G&G XVIII: To Games and Togas!

I was in a weird headspace last Wednesday afternoon when I finally began making my way to the southside for the 18th iteration of Gaming & Guinness, our little group's annual event focusing on concentrated game-playing, eating and drinking, not always in that order.

Being unprepared was nothing new, and I had been painting scenery for the Star Fleet Battles game that very morning while roasting a pork loin on the Traeger for supper, but there was an apprehension that being rushed alone did not cover. 

As the fellow who ends up making a fair share of the decisions as to which games are played, I tend to agonize over whether or not the participants will have a good time even before we get together. And realizing I had left some medication at home after I had picked up a big pot of Pete's renowned chili verde and had to reverse course to my house and delay my arrival even longer (like, 4 hours later than anticipated)  did nothing to aid my disposition.

True to form though, once I was finally ensconced in Belongamick, where Totty was hosting for an astonishing eleventh time (!), and a majority of us were onsite playing games and hoisting pints, my spirits improved considerably.

Wednesday night is generally spent playing smaller scale pick-up or party games, and one of these was Totty's Kickstarted trivia game "Everyone Else Thinks This Game is Awesome", which not only allows you to make guesses on trivia questions but then get points by wagering on whether or not your opponents have the right answer. The questions themselves range from the moderate to insanely obscure or counter-intuitive, but are generally entertaining, and there is even a space to bet on whether all the players or none of them have the correct answer.

And as a result of this, the phrase "tiny stilts" will never be forgotten by the five of us who played the game a second time late Friday night...

My modest dinner of roast pork, peas and instant mash was very well received on opening night, and made for quite a few leftover sandwiches over the event too.

Thursday afternoon, before getting things fully underway, Earl and Jeff handed out this year's magnificent commemorative items, starting with personalized whiskey glasses with the Tolkien's "One Ring" inscription on the bottom.

And if that wasn't enough, personalized stainless steel mugs!

Rounding things out were a fun set of "Dice of Disappointment" and a fridge magnet.

we tackled the Aliens boardgame, Another Glorious Day in the Corps, a co-operative game that saws us trying to usher some of our favourite movie characters through a mob of xenomorphs and onto a waiting armoured personnel carrier.

I really, really want to like this game, but in three attempts to play larger games (with fairly experienced gamers, I am sure you'll agree), we have never fared too well. And I don't just mean not winning, but not seeing any path to victory whatsoever from where we ended up. 

There is a chance we are putting too much focus on fighting and not enough on running, and a general agreement that the time spent gathering weapons was rewarded with half the squad being bottled up by bugs on the same board they started on. Scott took the game home to play with his son though; hopefully they can unlock some strategies!

Jeff made us his renowned and adored Maui Ribs for supper, with Island Mike (having arrived only that morning) accompanying him on the roasted potatoes. 

Role-playing games have only showed up at G&G once before, but this year we tried something very unusual; a horror-RPG called Dread which, instead of using dice to resolve outcomes, uses a set of stacking blocks like Jenga. If the block tower collapses, not only does your character fail in whatever they were attempting, but they are now out of the game, perhaps having died, or possibly gone mad, gotten arrested, become catatonic, or simply called in for a double shift.

(Photo courtesy of Earl J. Woods)

The scenario involved a spaceship crew investigating a derelict vessel, with the tension rising and falling periodically, and players becoming more and more reluctant to pull blocks. One player made the ultimate sacrifice, purposely pushing the tower over to ensure the ship's reactor could be set to overload, enabling the other characters to survive.

I wouldn't be in a hurry to play Dread again - it is fairly challenging to run and requires a certain mood that a group of analytical, middle-aged nerds don't take to altogether naturally. Having said that though, everyone agreed that as an experiment, it ended up being a pretty cool experience; Jenga with a story attached!

Friday kicked off with a G&G mainstay: Circvs Maximvs. In anticipation of this, I had suggested ordering sheets for making togas so we could have a memorable group picture, to which my boon companions gamely agreed.

I straight-up love these guys.

It can sometimes be a challenge finding a balance between racing and fighting in this vintage Roman charioteering game, and this year featured a couple of wrecks and two fatalities courtesy of five-time winner Jeff, who switched things up with an incredibly intimidating heavy chariot. 

This is the first time the deadly scythed wheels have showed up in our CM games  in years, but I not only managed to evade Jeff's gaze but injured a couple of other horses with my own medium rig, slowing them down significantly. And I ended up winning to boot!

(Rob is not actually grumpy, but LARPing a disappointed racer)

The awesomeness continued through the dinner hour with a Big Yellow Box from Dickey's BBQ, the first period of game 6 of the Western Conference Finals, and setup for a big Battletech game! Jeff's love of Battletech battled with his devotion for his beloved Oilers, but he remained focused on the game he had set up. He provided us with two lances of medium battlemechs and a 4 x 8 table laden with marvelous 3D printed scenery, including a massive Leopard-class dropship.

I had helped him come up with a scenario, suggesting the team that grabs a mobile objective in the center of the table be required to take it off the opposite side instead of the more usual friendly side, resulting in something that felt quite a bit like football. In the end, my opponents in House Steiner were victorious, but we caused a reactor explosion crit on one of their mechs, which gave us 12th Vegan Rangers something to cheer about as well.

The beginning of the final day saw the return of our Wits & Wagers game, another trivia game that you can win without ever getting a questions right, simply betting on the answer you believe is closest to the correct number without going over, Price is Right style.  

It is not a particularly photogenic game, but three players make up their own questions every year which keeps it interesting. Saucy talk also generated one of the best wheezes of the weekend as Jeff was incapacitated by the giggles for over a minute at one point.

After this, Earl and I set up our biannual Star Fleet Battles game (using the miniatures-friendly Call to Arms rules). This game is too fiddly by far, and some of the scenarios really lack balance, but dag is it a lot of fun to push models of 60s-era starships around a table and blow them up with dice. And it looks tremendous, making it totally worth transporting the world's most fragile models away from our homes.

The scenario was a pretty complicated one as well, involving a shuttle, lost in an asteroid field, next to a deadly star that pulls everything closer to it each turn. We tweaked the rules as we went, and while the Federation was first to find the objective, my command battlecruiser and its escorts managed to take out the rescuers before they could leave the field and claim victory, in true Klingon fashion.

Another tough balancing act: so many games, so little time, but playing the same games in repeated years make it much simpler to pick up again...

After a dinner of Pete's legendarily tasty chili verde, we got down to our final game: an Arena: The Contest game pitting two dragons and three heroes against each other. 

It is a surprisingly chess-y way to play this dungeon-crawler, and made for a tantalizingly close game; both dragons start with 280 hit points, and when our white dragon finally died, the opposing red dragon had less than 50.

And that was about it, honestly. We got in a final game of Neanderthal Poetry, a first time for some players, and everyone enjoys the opportunity to bonk their friends with an inflatable club, right?

And a handful of us got in some crokinole games, but alas, the tournament bracket will need to be competed at G&G XIX instead.

There is a lot I don't capture, because I try to be in the moment as much as I can, and a lot of my favourite things don't translate well into photos or video anyways. 

But I am confident that if my head had a dashcam, I could pull out some stellar moments of not just incredible luck, great strategy or wonderful production values or painting skills, but also beautiful displays of friendship, wry laughter and deep appreciation. A group of friends this good, who will turn a forgiving (but not blind!) eye to my foibles and tolerate that my patience is not what it used to be, getting together to celebrate nonsense almost every year since 2006, is to be rightly treasured.

And while the games are awesome and a necessary focus amongst a group as diverse and distractable as ours, it is the fellowship that keeps us coming back.

(Scott, a teetotaler, has just poured me an exquisite Crown Float that I requested after he failed a coin check)