The Wollongong Ripper

Yesterday we headed into town to play an interesting detective game - The Wollongong Ripper. Basically it was a scavenger hunt run across the city-centre, and managed by an app we all installed on our phones. Teams or up to six people set out to solve the mystery of a serial killer targetting police officers.

We were encouraged to dress up. So we did. We lost two team members to illness, so could only manage four of the six Cluedo characters - my son portrayed the worst Professor Plum ever, my wife a slightly bohemian Reverend Green, Maya a very bohemian Mrs Peacock and myself a rather mature Miss Scarlett.

Essentially the app showed us various points on a map of Wollongong where we'd could find witnesses or useful locations. When you got within a certain distance of the point it would show the character's details and you could pick up a statement and maybe interrogate them using a limited supply of questions. Sometimes, though, you'd have to solve a puzzle first and, in at least two cases, you had to visit witnesses in a particular sequence since one would give you an object you needed in order to gain access to another. Some points awarded penalties (usually time penalties) and some offered rewards (a time bonus or extra questions). 

You could guess the killer at any time, but there was a massive time penalty if you got it wrong.

At the end of the day the winning team would be the one that solved it in the shortest possible time, but there was also pries for best costumes, best team name and a few other things as well.

I think around thirty teams took part in total, so it was fun wandering the city and seeing the different costumes and groups of people having fun. We identified a likely suspect very early on, and then spent far too much time confirming it was them - it was, and it was as obvious a solution as it seemed to be. But it was fun taking our time over it.

We'd certainly do something like this again; the initial game setup was a bit fiddly but once we got started it all went very smoothly.

Christmas Games

I hope you all had a great Christmas, how ever you chose, or were able, to celebrate it. 

We were able to get family together -  our children and their partners, plus my new daughter-in-law's brother. And with that many people in one place it meant ... games.

Last year we played pool at my niece's pace on Christmas Day itself. we were unable to go there this year, but Mrs Kobold proposed an alternative - Carrom. This is an Indian game similar to pool/billiards, but using round disks which are hot by a flicked striker disk. We bought a board many years ago - before we were married I think - but hadn't had it out in years. And my daughter's partner also had a board, so we had two games of doubles running in parallel.

We failed to finish either of them; carrom is a game where penalties mean that pocketed pieces are returned to the board, and we were so bad that pieces were being retured to play as fast as we could pocket them. Still, we had a great time.

Our game was hindered somewhat by the board. My daughter's partner's board was quite old, and is probably past its best. My daughter had read that, in order to smooth it off, you could sprinkle it with cornflour. She had a curious idea about how much cornflour to use. By the end of the game we all looked like we'd been snorting cocaine.

After the carrom we opened presents - more about what emerged later. After that it was time for a nap for me, but some of the others played Skull.

And then I woke up and it was on to the main event of the afternoon - Elon Musk's iPod Submarine. Here are the rules: 

People picked it up pretty quickly, and despite some early reservations about how well it would work we had a great time, and played for a good two or three hours. Our problems ranged from from 'A Skyscraper Is On Fire' and a 'World Drinking-Water Shortage' to 'Not Enough People Adopting Puppies' and 'Elon Musk Had Lost His Memory'. The favoured solution to the latter was 'Do Nothing'.

But that stage of the day it was time to get on with some cooking, and then eat the resulting enormous roast dinner. We had also been joined by our tenant and our next-door neighbour. 

That left nine of us playing The Cat Game. This fun, Pictionary-style, game kept is going for most of the evening, until my son, his wife and her brother had to leave. 

The rest of us switched to a push-your-luck dice game called Greed.

And that saw us through to the end of Christmas Day.

Before my daughter and her partner left on Boxing Day we played a game of a an Egyptian-themed tile-collecting game she'd picked up in a charity shop called Tutankhamen. well worth the $3 she paid for it.

And then we had another go at There's Been A Murder. It took us four tries to catch the murderer, but even the failures were fun.

After that there was just Mrs Kobold and I. We decided to look at a game we'd got from my parents (or, at least, pre-emptively bought with money we knew we'd get from my parents - Flamme Rouge

I really fancied some kind of racing game, and had seen this in a shop a few weeks ago. I looked up reviews and play-throughs and felt that it was just the sort of thing I was looking for. Each payer has two cyclists - the steady Rouleur and the faster (sometimes) Sprinteur. On a turn each cyclist plays a movement card from their type-specific deck, then all players move their cyclists along the course. If there is a one-space gap between cyclists towards the rear of the pack and those further forward, then the rear is moved up due to slipstreaming. The combined pack is then moved up if there's a one-space gap in front of it. And so on. Any cyclist with a space in front of them after this gets an exhaustion card added to their deck. The game is very much about managing your limited hand of movement cards, and co-ordinating the movement of your two cyclists to gain maximum movement for minimum effort. 

On Boxing Day we simply played a two-player game. Today I found some AI rules, and we were able to add a couple of NPC teams, which make the game a lot more interesting. And finally we played with ascents and descents, which make the card management even more difficult.

Mr Wednesday liked the box.

My son  bought me the European implementation of 'Ticket To Ride', which Mrs Kobold and I also managed to play today. That's certainly a game which needs more than two people, but at least we understand how to play it now.

So that was our Christmas - mostly games.

How about you?

There's Been A Murder

Last night Catherine, Maya and I had a go at 'There's Been A Murder'. This is  small, quick, cooperative card-game from Tin Star Games, in which the players work together to unmask a murderer in a deck of cards representing the occupants of a stereotypical 1930s country-house. It's all very Agatha Christie, with individuals such as The Cad, The Socialite and The Butler helping of hindering The Detective from revealing The Murderer.

The deck consist of 18-20 cards (slightly more if you have 5 or more players), and each player starts with a hand of two cards. Each card represents a character, and has a particular game effect, allowing players to pass cards to other players, discard cards, swap cards, search the draw or discard pile and so forth. By careful card play you must engineer things such that either The Detective is played to force the player with The Murderer to reveal it, or The Murderer is passed to the player with The  Confidant (in which case the murderer confesses). If the deck runs out, or if The Murderer is inadvertently passed to someone holding The Witness, then the players lose. 

This all sounds pretty straightforward, except for one thing:  this is a polite English country-house, and it's considered unseemly to talk about what cards you have in your hand. So you can't. The rules require that you can't directly or indirectly state what you have in your hand, what you know is in other people's hands or what you've seen in the deck. You can discuss tactics, so it becomes a game of very subtle communication, combined with using the card abilities to collect information. 

We played three game, and unmasked the murderer in the third. According to the designer it's fairly straightforward with three players, and is optimised for four. Extra cards are added to the deck for the fifth to eighth players, which make life slightly easier with the larger numbers.

It's available via the link above as either a deck of cards, or as a print and play version (which at $3 is an absolute steal, since it's a dead easy game to put together).

Weekend Games

This weekend included Fathers Day in Australia, and both of my children came over to see their old dad. We went out for a meal on Saturday (the day before actual Fathers Day, so we missed the rush), then had some family time on Sunday. And we played games.

First up was 'Murder Most Fowl', by Invincible Ink. This is a card game of bird-watching, with each player laying cards to create a 'path' which shows off a particular family of birds to its best advantage.

As the paths develop, players can sabotage each other's efforts, and eventually this may lead to ... Murder!

The game is inspired by Agatha Christie-type mysteries where rivalries within a harmless and innocuous hobby lead to death.

The game was fairly interesting, but we found several bits of the rules were unclear. It turns out that my daughter's copy is an older edition, and that there are updated rules, which clear up a couple of points, but we've had to raise questions with the designers over other areas.

Problems aside, the game occupied us happily for a chunk of Saturday afternoon, and that's really what you want out of a game.

On Sunday I was presented with this as a gift:

The Cat Game is basically a cat-themed variant on Pictionary. Players have to draw film-titles, people, activities and so forth for the other players, who have to guess what it is. The only real twist is that there are a pile of cut-out cat images included with the game, and these have to form part of the picture being drawn. That's it.

It's a stupid game with a stupid gimmick. We loved it. I can't say it'll see much time on our table, but it was ridiculous fun. A party game.

Murder And The Orient Express

We had another get-together with our friends the Perrys on Friday. We'd tried a couple of murder mystery evening with them over the past year and, having enjoyed them, Catherine wanted to have a go at writing and running one of her own.

The mystery went well; it's not an easy thing to design something like that and Catherine rose to the occasion providing an entertaining couple of hours for all involved, even if most of us guessed the identity of the killer. It was the journey to the solution which was fun, not necessarily the destination.

And, talking of journeys and destinations, we finished the evening with a game of Railway Rivals. This game has been released in a boxed form at some stage, but my version is one of the early cardboard tube editions purchased directly from the designer at a games con in the mid-eighties. I have four maps in my set, and we ran with France, since it's one of the two I have that suits six players.

Railway Rivals is, as the name suggests, a game of building railway systems and then (in an abstract form) operating them. This is, of course, a whole genre of games now, but Railway Rivals was one of, if not the, first.

Half of the fun of the game is that you get to draw on the laminated map. Here's the game in its early stages, as each player expands their network from one of the starting towns around the map.

Once the map has a mostly complete network the game shifts into an operations phase, which is run as  series of  races between randomly determined towns on the map. Players win more points with which to expand their network, and the races are punctuated by chances to expand your system.

We had one player team race ahead in the operations phase, and pretty much hold their position, but there was a lot of shifting around for the other five places. My network was the green one, which started in the south of France. I managed to create lines which at least pushed to the edges of some other areas, and had some lucky races come up which  made use of track I'd just built, but only managed to get a fourth place at the end. The most exciting races were a short one which ran from Rouen to England, and consisted of three ferries racing across the Channel, and another race which saw three players steaming across the whole country from Bayonne on the Spanish border to Belgium.

This was the map at the end, with additional player doodles.

This was the first time I've had this game out in possibly twenty years, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. sadly I don't think you can buy new maps for it anymore.