Ikea wardrobes and gravestones

When Gary Numan's Tubeway Army sang "Are Friends Electric?" back in 1979 he could well have been singing about the new look GNN that entered its second week of social distancing this Tuesday.

Six of us met up on the Discord server, Ian, Martin, Joe, Katy, Sam and - a few minutes late - me.

When I arrived/logged on they were playing Bring Your Own Book, a game that translates quite easily to remote play. This time there was a little variant where players wouldn't announce their books so they could be guessed by the others at the end of the game.

I came in halfway through but with no attempt at keeping score, this wasn’t a problem. I grabbed my copy of “The women who built Bristol” hoping it would have enough variety for a range of amusing retorts. It didn’t. We only played a few rounds, one of which was “Something you’d be surprised to find in a coat pocket” which Sam won with “Christmas.”

Then we encountered technical difficulties as Martin’s audio kept cutting in and out. His long, weary sigh worthy of a Jane Austen novel came through loud and clear though. We decamped from Discord and set up on Google Hangouts to finish of Bring Your Own Book.

Then we played Wavelength with Katy in charge of the dial and cards. Our first category was “Smelly in a good/bad way” to which Katy clued “Hair.” A baffling choice that kind of lead us towards a middling result and we were lucky enough to hit 3 points!

We then went through a see-saw game, alternating between three points and not scoring at all before collapsing with two fails. Joe’s clue for “Wet/dry” was “banana” and we were hopelessly wrong, putting it far wetter than Joe had. “You don’t get banana juice for a reason,” Joe grumbled afterwards. Another failure was Sam’s clue of “umbrella” for “Fragile/Durable.” Our deliberations involved a lengthy detour concerning an umbrella made of sausages. It didn’t help us get the right answer. By means of explanation, Sam mentioned that at the durable end of his scale were “Ikea wardrobes and gravestones” which was notable enough for me to write it down.

Score: nine points.

Finally we all set up on the slow and juddering website Yucata for another game of Las Vegas. Joe pointed out that his German copy of the game was called Vegas and he wondered if it might be worth something. I mused that, being German, it should’ve been called Das Vegas. Joe may have a copy of his won, but he still needed to be reminded of the rules after he tried to put his four dice in the two casino.

There was a little smutty innuendo regarding sticking things in the golden nugget and me saying “Don’t hold onto your neutrals too long” and Joe replying “they can blow up in your face.”

Joe was in fine form with his wit, rules confusion and, additionally, an inability at scoring at all in the first two rounds. How we laughed (“we” meaning us, not Joe). In round three he finally scored by putting six dice into one casino. He then won round four which, surprisingly, was enough to get him out of last place. I won what was a close game.

Andrew $300,000
Martin $280,000
Ian $250,000
Joe $230,000
Katy $220,000

And with that, we set off home except that we were all home. Thanks all for the entertainment. See you all next week.

End of the evening, all cameras turned off