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)

G&G X: Nine for Ten

There is a core group of 8 of us who comprise the majority of Gaming & Guinness events; sometimes situations preclude everyone's attendance, such as work or distance. For instance, this year, a rescheduled assignment kept Mike T. from joining us until Thursday morning, but Colin made it out from Vancouver Island to attend for the first time in six years.

This brought our total number of attendees up to nine, like the Fellowship of the Ring.  Or perhaps more like the Nazgul; it can be difficult to distinguish...

He brought the drinkers:teetotallers ratio down to a paltry 2:1, but despite a legendary beer being half of the name, G&G has never been focused on drinking. The half-dozen Edmontonians can get together for a game and an ale just about any time, and we often do, but bringing in the out-of-towners and having lots of people stay the night prompts a more carefree attitude and deeper fellowship. Sharing meals together gives us a chance to catch up, to chat in a manner that often eludes even those of us unseparated by time zones.

But dice and models and cards are the hub by which our wheel turns, and the gaming was good this year, as it is every year. Island Mike kicked things off Wednesday with a game of Wits & Wagers, a trivia game using exclusively numeric answers, and placing player guesses on a betting line. The game itself is a ton of fun, and the wagering angle means even those who aren't good at trivia can even things out very quickly, but Mike had also created a set of questions linked to the 9 previous G&Gs, making the experience absolutely exquisite.

Thursday saw Mike T. make it back in time for our very first game in Serenity Gulch. Despite the fact that I didn't get as far in building and painting the town and miniatures as I would have liked, everyone seemed happy with the 'work in progress' rendition we ended up with.

The quick and easy nature of the Legends of the Old West rules made the game easy to pick up. We gave each player two miniatures to run, one sheriff or desperado (hero level) and one vigilante or rowdy (henchmen level), and ran a straight up street crossing gang fight with 8 models a side. Then we kept the same sides and tried a scenario out of the book, with the Outlaws edging out a victory over the Lawmen, ably abetted by Mike T.'s Apache Scout.

Thursday night we played one of the best games of Formula Dé I can recall, with the lead changing hands many times on the Monaco course before victory went to Colin, who insists the game would be more interesting if the vehicles were armed.

Friday afternoon was the introduction to the X-Wing miniatures game for most of us, and we were all suitably impressed: fast, simple mechanics, a fairly elegant movement system that has players revealing their pre-set maneuvers simultaneously before using a template to move their ship, and very well done models that come pre-painted.

Earl set up a scenario in which Darth Vader and a hand-picked squadron of Imperial fighters ambushed Luke Skywalker and Han Solo in retribution for the destruction of the first Death Star.

Totty selflessly sacrificed his two TIE Fighters, keeping the Millennium Falcon tied up at one end of the table while Darth Vader, my TIE Interceptor and two other fighters went after Luke and his escort.

Astonishingly, the Force was not enough to save Luke and his X-Wing and the Imperial heroes restored order by eliminating the terror-pilot of Yavin IV with a jail of turbolaser fire! At least, that's how the press release will read. I'm sure he ejected safely and is awaiting his chance to return to the fight,

Friday afternoon we schlepped down to Windermere for a VIP screening of Mad Max: Fury Road, and it was a great movie I intend to review later. Friday night was our opportunity to return to Rock Band, after Jeff went out to pick up a power cord for his PS 3. We were all a bit rusty, but with suitable amounts of liquid courage, a good time was had by all.

Saturday got off to a late start since the last of us wrapped up Rock Band after four a.m., at which point I put the chili together for Saturday night. Thankfully, a modest amount of prep work and the use of a slow cooker meant I got to bed a little before 5:30.

Would that as much planning went into the Call to Arms: Starfleet Battle game for the afternoon, but judicious application of a club-style 'Every Man/Klingon For Themselves' meant we were still able to finish by supper time.

The cutthroat nature of the scenario meant that a few people ended up leaving somewhat early, but consoled themselves by getting in a game of Pimp: The Backhanding on the floor, so they could still keep an ear on the happenings in the Harp Nebula.

Three Klingon ships met their objectives, of which my beloved battlecruiser Vengeance was one, having successfully boarded the U.S.S. Excalibur, subsequently destroying it, and then chasing off another Federation lapdog. Truly, a dark day for Starfleet!

Saturday's traditional chili dinner, like most of our meals, was taken outside. The weather broke Alberta G&G tradition by not snowing as well as being very, very warm. This also gave us a chance to take the group photo and show off the amazingly suave jackets Pete had made to commemorate our tenth (tenth!) year of Gaming &Guinness.

The final marquee game, as always, was Circus Maximus. This year we allowed everyone to take a medium chariot for free, hoping to tip the scales a bit more towards carnage, since our favoured light chariots are useless for ramming.

Thanks to two players thinking along the lines of, 'well, if a medium chariots good, then a heavy must be even better,' those scales tipped like a teeter totter after Shaquille O'Neal gets off his end. Of the nine chariots that started, only six came out of the first corner.

I took myself out of contention early on by swerving instead of braking to evade one of the heavies, but stuck it out and managed to finish the race. Island Mike was again the victor, taking the coveted Circus Maximus trophy back to Vancouver Island, with Earl and Scott rounding out the podium.

As always, G&G is a happy blend of the old and the new: new games, like Legends of the Old West and X-Wing and Wits & Wagers. New beers, like the Mellow Moon Pineapple Hefeweizen or the growler of Hogsbreath from Hogshead Brewing. And the old? Well, Saturday morning, that felt like us, frankly. But many tried and true games as well.

A decade later, I can't tell you how we did it: how we kept the momentum up on something that was initially a one-off event, prompted by the vision of filling a long empty basement with friends and games, and not having anyone need to drive home if they didn't want to. Somehow those first crude t-shirts made with iron-on inkjet transfers made it into an event, and captured the imagination of friends whose companionship I count among my most valued possessions, and whose commitment to fun and fellowship will keep this silly tradition going for at least another decade!

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