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Ben Bateson
United Kingdom
Ross-on-Wye
Owner of original 'crappy art' GtR and pleased about it.
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Yes, it was festive fun and frolics at the White Lion this week,l with a range of light-and-frothy fun that descended into typical competitiveness as the evening wore on.
Members of the Boydell family both senile and juvenile were attending, and Tony brought his son with him as well! Ben, Becky and JP rounded out this little party box.
Sticky Stickz was as good a place as any to start. A reaction game which almost defies description, it provoked much fun, laughter and poor language (I think John, if we'd accounted very strictly, might have finished on negative numbers of tiles). Tony and Becky tied this one, thus preserving the light-heartedness. For now...
I was surprised to find that none of the group were experienced in the ways of Pit and introduced it as a game about 'shouting and negotiating as loudly and quickly as possible'. Naturally, after an introduction like that, there could only be one winner, and sure enough John demolished the field. In fact the other three men around the table finished in negative points...
Onwards to Cubiko, and frankly any game with bouncy balls is an instant winner for me (why are such things only marketed towards children, really?). A Tony/Benedict team, working in tandem, looked as if they had this one tied up, but Becky unexpectedly got her mojo working and scored two diagonals in quick order. I can't say I think much of the scoring system, to be honest, but the game works absolutely brilliantly.
With barely 40 minutes of the evening gone, we were already three games down, and Boydell Jr. suggested a favourite of the family: Bloody Legacy. Of course, people who suggest these sorts of games tend to get picked on first, and he was shortly worm-food, leaving Tony to beat out JP in a fast-and-furious finale. I've promised to be less unkind about Tony's designs, so...well...that's about all I've got to say about this one.
Becky has alleged to be useless at making things out of Lego and was dreading the forthcoming game of Creationary. The rest of us, unfettered by our incompetence were early put to rights when she constructed a small working model of the Titanic, along with four operational funnels and CGI passengers, in order to communicate 'iceberg'. We were playing 'Bens against the rest', and although Benedict and I roared out to a 6-2 lead, we stalled too early, notably during the round when my young partner spent 90 seconds saying 'there's plenty of time' and not actually building anything, and were pipped for the win by some lucky guessing. Young Ben did redeem himself by guessing 'sledge' when I'd only put two runners on the table.
Tony and I only had one game in mind for the main event of tonight, though, and it turned out to be an excellent game of Balderdash. One of the few complaints I had had about the previous 'Absolute Balderdash' version was the high proportion of Americanisms, which made some of our British answers largely improbable. I'm delighted to report that the new 20th Anniversary edition has fixed this flaw, and we're left with just the most brilliant game of bluff, silliness and hilarity (house rules: don't use the spinner).
I'm going to chalk this one up as a draw, given Tony used the rather off-key 'challenge' rule, looking up the 'questioner gets three points if no-one guesses' rule and finding out it was actually two points. Claiming it was 'just because I only wanted to play one more round', it seemed decidedly odd that he didn't want to play any more rounds after overtaking me on the finish line.
I was justifiably proud of the game's only clean-sweep, convincing everyone else around the table that Maxwell Loeb was 'acknowledged as the writer of the world's worst musical theatre' while correctly guessing that he was actually the 'inventor of the Brillo Pad', but definition of the day had to go to young Benedict, bigging up one person as 'the man who invented the electric fan and then died in one'. We all agreed, even Benedict once he had discovered his lying boots, that Balderdash is something we should play a lot more of.
The Boydells having taken their leave, we finished with a mini-tournament of Tumblin-Dice, having furniture-polished the board to slick abandon. Three games down, and there was nothing between us, so we played a final game, won by yours truly with a die that shot straight down the middle of the board to displace John from row 4, and a slightly over-competitive fist-pump (Tony: this does NOT mean what you think it does).
Immodest, me? Frankly, I'm just impressed I made it through the whole evening without telling everyone about this.
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Owner of original 'crappy art' GtR and pleased about it.
