Rouge in the Cheeks

Last week the boys, Sally and I went to Katie and Mark's for a few days away from the big city. After the travails of hiring a car (power cuts at the car rental place, extra charges for not having a credit card, the bank suspecting fraud and declining payment) and then the travails of the M5 (five hours to reach south Devon!) we finally arrived, remembering that we'd not done our lateral flow tests before leaving. This is how all holidays start now...

Monday

Safely in the clear, we spent a while catching up before heading out with dog Nellie for a walk while the weather was reasonable. Nellie isn't pictured here, probably because she was running around or pulling plants out of the ground elsewhere. She's bonkers. 

In the evening the first of the games arrived. These were Love Letter (winners: Peppa and Stan) In Vino Morte (Peppa) before everyone else went to bed (bar Stan) and Mark, Peppa and I broke out the first of our attempts at Flamme Rouge. We plumped for a Tour, where finishing places carry over and scores are cumulative. On the first race, Peppa led from the front, picking up numerous exhaustion cards. She then blocked both Mark and I from overtaking, and afterwards I realised that we were definitely playing something slightly wrong, and we should have been able to overtake. Nonetheless, the scores stood, and Peppa was off to a flyer. 

Tuesday

Early in the morning - well, 10am - I led the boys and Lula off to Kingsbridge for a poke around the games shop, which has now moved from a tucked-away corner to a slightly smaller space, but on the high street itself. After ten minutes perusing the shelves we emerged with Dragomino and Decrypto (me; my Decrypto pad was exhausted and both stands broken) and High Risk (Lula). Sporting some other holiday goods (free books, nectarines, aubergine pickle) we returned to the house and Lula, Mark and I broke out High Risk. 

This is a super-simple luck-pusher of getting your guys to the top of the mountain first. Dice or rolled for movement; do you settle for what you have or roll your duds again and risk going bust? When you move, all movement is assigned to a single climber, and while the bivouac spaces can be shared, the smaller mountain spaces can't, so an arriving climber will shove the current occupant off ('like an asshole' - Mark) to the next available spot below. If you go bust, your highest climber falls in similar fashion - although climbers at the summit won't go anywhere, preventing the game from lasting forever. It's fun enough; not as elegant as K2, but not as long as Pickonimo. 

Then everyone refused to play Dragomino with me, so I played it twice myself. This is the little sibling of Kingdomino: there's no area scoring or multiplication and no claiming of next round's tiles. Instead you simply take one tile from the array and add it to your kingdom - I think the theme is exploring an island - and if any land types match, you 'find' a dragon egg there; taking a face-down egg from the supply and flipping it over. If it's a dragon, that's a point. If it's an empty egg, that's not, but you do take the Mother Dragon token which means you'll choose first in the next round (it's also worth a point at the end of the game).

I enjoyed this so much that at various points in the day I managed to get Stan, Peppa and Sally to all play with me (though I rarely won). The entire game takes ten minutes but despite the simplicity, it certainly doesn't play itself, with Peppa in particular on the lookout for taking tiles others might like. We also tried a small variant where the tiles with watering holes on allow you to take two eggs and choose between them instead of the standard one. 

In the afternoon we trundled down to the beach. Lula was the sole heroine in terms of actually getting in the sea, hurtling off the breakwater while the tide was high enough. The rest of us took turns digging an enormous hole and then inventing a game called Holeball where the hole was the goal and if you scored you went in it as keeper. Surprisingly good fun. I had slept really badly though so at one point I laid down under a towel and closed my eyes. And Joe and I walked out on the breakwater.

We buried Stan's legs in the hole before we left. 

In the evening there was more Dragomino and the little-seen Tomatomato, where you say all the syllables of 'tomato' (plus one rogue potato) in fast but random order. If you make a mistake, all the other players get to pick up a tile, and the winner is the player whose tiles can spell 'tomato' the most. 

My tactic was leaning in like an old man and moving my head along the line of tiles as though peering shortsightedly at a bus timetable, reading as I went. Old man wins!

There was three games of Spicy between Peppa and I, then as tired children and adults tottered off to bed, it was time for Flamme Rouge again. With a huge amount of flat before any hills, Mark and Peppa shot off early and I struggled to catch them. 

I was so far back I was picking up as many exhaustion cards as the leaders, and although I managed to catch them (my rouleur finished second) in the overall positions my team was a distant third as things stood. Noticing that the riders seem to have enormous butt cracks ("that's a seam" Mark pointed out) was scant consolation.

Wednesday

There was a trip planned to Adrenalin Quarry for the early evening, for much cavorting on massive inflatables atop freezing water, so I had to go and get myself a wetsuit. This was a bit like the car hire adventure all over again, as my card was declined and I didn't have the back-up with me, so had to call Sally and get her to transfer money on my laptop back at the house. Factor in the negligible Devon 3G signal and me holding my arms in the air halfway up a hill and you have a decent portrait of the level of chaos I have, day by day, being a scatterbrained halfwit of the highest order. Fortunately, we got there in the end, and I came away with a rather expensive new all-in-one outfit. 

Back at the house Peppa was up, and up for games. We cracked through another two Spicys (one win apiece) before Mark joined us for the next leg of our Flamme Rouge tour. My riders lurked near the back again for most of the race, but ended things a little less lamely this time - true, my sprinter limped in last, but my rouleur sped through the peloton for a win!

Then in a stunning turn of events Joe wanted to play Dragomino, and he beat me 7-4. After a little while we also tried out Pugs in Mugs, which is a fairly standard Exploding-Cats style thing, only a little gentler. Collect three matching coloured card to claim a pug in a mug, and claim all coloured pugs to win. It's okay. Not my kind of thing, even if there's a pug wearing a bra. 

Then we hurtled off to Adrenaline Quarry, where I had 45 minutes of hilarious fun, but felt my age for the last 40 of them. That was it for the games, except for a couple of rambunctious whirls around In Vino Morte as we waited for chips in Plymouth. Owing to Mark's planning and blessed providence, we were also well placed for the final of the UK fireworks championship as it exploded above the sea, not far from where we sat.

Then it was time to go home. Firstly Katie and Mark's home, and this was an adventure in itself with wrong turns, cantankerous GPS systems and eventually, everyone bar myself (-driving) asleep. And the next day, home home, with no final games to play, but a stop off at Hound Tor on the journey back.

Many fond memories, Katie's olive bread, Mark's margaritas, and some great games!