Dark Web Gogglebox

 7.30 Tuesday evening. Joe let me in and I walked down the stairs into his kitchen, noting Tom Waits on the speaker, finding a group of gamers sitting around Joe’s table: Ian, Katy, Sam, and Martin. Adam H had been expected at 8.15 but then he email to say he’d be here at 7.50. This left us with a quandary. Find something short to play or talk to each other for twenty minutes.

Happily, reason prevailed and we got out For Sale. Katy began with her usual insistence that she’s terrible at this game which, for once, is justified. Sam, too, never seemed to get going while Ian picked up a last round $15k cheque with only a 15-value house. Not enough to win, but very satisfying. For him.

Martin 54

Ian 53

Andrew 49

Joe 46

Sam 36

Katy 33

Adam arrived mid game and so we split into two. At one end Adam, Katy, Joe and Martin played one of the many games called Orbit. It’s so new that it’s listed as a 2025 game on Board Game Geek! Martin explained the rules and they set off in this dickish game of intergalactic high-jinks. How they laughed when Martin complained “I’m absolutely in the middle of fucking nowhere,” which is, I suppose, a valid criticism of most of outer space.

Ian, Sam and I played Around the World in 80 Days. There was a lot of detective work this time, as we kept trying to upset our opponents with not-so-chance encounters with the law. Ian tried to use a balloon - a transport that uses a dice instead of the value on a card to tell you how long a journey took. He rolled a 5 and stating that statistically he would probably get a lower number, he paid a coin and rolled again. A six. Of course.

Thanks to a lucky last-minute purchase of a card from the deck, I get back to London in double-quick time, arriving at the door of the Reform Club after only 69 days. Sam cursed his luck as, once again, he finished stuck in New York.

Andrew 69 days

Ian 78 days

Sam dnf

While we waited for Orbit to finish, we played Push. A simple card game, build up three columns of cards but no duplicates of numbers or colours. Then you take one column and your opponents take the others. Ian’s lack of luck with a die in Around the World was compensated as he dodged having to discard cards when rolling the dice in this game.

Ian 81

Sam 77

Andrew 72

Meanwhile Orbit ended with Martin’s green planet being moved out of his reach and then Katy swooping down towards her own home planet, clearly relieved that people hadn’t noticed that she was about to win. One of the first people to win at Orbit, she told herself.

Katy wins!

The others don’t.

They packed away, with Katy remarking that Martin’s player mat was covered in crisps, and as a septet again, it was time to change things up again.

At one end of the table Martin, Sam and Ian played Saer while Joe, myself, Katy and Adam played Sunrise Lane. Two rules explanation hummed around the room at the same time, and even seemed to synchronized/interfered with each other.

Martin: You have 3 cards.

Joe: You have 3 cards.

Martin: Face down.

Joe: Not face down, in your hand.

Martin: In your array.

I know nothing about Saer except that I thought I’d played it when I saw it. It didn’t have the most original visual aspect.

Martin 12

Sam 9

Ian 4

As for Sunrise Lane, I quickly got a long chain of buildings and then got tall buildings in both blue sectors. But I ignored the red quarters, which could’ve been my downfall.

Joe 87

Andrew 83

Katy 74

Adam 69

Again, we were all together. So Clover doesn’t play seven, so we dug out Hitster, that game of putting random songs in chronological order thanks to an app that links to Spotify.

Or, rather doesn’t link to Spotify. After only a few songs (one of which, You Can’t Hurry Love, was wrongly identified as The Jam by Katy and, in fairness, A Town Called Malice does have a very similar opening) the app gave up. Instead we changed to just singing the song for the other people to guess. 

Of course, this meant that most songs after 2005 were discarded because we didn’t know them. But otherwise it worked fine. For certain obscure definitions of “fine”. Imagine the scene where half of us are singing a hit from the late 20th century while the other half are arguing about it. “Like a Dark Web Gogglebox,” observed Sam, giving this blog post it’s title.

I had to leave just as our row of guesses stretched across the whole table, with only a few mistakes here and there. The rest of the blog is courtesy of a few messages from Sam.

After I left, they played So Clover twice: 24/30 and 26/30 (so someone else must have left too).

And Sam also told me that at the very start of the evening he and Joe played Landmarks, a word association game that involved getting across an island.

What an evening! See you all soon.