Monopoly syndrome has not been completely avoided – she went bankrupt with little chance of regaining any position at all. With nearly all properties owned, even a million dollar bank loan allows the broke player to travel the board, but with only a microscopic chance of expanding her property portfolio. One possible rule change might be to call Game Over if a player goes bankrupt twice.

Tara wins, Genelle & Rob get placings, everybody else WHP!

Thanks to Louise for having us over in March for a challenging game of Word Power that took so long to play that the scheduled backup Smart Ass had to be abandoned. To avoid too much disappointment Genelle has chosen Smart Ass as the April backup. Gill was feeling off colour and didn’t make it to the meet, but retains the leadership by a reduced margin, now only 15 points, previously 50 points. Tara won Word Power (and Bunnings voucher) by a significant margin, and the 100 points boosted her up the ladder, overtaking Mark, Nicole, and Genelle. Due to the absence of a secondary game the majority of players scored WHP, the only placegetters being Tara, Genelle and Rob. Wayne had to borrow Mark‘s specs to read questions as he’d left his own in his car (a common occurrence), and there was no way he was going to climb up that driveway to retrieve them!

At this meet we used Genelle’s Disney pieces for the first time instead of the supplied game pieces – we now have our own permanent pieces. They were slightly too big for the Word Power squares with some crowding evident, but overall a success. Without going into too much detail, Rob was chastised by resident Disney expert Nicole for a decidedly non-Disney comment about an unfortunate juxtaposition of Woody and the Alien.

Genelle will be hosting the April meet, so please note the earlier start time of 7:30, and sort out your car pooling. I plan to depart Como at about 6:20, and the back seat will be available. We plan to play the backup Smart Ass first so that the main game Shire Buyer can go as long as necessary and conveniently ended whenever required, placings decided by money amassed.

UPDATE:
Nicole was going to miss the April meet due to husband being away and child minding necessities, but due to it being school holidays, she can make it to the meet if it is hosted at her residence in Engadine. Genelle has kindly agreed to the change, so the venue will now be Nicole’s, same games, start time 8pm.

Nicole takes the lead – Champ scores WHP

Nicole was once again the hostess par excellence – in keeping with the piggy flavour of one of our games, she served pink cupcakes with marshmallow piggy faces on top! Yum!
The main game was Pictionary with teams drawn as Nicole/Genelle, Louise/Gill, Tara/Mark and Wayne/Rob. To save time at game end, after Nicole/Genelle crossed the finish line, the other placegetters elected to finish immediately as Gill/Louise were already on the final square, and Wayne/Rob had not yet even left square one!
Pass the Pigs was the backup, and we started off using Gill’s new set of piggies that were in quite different packaging from our old set. After one round, it was noticed that there were numerous instances of pigs landing halfway between on their back and on their side, theoretically a rare situation without a score attached. Rob went and retrieved the older set of pigs from his car, and we swapped them. There were still some “leaning razorbacks” but not as frequent. We elected to treat them as 5-point razorbacks. Wayne won in seemingly effortless fashion while prattling on about anything but the game in question while the rest of us battled pigout after pigout. Nicole and Tara got the minor placings.

This is the first meeting report on the new website that will replace regular updates on the SBGA Facebook group. While Facebook is ideal for our purposes, there is now 25% of the membership that doesn’t use it – Genelle has never taken the plunge, and Wayne recently closed his FB account. With only phone access, he found it too stressful and confusing not knowing which material to ignore or not, and there certainly is much on FB worth ignoring. Some members expressed a preference to keep the SBGA Facebook page alive, so it will stay, but for now I’ll be posting meeting updates and reports here rather than there. Any of you are welcome to post on FB. I’ll probably be tinkering with this website to gradually improve it, so feel free to give me feedback if you find anything broken or annoying.

UPDATE:
Mother Theresa’s missing novelty game pieces have been found on a shelf hiding behind El Prez’s copy of Sherlock Holmes! Now we just need to find Tara’s missing shirt. And just for good measure, here’s a photo of her to prove I can insert photos into news items… (isn’t it a great photo?)