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Anthony Boydell
United Kingdom
Unspecified
Unspecified
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Ugh.
My head feels like its made out of fudge – you know that thick, head-achey feeling you get from sleep deprivation and not enough caffeine? A genteel Tuesday night excursion to the Hemel games club ended up being much, much later than we’d anticipated; mainly due to the Magic: The Gathering side of things going almost 40 minutes passed its normal end-point. I was board-gaming so this shouldn’t have been a problem…only my chauffeur for the night was embroiled in the aforementioned TCG snail-a-thon so his departure was my departure.
For those of us playing the PROPER game(s) of the night, a healthy quorum of eight cube-pushers neatly gave us a table with Ys and a table (mine) with the excellent Caylus Magna Carta. David (an old Hemel lag) and myself sat with a relative noob (Chris) and a total noob (Rob). The rules are a breeze to explain and I performed the Debbie McGee (pointing, smiling) to David’s Paul Daniels*. A relatively nice game followed with just myself paying to move the Provost back on a number of occasions to stiff someone else (or preferably more than one ‘someone else’). The Lawyer was quite late in arriving (but he still charged for the full consultation) which meant that mine and (particularly) David’s aggressive castle-building ran through the VP tokens with ‘most wicked haste’ – consequently, only ONE prestige building was built before the game ended and the totting up: 34 (David)-28 (Me)-22(Rob) and 17 (Chris). I think my failure to build the first ‘wood’ space (there was no starting building that gave wood directly) gave David the head-start he needed – damn my distracted bonce!
The other table were managing (and would continue to manage) to nurse the one game of Ys through an entire 3 hour session – a bit like a tramp nurses a tin of pale ale while talking loudly to himself in public parks, or when urinating clumsily into a bin on the High Street**
Utterly satisfied by a short but juicy engagement, Rob and Chris left a little early (one with a headache, not sure which) leaving David and myself with time BUT NO TWO PLAYER GAMES in the pool. Helpfully, one of the urchins that Carl has fostered (Fagin-like) had received a bye in the M:TG session and happily joined us for some *gasp* Dominion with only the original set! Yes – you read me correctly – JUST the original game! And what an utter delight it was to see some of those cards come together again, unencumbered by the crushing weight of three years of expansions, more complex ideas and a homeopathic-like watering down of actual fun. Game one was close between David and myself, but a Chapel-ed deck with lots of Gold is going to do pretty well (one to me); game two was much more of a runaway for David who, quite brilliantly from the off, put together a Library deck that delivered 8+ money much too regularly for the rest of us to even approach keeping-up-with! Well done, that man!
Looking at my watch, it was 10.45 and I asked Rob, Mr Magic, if ‘this was the last round of their draft’ to which he responded ‘Yes’ – only, what HE meant was ‘when this round is over in a couple of mins THEN it will be the last round’. Cheeses. So, I watched Carl ‘pull a Tony’ in his last match – draw either ALL LAND or NO LAND – and we eventually left the building as the Sun was coming up in the East (FFS).
I shouldn’t be too hard on Rob or his organizational skills – not when he obviously has to cope with the debilitating handicap of HAVING TO RUN THE CLUB WITH AT LEAST ONE OF HIS THUMBS UP HIS ASS AT ALL TIMES
-sigh-
Still – not bad at all for a Tuesday night, really.
*For any non-UK readers, Paul Daniels was a TV magician of the old school in the 80s particularly. He married his ‘sparkly assistant’, a couple of decades his junior, and spends most of his time acting ever-so-slightly bitter and aggrieved at the way his career has collapsed. Occasionally to be seen ranting in a sexist manner, eating kangaroo anus in the jungle or clod-hopping around a dance floor in a celebrity talent show.
**This triggers a memory from my College days in Liverpool when, whilst purchasing an album or two (on vinyl!) from the HMV store in the middle of the City, a tramp shambled up to the bins, pissed into (and around) one and then – obviously in a major hurry to get to some pedestrian-bothering appointment – simply walked off without return ‘the soldier’ to ‘the barracks’. Not an image one wants to see before drifting off to sleep: flaccid hobo cock in the home of The Beatles…that was 25 years ago…
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