Thursday 29 May 2014

Arthur baby is better than none

Just a brief note from tonight’s Roll For The Soul event. I didn’t take any photos and I came last three times, so there’s no need to linger on the details. Plus, there are several names that I’ve forgotten. Ah, well. I remember the most important bit: Adam and Hannah arrived, with little baby Arthur.

The first game was 6nimmt – a game that I remain baffled by, and I came crashing out in a distant last. Adam, on his return to the world of GNN scraped a win by one solitary point from Katie. Meanwhile, Katie’s husband sat in for one round and, although he didn’t understand the rules and was pretty much playing cards at random, he still did better than me.

We split into two groups: Martin, Andy, Katie and someone else whose name slips my memory, played Abluxxen. Meanwhile, Adam and Hannah were keen to try GNN favourite Port Royal, so we began a three-player game.

After I explained the rules we began playing a dummy round so Hannah and Adam could see how it worked. Then Mel arrived, and we dealt her in. So the dummy round continued for a little while longer and then we decided that, since Adam and Hannah (and Arthur, too) had to go soon, maybe this should be the actual game. Mel was given a card at random to even out the disadvantage of starting late, and we continued.

It all seemed to be going smoothly, with Arthur being passed from mother to father as and when necessary. I got a bad case of explainer’s curse, and came last wqith just 7 points. Mel had 9, Adam 11, but Hannah just stole it by nabbing her 12th point on the last turn.

As for Abluxxen, I don’t know who won, but I know Martin didn’t after he complained about a terrible last round. Katie didn’t like it, finding it too stressful, but the other players seemed to find it more enjoyable.

Finally, Adam and Hannah left because it was bed time (ostensibly their child’s, but possibly theirs too. I didn’t ask) so the six remaining gamers played a game of Fauna, the RFTS smash hit of guessing stuff about obscure animals, pronounced "Fa-oona" by Mel, which caused some confusion to Katie who wondered if she'd been pronouncing that word wrong her whole life.

I didn’t badly, thinking that because I’d never heard of a dogfish (except in comics when I was six) that it probably wasn’t that big. I also didn’t know anything about the Macaw. Martin won in the end, thanks to his knowledge of bandicoots. This species cropped up fairly recently, and it does occur to me that if you play the “easy” animals (on one side of the deck), then the “difficult” animals (on the other side of the deck), followed by the “easy” ones, then you’ll get the same ones cropping up again. Still, it was fun, and it took us neatly up to ten o’clock.

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