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.