I was in Easton with a plan to walk through some of Bristol’s more country-ish lanes to Sam’s house. Imagine my surprise when I stepped out of an off-licence and saw Jo and Martin walking by with, apparently, the same idea.
We arrived at the venue and Sam let us in. Joe, Ian and Katy were there and Katy told us of her recent gaming activities, playing a lot of Snakes & Ladders with a five-year-old nephew. “Snakes & Ladders can last a long time,” she assured us.
We began with a homegrown game from Jo - I’m the Chump. A word game where people are randomly split into two teams - champs or chumps - by dealing a card. People don’t know what team they’re in, but everyone else does. And then everyone is dealt a word. Again - they don’t know it but everyone else does. The idea is to give clues to people about their word in such a way that a Champ can guess their word before a Chump realises they’re a Chump. So you have to give bad clues to Chumps but not so bad that they work out their true nature.
Katy got the clues “nought,” “Jesus,” and “angry” and thought it was a bunch of nonsense and declared herself a Chump. She wasn’t: we’d all been cluing “cross” but she took solace in her defeat in the fact that she’d ended the game.
Katy made notes
But we actually played two more rounds. Joe correctly guessed he was a Chump because everyone else was a Champ. And then Jo guessed they were a chump after correctly surmising that “taxi” and “shop” were probably red herrings.
It was an interesting game. There was a little discussion afterwards about how it played which got diverted into which words also followed the “ch_mp” form.
After this we split into a four and a three. Katy decided to forgo her usual distaste for plastic-heavy games and chose Manhattan, joined by me, Ian and Sam. Joe, Jo and Martin went deep into thoughtful logical deduction with Message From The Stars.
In Manhattan, we are four property developers building skyscrapers not just in the titular Manhattan but also in Hong Kong, Kairo (sp?), Frankfurt, Sydney, and San Paolo (spoken in an Australian accent). We can build on top of each others skyscrapers and we often do since the uppermost floors score.
We are putting up tower blocks all over the world when the words “Z has to be trusted” drift across the table mid-game as those playing Message From The Stars seem to be reciting dialogue from a spy movie.
But Manhattan collapses into a late-game dilemma. Not for Katy, though. Me, Sam and Ian battle over the area-control points of four of the areas while Katy quietly builds in the remaining two, unchallenged. While she won’t improve on her 2-points for area-control, every new building she puts down gets her another point and her final round tally of 17 is immense.
Katy 45
Sam 40
Andrew 39
Ian 39
We finish just as Message From The Stars finishes too. “Fully successful” was the summary from Martin of their efforts.Sam told us about a dream he’d had in which Martin had a game that came in a pencil case. The idea was to take turquoise pencils out one by one and decide if they were blue or green.
We rearrange ourselves for the next game. Katy, Martin and Jo play L’oaf while Ian, Sam, Joe and I play For Sale in a little burst of nostalgia. Since it’s not Joe’s pimped out deluxe version, we need to remind ourselves about what value cards are actually in play but otherwise it’s all very familiar. Although maybe I had forgotten how much to bid for cards as the first hand of the game contained the highest card and I went big.
Joe 59
Sam 59
Andrew 55
Ian 45
L’oaf, after Martin declared “they picked the same card four times running,” ended:
Katy 29
Jo 24
Martin 18
And with that, I bowed out. The remaining sextet played So Clover once. Sam sent me pics and remarked that Martin put ‘tearjerker’ for Napkin/Movie and Katy was disappointed in him for not being filthier even though Martin pointed out it did have jerker in the clue.
Thanks all, it was lush.
