G&G XVI: Dragons, Mechs, Dungeons & Wrecks (Part 1)

As the guy who hosted the inaugural Gaming & Guinness back in 2006, I am given a lot of credit as the founding father, or Prime Guinnesster or what have you. But in truth, I think it was the out of towners who lent that first weekend its sense of significance, and when Island Mike said, "next, year, my place" (on Vancouver Island), I feel like that was the moment when the actual tradition of G&G was born.

This weekend we did it again - gathered together from our different places and different lives, to set aside (but not abandon) our various responsibilities and try to focus on being together. Playing games, sure; drinking beers, probably, but mostly just grateful to have this time to have fun, share laughs, and catch up. And for the sixteenth time, as well!

Most of us were in place by mid-afternoon on Wednesday, and we played a game of Anomia while waiting for Scott and Earl to return from the airport with Island Mike. It is ridiculously entertaining but also incredibly stressful for a word game. Watching two people race for an answer, one looking for a kitchen appliance that hasn't been named while the other struggles to name an element, only to have one of them exasperatedly croak out "sodium" like some final utterance in order to secure victory, provided one of the biggest laughs I had all weekend.

When Island Mike arrived, all the needed components were at last in place.

We played drinking Jenga with oversized blocks and then got down to Wits & Wagers, a trivia game where you can bet on the answers of other people. Island Mike, Rob and I supplied the questions for three matches, with an incredible range of topics, reflecting the diversity and breadth of our collective interests. 

We rounded out the evening with a couple games of Codenames and some Jackbox before finally getting to bed around 1:00 - an hour that would have seemed tame not all that long ago, but which nowadays feels quite a bit later than it used to.

On Thursday afternoon, we prepared to cap off the end of the D&D campaign we'd started at the beginning of the pandemic with a climactic battle in the Temple of Tiamat. Jeff had printed off some dragon cultists and evil wizard figures for me so I wouldn't have to use a mish-mash of stand-ins, and they turned out pretty good.

Roll20 has spoiled us, and remembering how to calculate to-hit numbers and even add up mass quantities of dice took us a bit longer than we might have liked.

Even still, it was a genuine treat to be rolling real dice on a real tabletop with our friends from three time zones all in one room (even if players needed laptops in order to view their character sheets...).

And better still, Pete had devised a recipe for the drink that had been created in-game in honour of Jeff's Half-Orc Champion, Hrack N'tall. Smooth but hard-hitting, just like its namesake!

But the highlight for me was the moment in the game that the cult's ritual was completed and the five-headed Queen of Dragons herself entered play, so that at last I could reveal the immense Tiamat model that Jeff had printed (and which none of the other players were aware I had been frantically painting for nearly a month) and place her on the table. 

In truth, they were too busy being impressed by the grandeur of the model, with its five heads, three tails and 19" wingspan, to really display the amount of terror I was looking for, but the appreciation for my paint job and what turned out to be a fairly difficult build (to be detailed in a future post!) was still very gratifying. And it really is a marvellous sculpt! Please note - the video of the reveal below is pretty low-res and also contains some rather colourful language.

True to form for the members of Agency 7, and thanks to interrupting the ritual in various ways so that only one head could enter the combat per turn, the heroes were in fact able to vanquish a weakened Tiamat without a single casualty! Which, if I am being honest, maybe disappointed me just a little bit. 

Back row, from left: Hrack N'Tall, Half-Orc Champion; Cthuul Pi'it, Drow Sorceror; Sirona the Blessed, Half-Elf Cleric; Front from left: Bee Dozer, Rock Gnome Monk; Haldir the Jaunty, High-Elf Assassin; Leslie Tompkins, Halfling Pirate; Skad the Ravenous, Dragonborn Ranger

Afterwards we enjoyed bowls of Pete's fantastic Pork Chili Verde that he had cooked up beforehand, then settled down to battle some zombies in 

Earl's Last Night on Earth boardgame. The first game felt a bit sullied since our human team found the gas for the escape vehicle in a way we technically shouldn't have, but the second game played out similarly - ehrleschkeitt kommt wiede, I suppose!

 

(on to Part 2...)