Gamesnight 1st February ….‘Gheos’ by Rene Wiersma
‘Is this the joint for a gamesnight?’ growls Kendall as Dicken opens the door. Bizarre what a walk in the neighbourhood can do to a grown man. Paul and Liz have arrived by car and are suitably relaxed; but who is the stranger in the kitchen with Carol? It’s Donald, looking in better health than he has for years – giving up the triathlon and teaming up with a ‘good woman’ (Sarah, not Carol) is obviously something we should all be doing.
Unfortunately tonight’s scheduled game is ‘Gheos’ and it’s a 2-4 player. However being 45-60 minutes playing time means there will be plenty of time for a six player later. Dicken has already set up and the rules have a familiar feel. ‘Carcassone’ and ‘Tigris Euphrates’ are just two titles that spring to mind on first impressions. In fact it’s perhaps surprising that Ragnar Brothers are not credited, as the Epoch tiles and scoring tokens have a decided feel of ‘History of the World’ and ‘Kings and Castles’ respectively.
First player is determined by the last player to start laughing. Paul threatens to re-tell his elephant joke, which is sufficient for the three other clowns to guffaw obligingly so that the game can commence. There is a reference to ‘inspiring discussions’ in the rules; Dicken gives the designer the benefit of the doubt on this one, suggesting he is simply being ‘ironic’.
‘Gheos’ is a tile laying game that uses triangular tiles. The spiel on the box bottom talks of Gods and continent making and civilisations and loyal, wealthy followers. There are pyramids and temples and plenty of victory point tokens in 1’s, 5’s, 10’s, 20’s and 50’s (very K&C). Each player starts with two tiles, presenting the novel problem of how to hold two triangles; Liz, Paul and Dicken soon have there’s face down on the table, but Kendall persists in propping his up behind his beer can.
The game begins with Paul placing a tile, starting a civilisation and taking one of the five followers of that civilisation. This simple process takes around five minutes as rules are re-read to check on how the wheat symbol (agriculture) affects play. There are two other ‘round’ symbols; cups (wealth) and weapons (war). Temples can be used to garner points depending on which symbol they carry. Pyramids are permanent bastions, grinding out points whenever Epoch tiles (of which there are eight) are drawn. Paul draws another tile and the whole thing is repeated (including re-reading the rules) by Dicken, then Kendall, then Liz.
For the second week running, Dicken has laid on copious amounts of food – he’ll soon be taking up the triathlon.
After a few rounds of play, Kendall is moaning that he’s not drawn any ‘interesting’ tiles i.e. temples or pyramids. In fact Paul is the only player to have drawn more than one such tile so far. The rest of the tiles show various subdivisions of land and combinations of round symbols. These suddenly become more interesting when Kendall makes his first ‘replacement’. This is the new mechanism that Gheos brings to the genre of tile laying games; take a tile out and put in a new one. Cue lots of attempts to make jokes about tectonic plates. Kendall removes the start tile, only to be reminded that pyramid tiles cannot be removed. An alternative play emerges and Kendall has a minor sense of triumph.
Thereon in the game is dominated by replacements. The number of tiles making up the map creeps up to just twenty or so in total causing Kendall to describe the game as ‘throbbing’ to which Paul adds the even more improbable and suggestive allusion to it ‘going in and out’. Liz’s laughter becomes even more racey than usual.
Replacing tiles generates wars and migrations, which means more re-reading of rules.
Meanwhile Paul has managed to scupper Kendall’s yellow empire only to gift Dicken 40 points in one turn. He promises to ‘scupper’ Dicken, which he does some turns later; this time to the delight of Kendall. A last check of the rules confirms that everyone has a final scoring round at game end, and this is sufficient for Kendall to romp home as a somewhat surprised winner. Kendall scores 105, Liz has 91, Dicken 84. Paul has a mind-numbing total of just 34; his comment of ‘I thought I was playing well’ raises more laughter than the elephant joke.
Paul cornered the market for choice comments throughout the evening and his enthusiastic rejoinder that ‘I think this game is OK!’ is particularly apt. It is OK. It’s neat and tidy and works without offence. But it is so much a set of mechanics and so unconvincing in its representation of a theme that it’s bound to be only an occasional choice with the Ragnars.
It also took 90 minutes to play, which means that conversation with Donald supersedes the opportunity for a second game. Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd… then on to films of the nearer past ‘Get Carter’, ’Breakback Mountain’, ‘Happy Feet’ … how cultured! So ends something of a ‘classic’ games-night; humour thrives in adversity.
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