by Ben Bateson
It had been over a month since I had seen Tony, and I was rather looking forward to his cheeky smile and rapier wit once more. Instead, I face the following - verbatim - Facebook Messenger exchangeTony: How many tonight?
Me: Five
Tony: Arse
Which I - correctly - interpreted that the huge shortlist of two games that he wanted to play (presumably Round House and Tasty Laurence) wouldn't accommodate that many. Still I loaded up the games bag with plenty of outstanding five-player fare: Concordia, Keyflower, Princes of Florence and El Grande.
Tony didn't want to play any of them.
Instead he preferred to play a 2P Le Havre with Becky, while leaving John, Bill and I to Cuba. Another game, incidentally, that would have been more than acceptable with all five of us playing.
Assuming - incorrectly - that Bill had recovered from his chronic 'how NOT to place your buildings on your plantation board' syndrome, I opted to throw the El Presidente expansion in: a first for any of us. There has been a lot of guff talked here about how the expansion 'completes' Cuba. Well...it's a good expansion, and I enjoyed it a lot, it fixes a bad Start Player rule, and I'll almost certainly include it every time now because it doesn't add any complexity. But it would be stretching a point to say that the base game is unplayable without it.
Remarkably, John used to badmouth Cuba, but he's been recently transformed to one of its biggest proponents. Truth is, he had the lead from the opening round and - pausing only briefly for a classic John-ism* - managed to keep it throughout, despite a late charge from myself. I still need to win over Becky (and Dan), but Cuba is belatedly becoming part of a favourite rotation for the rest of us.
I suppose the one bright side of the anti-social Le Havre table was that it finished concurrently with our rum'n'baccy exploits, so we had time to all congregate for a game of Friese's excellent double-guessing game, Unexpected Treasures. It might be a mite crowded with 5P (God knows how it plays with 6), but it didn't stop Becky proceeding to a huge win.
Tony had been untimely called away for family duties, so we had about an hour to fill. Various permutations were proffered, but only Buccaneer managed to meet with everyone's favour (it really was one of those nights). This is one of those uniquely Stefan Dorra games which really seems to simple to work but is actually hugely fun once you get stuck in. It also seems to be a particular favourite of John and he managed to win once again.
So, the practical upshot was a night when no-one seemed to want play anything that anyone else wanted to play. Roll on Christmas!
* Hearing the jukebox's Random function spin up Peter, Bjorn and John's seminal 'Young Folks', apropos of nothing, John looks up, spits out: 'I fucking HATE whistling' and returns quite merrily to planning his turn.
