Category: Meeting report

Tara wins, Steve most improved

On a balmy late spring evening at the Jannali Gamerdome it was the expected outcome – our game host Tara won the championship for 2022. She finished 70 points ahead of Rob who was 105 points ahead of Genelle. Never have we seen a player so nervous about cementing her place at the top of the ladder as Tara – she was sick with anticipation, and told us her kids wanted to be woken up and told the result if she won – so wakey wakey kids!
The graph shows that Steve was the most improved player, rising up to 4th place from Wooden Spoon position that he held from the start of play until July, so it was fitting that Steve was the winner of the annual Beano award of $50 cash, the traditional year end prize for a main game win. The Wooden Spoon this year goes to Louise who was only five points below Ross on the ladder. Wayne Louise and Nicole were all recipients of WHP, and Ross was absent.

The main game Sherlock Holmes went off without problems, but a detailed reading of the rules by Rob revealed that we’ve been doing the initial deal incorrectly for many years. It seems that on the deal, only one villain is included. Previously we have dealt out cards which included at least one villain with the possibility of multiple baddies being distributed. Only a minor point, but we like to do it right don’t we gamers?
Billionaire! was up to its normal fun level with Rob scoring a personal best, getting three Billionaire calls. Genelle got two and steve got one, and that’s how the placings went. Tara got four penalties offset by one Billionaire, and Louise also got four penalties, but no actual wins.

Don’t forget the Annual Dinner at Taren Point Bowlo (203 Holt Rd) at 7pm on Monday 28 November – there are trophies to be had.

Tara’s heading for the win

Another night at the Jannali Gamerdome – this one a bit damp, as is most of the eastern side of the country. Wayne was hosting and Genelle supplied a mini birthday cake for El trez who had celebrated it the previous day – thanks GG.

Look at the scoreboard – it has now definitely morphed into something we’ve not quite seen before. The three potential trophy winners fighting it out at the top of the ladder, then a large gap of 335 points to the also-rans lumped together in a 35 point band. It looks like the number 1 trophy is almost in the bag for Tara with only an outside chance of being overtaken by Rob, and another outside chance of Genelle overtaking Rob. At the other end of the scoreboard, a late run by two or three of the also-ran group could see The Spoon go to any one of them.

We played one of the El Prez originals, Musicopoly, in which players act as entertainment booking agents getting gigs for their performers. It has not been played for some years, and a weakness in the game strategy was revealed which somehow hadn’t been noticed previously – or possibly just forgotten. It concerned the idea af an act getting a residency at a particular venue – the rules not conferring any advantage on the agent owning the residency if an act he didn’t own turned up to play there. Our work-around was to allow residencies to be dumped at any time, as the other disadvantage was that an act with a residency was locked in to the venue and couldn’t play anywhere else. We think it should be fixable with a couple of rule changes. Rob won Musicopoly convincingly, mainly luck by not scoring any huge bills. Louise was ashamed of herself for scoring the only WHP despite there being only five players present. Nicole had urgent work commitments, Ross was ill and heading for a Covid test, and Steve was celebrating his wedding anniversary. Happy Anniversary Steve!

The backup game Pass The Bomb went off with much fun as usual – won by Tara.

November is the month of the Beano prize – $50 cash to the main game winner, so get your deerstalker hats ready for the Sherlock Holmes extravaganza. Also in November we need to start thinking about finalising dues payments. I’ve made a guess at what the trophies will cost and a rough estimate shows that those owing back dues are Louise ($1.42), Steve ($21.74), Nicole ($21.73) and Tara ($13.63). You will all get an email with more exact figures as soon as final costs are known. The current plan for our annual dinner is December 5, to be finalised soon.

Tara leaps ahead

With only two meetings until season’s end we’re starting to see the shape of the ladder at trophy time – just look at the graph. The three front runners are well above the bunched up rest of the pack – “the rest” are squished together inside a 50-point band centred around 210 points which is 360 points behind the leader. Tara‘s almost flat score line over the previous three months allowed Rob to catch up to within 20 points, but tonight that changed with Rob’s WHP and Tara’s double helping of points, and then Genelle‘s 100 point win in Word Power pushing her into 2nd spot, but only by a margin of 10 points. The only other change of positions is where Louise overtakes Steve, but there’s only 5 points between them. So it’s starting to look like Tara for champion with Genelle and Rob fighting it out for 2nd and 3rd spot. The other WHP was El Presidente who is currently in Wooden Spoon territory, but that could change a couple of times within the closely spaced bottom of the pack between now and trophy presentation time. Nicole is the best of “the rest”, but not by much. Steve was a no-show due to late work attendance.

Steve returns… Scores Double Whammy!

Steve was our host at the Jannali gamerdome tonight – after putting together a pretty good selection of nibblies he then proceeded to make a spectacular comeback after languishing in the Spoon position since the season kickoff by scoring wins in both Wembley Cup and Sherwood. This has catapulted him up to 5th place, overtaking Louise, Wayne and Ross. The bunched up lower placings are now even more bunched up into a 45 point band. Tara has managed to break her 2-month flatline by the smallest of margins – her 10 points for third in Sherwood, which has allowed Rob to catch up a bit more, there now being only a 20 point gap between 1st and 2nd. Genelle sits in the middle of the gap between 2nd place and The Bunch. Louise and Ross were both absent due to family commitments.

Nicole and GG were the runners up at Wembley – we didn’t even bother to add up Steve‘s winnings so obvious was his stash. In fact we didn’t even bother to play the actual FA Cup final because Steve owned both teams, and we didn’t really need to go through the process of sorting out the auction of one of those teams, the result would have been the same. We did commit an error of dice selection in the semi-final because we failed to play the semis on neutral ground with both teams using the “away” dice, but the consensus was that the result probably wouldn’t have changed.

GG – double whammy in minimum quorum

Minimum Quorum – that was our attendance at the July meeting, just the four of us. Genelle, Louise, Wayne and Rob braved the cold and played in airconditioned comfort at Jannali (except there was no milk in the fridge for a cuppa). Tara was out of town on holiday (it was school hols time), Nicole had a bad sore throat (not Covid we believe), Steve had come down with Covid, and Ross was dealing with his very ill father.

This date was a significant birthday for Genelle, and she brought magnificent home made (by her daughter) cupcakes – we of course sang the requisite HB2U song. Once again Happy Birthday GG. It was in fact Ross’s turn to host, and he supplied nibblies earlier despite being absent for the meet.

The main game That’s Broadway was marred a bit by complex rules that had been significantly updated with hand printed notes from the original as a result of weaknesses that would have come to light during earlier meetings. There were even contradictory statements between two rules. As a result we spent far too much time interpreting rules instead of playing the game. It was won convincingly by Genelle who ended up with about 50% more funds than Wayne in 2nd place.

The backup was old favourite Pass the Pigs – also won by GG in a double whammy which has lifted her from the middle bunch on the scoreboard to within striking distance of Tara and Rob at 1 and 2 on the ladder. I have the piggy score sheet in front of me and it looks like Wayne takes the cake for “pigouts” – 11 out of 14 turns. Everybody else pigged out 6 times out of 14. There’s a reason for this – once Wayne realised he was trailing in the scores he had no choice but to take more risks which of course makes it more likely to go bust, such is the nature of the Pigs.

Tara‘s two consecutive absences have allowed her giant 185 point ladder lead to be whittled down to just 35 points. Just look at the scoreboard – in the middle there’s half the membership squashed into a 10-point wide bunch. Steve is lagging at the bottom not through lack of talent or luck, just through not actually playing games. Come on Steve, we want to see you at the gaming table some time, hopefully in August when you’re the host! (Covid permitting of course)

The Lovelorn Painter Behind The Fridge?

That must be the most obscure News heading we’ve ever had, but stay with me.

On a cold mid-winter evening there were just five of us to enjoy the mayhem – Steve was stuck at work, Tara was away out of town, and Nicole was not well with a sore throat. We played Trivial Pursuit individually (no teams) and finished by the clock with a cheese count to determine the winner (Rob) and a quiz-off for the runners up with Ross beating Louise to 2nd place.

The image above is a very famous American painting by Grant Wood known as American Gothic. One of the trivia questions asked of Genelle by a squinting Ross was “Which lovelorn painter was the artist responsible for American Gothic?” In fact he wasn’t wearing his spectacles, and it should have been “Which Iowa born painter…” hilarity ensued. Then there was the question Louise asked Rob about the title of the classic 60’s comedy revue starring Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller. The correct answer is “Beyond the Fringe”, but Rob’s answer was “Behind the Fridge”. More hilarity – however his answer wasn’t as silly as it sounded, Pete and Dud did in fact have a comedy TV series in the early 70’s called Behind the Fridge, a play on the title of the ground-breaking Fringe show which paved the way for acts like Monty Python and Not The 9 o’clock News.

We finished up with a quick 5 rounds of Uno – not the savage “flip” version, but the much gentler original. Wayne accused a couple of players of failing to say “Uno!” at the appropriate time despite everyone else having heard the call. He did mention that he’d resurrected his hearing aid, but still hadn’t got it working. The sooner the better I say.

Despite Tara being away, she retains a strong 85-point lead over Rob, then there is a 190 point gap to the middle runners Genelle and Ross tied in 3rd place closely followed by Nicole and Louise 10 and 15 points below. Wayne is 35 points below the middle runners with Steve flatlining since March on 50 points.

It was with great glee that Louise announced she has become a grandmother. Congrats from all of us Louise.

El Prez MIA, Tara leaps further ahead

On a rainy night in Engadine there were just five of us to meet – thanks to Nicole for the hospitality. Louise and Steve were unavailable, and Wayne was recovering from a bout of Covid. Although theoretically at the end of his mandatory isolation, he wasn’t feeling 100% confident to attend meetings.

The games were two new ones introduced by Nicole, and both were well received by those present. The scheduled main game was to be Catan – a teams event, but there being an odd number we reverted to the standby, also a new game, Snakesss. For those not present, here’s a quick description: It involves multiple choice trivia questions, but with a difference:- in each round one random player is a “mongoose”, and two are “snakes”, the rest are “normal humans”. Nobody knows which other players are snakes. When the trivia multiple choice question is read out, the snakes get to see the correct answer. There follows a brief discussion in which the snakes try to talk people into an incorrect answer. The mongoose tries to convince everyone to go for the answer they think is right. Everyone then puts in their token (A, B or C) for their chosen answer. The snakes don’t choose an answer as they already know it, so they put in a snake token. The tokens are then revealed. Snakes get points for all the wrong answers, mongooses get points for right answers, humans get a point if they got the right answer. The scores were close – Tara, Genelle and Ross got 34, 30 and 27 respectively. It seemed that Ross spent most of his turns being a snake rather than a normal human!

The backup game was Hues and Cues, a colour describing game played on a board with 480 squares of different colours. There are many different shades of the basic red, green, yellow and blue gradually shading across the board. On each turn the player draws a card with 4 colours on it, each matching one of the 480 squares. One colour is picked and the player tries to describe that shade with one word, for example “canary” for a shade of yellow. You can’t say the common colours like red, green, blue, etc. You can say things like “shirt” while pointing at a shirt. All the other players then place one token on the shade they think might match the word. The player then gets to say one more word for the same colour. Players then place a second token on a nearby shade indicated by the second word, for example “lighter”. Players get points for how close their tokens are to the actual colour. Rob had the brilliant idea of picking a shade of yellow close to his SBGA shirt, but completely stuffed up by letting everyone see his colour card when comparing it to his shirt. He was allowed to have another turn. At first this game was described by the blokes as “a girl’s game”, because a bloke would describe something as “yellow”, where a woman would say “lemon”, etc etc. However, the placings were Rob (bloke), Tara (non-bloke), Ross (bloke), so go figure.

With two helpings of points Tara has now increased her lead to a frightening 185 points over Rob who leads Nicole by 100 points. The absence of Louise and Wayne helped Genelle overtake both of them into 4th place. Ironically, the only WHP was our host Nicole.

Tara is on fire!

A nice early autumn evening at the Presidential Gamerdome in Jannali saw us depleted a bit – Steve in Covid isolation as a close contact, and Ross expecting a grandchild birth any minute. We hope it all goes well for you guys.

The headline above says it all – it was once again Tara’s night with two lots of points. She won 5 Crowns despite a creditable challenge from Louise. They both scored zeros in 6 of the 11 rounds, and remember zeros are good. On at least two rounds, Tara “went out” before anyone else had even arranged their cards into a neat hand – there was even talk of a steward’s inquiry! Our host Genelle – hmm, it might be kindest to say that the highlight of her performance in both games was the lovely cup of tea with apple Danish served in the break. Better luck next time GG. 5 Crowns is obviously not one of Wayne‘s favourites, but he did get a round of applause when he managed to “go out” without assistance on the very last hand.

Greed was won by Rob but it isn’t clear if he was helped by an unfortunate scoring error. It seems we were incorrectly allowing high scores to be awarded for some combinations that should have been thrown on a single roll. At least the error was applied to all players consistently. Tara got second place in Greed,despite casually rolling an actual $GREED on her very first turn. Nicole managed to avoid WHP by scoring 3rd. So the only WHP scorers (excluding absentees) were Wayne and Genelle.

Finally! Pictionary fans get to play

It was a lovely evening at Tara’s – the rain had stopped, but you could still hear the grass growing! Everybody got some points because it was a teams event (pairs), and with two absentees, Louise and Ross, that left 3 teams for 3 placings. Tara on home turf playing one of her favourites, Pictionary, was on fire, she took her team (me) to the lead early and stayed there. I must have said “you’re good at this!” at least 5 times. At the last square there was no mucking about – quickly answer an “all play” and take home the points, thank you very much. There was at least one serendipitous point for the winners – Tara drew a solid rectangular object, and while waiting for further clues Rob mumbled “rectangular prism” to give it its correct mathematical title, thus accidentally saying the required answer of “prism”. The Steve/Genelle team made a creditable effort, at one point catching up to the leaders, but then got left behind again. The Wayne/Nicole team took quite a while to move off the Start square and were never in the running. At one point when the item to be identified was “penguin”, Wayne rubbished Nicole’s perfect little drawing of a “happy feet” penguin, something at which she is expert, thus revealing the weakest link in that team. We did adopt a supplementary house rule for Pictionary: each player is allowed ONE pass/redraw when encountering a word totally unfamiliar to them.

The backup was Billionaire! also won by Tara. A new record of loss must have been set by Genelle – In 6 deals she was caught with either the Taxman or the Billionaire 4 times, and once ended up with both of them! That’s $240,000,000 penalty points and no winnings at all. Could it be that Mother Theresa was too nice to foist her penalty cards on another player?
That double dose of points for Tara has put her at the top of the table, overtaking Louise, Wayne and Nicole. Rob’s double points (won main, 2nd in backup) has let him overtake 4 players to grab 2nd spot on the ladder. Louise’s absence has cost her dearly – dropping from 3rd to 6th on the table.

Nicole strikes with the old One – Two

A pleasant evening at the Presidential Gaming Palace has seen Nicole get first in the main and second in the backup for 150 points – that takes her from zero to first place in one fell swoop! A double helping of points was also snaffled by Genelle who came 3rd in both games. Ross is now on the scoreboard with his 2nd placing in Gallop, and both Wayne and Louise WHP. Rob won the backup Slam without really trying – given that there is no strategy available, it was simply the luck of the dice. Tara was absent due to a child isolating with Covid, and Steve was attending a family birthday celebration.

Nicole’s win in Gallop was quite convincing despite her betting disaster on the last race. The Tote Clerk (me) opened her envelope last during the final race accounting because she was already in a very strong position, having won ownership money on the two horses that came first and second, and also having bet on both of them – so everyone was waiting to see how big a fortune she was due from her bets. As the envelope was opened, the Clerk jokingly announced “Oh no! The money isn’t correct!” (laughter) Then after checking the envelope contents he said again “Oh no – the money is REALLY not correct!” Nicole had some notes stuck together that resulted in an overpayment of about $200. Mother Theresa (GG) and others immediately came to her aid with suggestions of mitigating circumstances, but the rules document was quite specific about what happens if the cash doesn’t match the betting slip – and poor Nicole had her overpayment forfeited and her bet declared void. But she still won the game! Well done Nicole.