Plus or Minus by Fair Means or Foul

Thursday games began with three player Uptown, a little tile placement game. When the others (Petra Pan and mrwendell) arrived they requested a game that either we already knew or was light and easy to learn because it had been a long hard day at the coalface and synapses were frazzled.






After a bit of a discussion in the hobbies room and some exploration of the games shelves Crabro and I emerged with an twenty year old Klaus Teuber "race" game which has been published under various names such as Hoity Toity and Adel Verplichtet, my own copy being the Gibsons-published Fair Means or Foul.

At first glance this is more complicated than it looks but each turn breaks down into the choice of a card in each of two phases. The intermediate object is to build collections to exhibit in various stately homes but the overall object is simply moving round the track. Light but enjoyable, it passed quickly enough that we had to look for a third light game to finish the evening. I suggested to Crabro we might try Plus and Minus again while it was fresh in our minds.

This worked fine even though the venerable game is a symphony of browns and pastel colours muted by the fading of time. Clearly it was old but still fun. Petra Pan, the youngest of our merry band thought it was so old that it might date from...the seventies! At this point I felt particularly old, as the 1970s were arguably the Rooftrouser heyday when I was a schoolboy then a student, with all that implies. I couldn't, however, remember the games at that time being particularly brown or wooden. In fact we were mostly playing Risk, Diplomacy, Speed Circuit and Kingmaker at the time. As I think I've mentioned before I do not know how old Plus and Minus is but I suspect it is from the 1930s or 1940s although it would not look out of place a decade or two earlier still.

 A not too taxing evening of light, fun games but as to the results I think I will say that the younger elements were on form and draw a veil over my own performance.