Green Bum

As I drove towards Greenbank Cemetery last night, the rain came lashing sideways in waves, ending a period of relative calm. I texted Adam suggesting he might want to abandon his plans to cycle, and he agreed: joining Martin as they both materialised out of the rainy night to climb into the car. We set off for Steve and Anja's, where our host was Louie. Now accustomed to nerds coming in with bags of games, he furnished us with drinks, glasses and bowls for snacks. Soon enough Anja appeared as well, and then Pete, and after a brief discussion of comics Louie chose our first game: Telestrations. 

Oddly Martin had never played this, but Louie talked us through the rules and we set off on a drawing and guessing spree. Notable highlights were Martin's drawing of a needle in a haystack being identified by Anja as 'pin' - she ignored the haystack - and Martin's guess for 'grilled cheese' which hopefully gave nobody else the bad dreams I had. 

The scoring is kind of a nonsense, but for what it's worth Louie, Anja and myself took a joint win with 1.5 points each. Steve joined us for the last round, so as we pivoted to the evening's main courses everyone was already at the table. Anja, Adam and Pete chose Thurn and Taxis and myself, Steve and Martin went to Ape Town. 

Pete was new to Thurn and Steve new to Ape Town, so there was some Rules Mumblings for a little while before we struck out establishing a postal service/menacing simians. As is my habit - sorry - I lost track of the other game as I was laser-focused on trying to be a mafia monkey, succeeding in making the early running but becoming increasingly concerned about my lack of lemurs. 

My worries were well-founded. Though we clung onto Martin's coat-tails - or actual tail - for the majority of the game, he pushed his way forward in the finale far enough to take a pretty convincing win. 

Martin 100
Sam 89
Steve 73

Germany's network of postboxes was still being developed, so we blasted through a quick game of Jungo. Martin won this too, in pretty short order. 

Then we embarked on a brutal game of Misfits, with all of us collapsing the tower at different points - most agonisingly for me, it happened placing my very last piece. 

And when that happened we all had around ten pieces of wood each - almost as if the last 15 minutes had been a complete waste of time. As Thurn and Taxis was now packing up, we declared it a draw. I'll have to leave the German drama to the comments, as I was distracted by being clumsy and don't really recall any of the rules. I know Adam won though.

Adam 30

Pete 24

Anja 16

Astonishingly it was now late enough that our next game was our last: So Clover, of course! And a triumphant So Clover at that. Martin's Spinal Tap was almost portabelloed by Movie coming out, and Anja's clue of Gallery had us foxed for a while as well until we connected to the underwater elements in zoo/tunnel. Most contentious turned out to be my clue of Battle Axe for Dungeon/Accessory, as Steve felt manacles would be a better clue, and I said not all dungeons are sex dungeons, Steve. Martin fleetingly thought one might go in fancy dress to a poetry party, before blinking in surprise at his own thought process in a way I haven't seen before. 

Regardless, look at this! 36 points. 

Adam had been first to finish, and whiled away his waiting time trying to draw an actual clover leaf on the back of his clover, before deciding it looked more like a bum. I"m presuming he added the hair afterwards. To be honest, there are a couple of other things it looks like now. 

 

On that physiological bombshell, we called it a night. 

Silly starts today

 I arrived at Sam's at 7.50, excited for a return to normality, eager to have a break from online gaming (although I felt a little sad that there wasn't a concurrent online GNN happening that we could watch). You can imagine my slight disappointment, then, when I found Sam, Joe and Katy deep in a board game based on Tetris! 

Oh well, at least it wasn't actual Tetris. I watched in faint puzzlement until they added up some numbers and Sam had won.

Sam 24

Joe 21

Katy 19

But what to play next? The possibilities seemed endless, and it was during this debate that Sam uttered the words that are this blog's title. It all seemed very fresh and new.

In the end we chose Cubitos, a dice rolling, push-your-luck, deck-building race game. You start with a set of pretty tedious dice that allow you to move forward or buy better dice, if they allow you to do anything at all. You can roll as often as you want with the risk of going bust if you roll all blanks. 

The powered-up dice had nicely silly names which allowed Sam to say things like "that's one step from Smelly Cat and Mr Dog goes back for two cash," without anyone thinking it strange. Joe hoarded money until he could afford a Rollersaurus. I stayed firmly in last throughout but the battle for first was very close. 

Sam's Reckless Cheese got him into a winning position, but Katy crossed the line first. Sam also finished on the same turn and the tie breaker couldn't separate them so we had to play another round. Katy edged ahead and it was down to Sam's final roll to see if he could outpace her. Luckily his Smelly Cat saved the day, allowing him to move twice and take the win.

1st Sam
2nd Katy
3rd Joe
4th Andrew

Next up, we played Master Word, a kind of 20 Questions crossed with Mastermind. One of us looks at a word, and the rest of have to write yes/no questions to guess it, knowing only the category. But the word-knower can't answer each individually, only say how many yeses there are in a particular round of questions.

In round one, category: Animals, we became fixated on the idea that the answer was Peacock. Colourful, feathered, not flying. In the last round Sam wrote Peacock on his card and I almost wrote "seriously, though, is it a peacock?" on mine, so convinced was I. But at the last minute I decided to be sensible and wrote Cockerel since that fitted the description too and you never know… Turns out I was right! I also did well in round two, when the category was weapons and I was the first to mention crossbows. 

But the real highlight was after we'd finished and were putting it away when Joe remembered there is a ranking system. "If you get it in seven rounds, that's Master Fox and if you get it in four then you have very soft palms." I dutifully wrote this down, thinking how nice it was to have a game that recognised the arbitrary nature of rankings by filling it with non sequiturs, when Joe clarified that the last bit wasn't the ranking but a comment about Katy's hands after she'd passed him some game tokens to put in the box. How we laughed at the misunderstanding. The genuine (and, by now, very ordinary) ranking was "bloodhound." But I prefer ours

.
Joe, Katy, Sam and Andrew: very soft palms

Then we played Telestration Upside Drawn. This is a guessing game played in pairs. One person holds a pen vertically, nib down, perfectly still, above the table and the other has to move the pad beneath it and draw something that allows the first person to guess a word. It was fun for a brief burst of silliness,  although it became a bit gruelling when the clue was "sinkhole." Katy tried to draw buttons because they have holes in them, but all I saw were tortured faces of the dammed.

We still won, though.

Katy and Andrew 6
Joe and Sam 4

I was ready to leave at this point but then discovered Joe had driven and was offering lifts. So I stayed for one more and it was my choice, too. I wanted to play Push It, since it's the kind of physical game that you can't play online. But Sam found that he'd lent his copy to someone so we played Karambolage instead. Sam sped into an early 3-1-0-0 lead but didn't score again for ages, allowing Katy to storm gradually into a 5-3-3-0 lead. I was last to score anything, my aim being wayward throughout. 

Joe showed his usual form of having the Yips. At one point, when trying to push the puck with the string he somehow missed such that the string went over the puck, caught it on the opposite side and then he pulled the string taught again, pushing the puck backwards towards him. 

And so that was us finished for the evening. No one froze or had to restart their phone. Three of us set off into the rain, happy with our life choices. At least for today.