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)

(Slightly) Closer Together

After two months of working from home and physical distancing, this was the weekend we loosened things up - a little, anyways.

It was a beautifully warm weekend too - if not the first of the season, certainly the best. I spent Saturday afternoon refurbishing the barbeque I had bought back in 2014 at XS Cargo, replacing the carryover tubes and heat plates that rusted away to dilapidation, as well as the grill itself. With any luck, that will last us another three or four years and then we perhaps look at upgrading.

But Saturday also marked my eldest and her boyfriend going out for a year, and he had arranged to come over and spend some time in the backyard with her (from 2m away, bless him). We enjoyed some conversation in the sun while I assembled the various pieces and painstakingly removed the rusted screws holding the carryover tubes in place, and at suppertime I grilled some steaks and asparagus while Glory roasted potato wedges in the air fryer.

The fact that Bobby had to remove himself to the far end of the table did very little to impact the enjoyment of our first patio meal together, especially since the table never even got deployed last year following a cold, wet spring. Still warm even in the shade of the house, and with very few bugs to speak of we must have spent a couple of hours feasting, drinking and chatting.

The following day, Jeff invited the local lads over to his backyard for another socially distanced dinner, this time featuring the immense (12 lb.) brisket he had painstakingly prepared the previous day and began smoking for 6 hours on his Traeger at a little after 7 am (on a Sunday, on a long weekend no less).

I've never claimed to be a genius, bot only a fool would have turned down such a generous invitation, so I joined Jeff, his son Connor and two other friends shortly after our online D&D session was finished.

The Traeger is a fancy affair that not only uses wood pellets to smoke the food as it cooks, but employs two different thermometers to do this, one for the grill temperature and a probe that gives precise readings for the meat itself. This is all conveyed to an app on the user's phone via wifi, like a baby monitor for food. 'Primitive' cooking of meat with fire was never so high-tech!

Enjoying thin slices of tender, succulent beef brisket, plus roasted potatoes, some salads and a cold Red Rage ale from Jeff's cooler was heavenly. But it wasn't nearly as nice as simply sitting in a lawn chair in his backyard and shooting the shit with friends that I hadn't seen face-to-face in ten weeks. We took care to only handle our own utensils and keep two-meter spacing wherever possible, but it was the closest I had been to other people without masks in quite a while, and it felt great.

After couple of hours, the wind began to pick up and the clouds began to form, so the other guests and I reluctantly bade farewell to the backyard sanctuary and made our ways back home.

But it really did feel like perhaps a threshold had been reached, a kind of turning point in our respective isolations. The situation in Edmonton is far less grim than it is in Calgary and other parts of southern Alberta, but I am hoping that the easing of restrictions that began on Thursday can be kept up for a little while, at least.

Who knows what the "new normal" will look like, but hopefully it has room for friends as well as family.

Oscars 2020 - Surprises Galore

After a one-year hiatus, it felt good to host our Oscars party once again, and it turned out to be a great night to be watching with friends.

I only got 9 predictions right out of 24 (compared to Totty who led with 14, or Earl, who outscored us all from his home with an astonishing 20), but watching Bong Joon Ho's Parasite become the first foreign-language film ever to win Best Picture was truly exhilarating. Especially since we only watched it the night before. (It's a great but intense film - watch it before someone spoils it for you!)

The party itself was a lot of fun, as usual. Glory outdid herself getting all the decorations set up, and the dessert-heavy pot luck table was well-received by everyone.

Pete generously loaned us his kegerator again, and the Buena Vista Brown from Alley Kat was also a welcome addition to the festivities.

Most importantly, it was wonderful to have friends old and new take a night of tv-viewing and turn it into a wonderful occasion celebrating our appreciation of cinema.

Sadly, I "won" our March of the Dead drinking game, having recognized 8 names from the "In Memoriam" roll and not realized they were dead:

Diahann Caroll
Danny Aiello
Barry Malki
Robert Evans
Andre Previn
Franco Zeffirelli
Branko Lustig (one of the best Oscar speeches I've seen!)
John Singleton

Pete was close behind with 7, but dang! I either need to stop reading credits or start paying more attention to the obituary notices in the L.A. Times and Variety.

With the growing influence of online Oscar prognosticators like GoldDerby.com et al, we have moved away from a "most correct guesses" model for our prize, so now each correct prediction gets you a raffle ticket. You only need one to win, but Totty's 14 gave him the edge and he picked up the movie tickets!

I'd also printed up some Oscar Bingo cards but we failed to get a winner this way, so a second draw saw Pete walk away with the 2020 Preview issue of Total Film Magazine.

Once again, the lack of a host for the telecast saw things finish up at a reasonable hour, but needing some time to absorm the damage from March of the Dead, the night ran a little late anyhow.

Culinary Craftsmanship - Vernal Geekquinox 2018

For eight years now, Pete's extensive hospitality is pushed to its limits twice a year as he brings his nerdy friends together for a big dinner party. Since 2011, they have been strongly themed, often around popular culture.

This year he made one of his craftiest thematic decisions: he would base his dishes around the comprehensive collection of cooking contraptions, most of which only get trotted out for his twice-yearly shindig, and some of which have been languishing since their initial use.

With "Hardware" as his theme, Pete quickly tied the menu and other visual elements to the obscure 1990 cyberpunk movie of the same name.

The movie's 5.9 IMDb rating is probably pretty close to the mark, but it gets bonus points for giving roles to music legends Iggy Pop and Lemmy Kilmister (Motorhead). Thankfully there were no traces of dystopia in the fantastic meal he put together, futuristic or otherwise.

The icons along the right side of the menu signify the various pieces of equipment used to construct this fabulous repast, from the more mundane (microwave, slow cooker and blender) to the more esoteric (sous vide rig, smoker, and pressure cooker). The enormous pot falls somewhere in between by my reckoning.

The meal opened with some spicy pappadums prepared in the microwave.  It felt a little strange eating them without a curry nearby, but they made a fantastic starter on their own.

They were soon joined by two warm dips served in his chafing dish, one of spinach artichoke and a red pepper garlic cheese variation, fortified with a shot of Frank's Red Hot!

Then, with a little help for dispensing, he blended a scratch-made mushroom soup and served it up piping hot. This was one of the richest, smoothest soups I have ever had, and even an attendee who is no fan of fungi was forced to confess how tasty it was.

While enjoying the soup, I chanced to glance again at the menu and asked Pete if I had slept through the cheese course. He leapt up and fetched a platter of cheeses he had smoked himself, including cheddar, mozzarella, brie and cambozola (a soft cheese with hints of blue mixed into it ). I'm glad I mentioned it, as they were absolutely amazing!

Following the cheese course, Pete went over to his largest pot, and extracted a steaming whole artichoke for each of us. We chatted while plucking the leaves, dipping them into melted butter and then scraping off the fleshy bits. The hearts were then devoured in similar fashion.

Photo: Earl J. Woods

This is not the kind of meal one eats in a rush, and it takes considerable time to get the various dishes sorted. No one was famished when the entree made it to the table a little after midnight (after all, such decadence is a primary component of our enjoyment of the evening, and no one is in a rush at any rate!).

A plate of asparagus risotto, accompanied by butter poached carrots (sous vide) and seared Brussels sprouts garnished a rack of rosemary lemon roasted lamb fresh off Pete's Big Green Egg barbecue/smoker.  It was amazing. Some people started on the meat with their forks and knives, but before too long, everyone was gnawing them off the bone to ensure none of it fell by the wayside.

The lamb was aromatic and savoury, a delight for the senses, and so tender a man with no teeth could have enjoyed it.

After clearing the table, we slowly migrated back to the living room, drinking and chatting until it was at last time for dessert (perhaps a little before 2:00 am): an amazing chocolate peanut butter cake.

Sadly, our zeal for this sweet end to a delightful meal meant that we neglected the whipped toasted cream Pete had prepared, but at least Audrey and I got to try some of it with the leftovers the next day! (It was just mas marvelous as you might imagine.)

Pete's precise planning and plentiful preparation precluded his needing to do quite as much work during the meal as he often does, gifting us with an unprecedented amount of access to our wonderful host. And as good as the food is, and as fascinating as the gadgetry is, it is always the people that make the meal most memorable, so this is nothing but a good thing.

Thanks again Pete!