night out

Games Night

Tim MaidmentLeave a comment

I’d forgotten just how good it is to get out of the house and sit with fellow geeks around a table to play games. Lady M wasn’t feeling great, so I wandered over to our friends’ flat on Monday evening with snacks and a selection of games to add to the mix.

And as we set up the board to play Pandemic (which I’d never played before) it was like tension boiling off. There were people there I didn’t know, but that didn’t matter because we were all focused on the table. My anxieties settled, and play began.

Okay, so the cards weren’t on our side and the world ended up dying as all the Outbreaks cascaded across the southern hemisphere as all the Epidemic cards came into play in very quick order, but it was a good start and broke the ice.

Then we played Cards Against Disney, and many people’s childhood memories were forever sullied. Sorry, not sorry – it did lead to several rounds of answers being sung in grand unison around the table. So, that happened…

We’ll no doubt do another one shortly as people’s shift patterns allow

Fun and Games

Tim MaidmentLeave a comment

The return of the Charleesi had to include both a visit to The Plough and the playing of games, and it made for a lovely relaxing afternoon, evening, and night.

A few drinks in and food inside us, we started to play Rock Paper Wizard – which combines hand gestures and tactic voting with Dungeons & Dragons spells. The backstory is that the players are powerful wizards who have slain a dragon and now stand in front of its hoard – and who then turn on each other to grab the biggest share.

Each round lays out spells to choose and you decide who you will play it on. Each card will either move pieces nearer to or further away from the board, or redistribute the gold coins that each player amasses. At the end of each round, the nearest players to the coins grabs an amount each. When all the coins have been claimed, the person with the most in their hand wins.

It’s a lovely visual game and can be very gently paced, or fast and furious. It also attracted comment and interest from other people in the pub; and the laughter from our corner table soon filled the whole bar.

Our second game, back from the bar, was Temp Worker Assassins – a deck building and piece placing game where you try to assassinate various supernatural corporate beings through the work week. Well-fuelled with alcohol, we played and laughed, and quibbled over rule interpretation – we will definitely be making it a regular centrepiece of evenings I think.

We got home late, but so worth it – Lady M hates being sociable, but she’ll always make an exception for games with the Charleesi.

Now Who’s My Wife Banging?

Tim MaidmentLeave a comment

Another Tuesday, another night of mayhem. In this instance, after a lovely fly-by visit from Lady P, we wandered down to The Plough and settled in. It was a lot busier than usual, with several groups of people who had stopped in for meals, and so the number of people who had not encountered the live music there before was correspondingly higher. This always leads to fun and games.

One young lady, much the worse for wear after several glasses of wine, decided to join the musicians at their table to try and chat them up/make requests/sway in a seat, and not take any hints that she was getting in the way or unplugging trailing cables.

With Lady G’s beau trapped in the middle of the musicians with an increasingly bemused expression, we of course took it upon ourselves to take the mickey through the medium of interpretive dance behind her.

So, when the finale arrived: the traditional rendition of ‘Two Packs of Lager and A Packet of Crisps’ – I mean, Duelling Banjos, we were all invited closer. A spirited if less than coordinated bit of flailing around later, with Lady M and Lady G bumping hips regularly, a silence fell.

As the drunken young lady flounced off, Lady M’s voice rang across the room: “If I’ve got bruises in the morning, remind me I’ve been banging Kate.”

As you can imagine, conversations become even more ribald at that point, and we’ve never been ones to back down from innuendo and silliness.

Happy days…