Here are the longer games I played during my stag weekend.
Suburbia
I like boring looking board games. I’m not sure why - maybe it’s that I think they must be so good they don’t have to worry about looking good. Suburbia takes the form of nothing but bits of cardboard: cardboard hexes, cardboard score sheet, cardboard money. There are a few wooden tokens per player to track income and score, but that’s as three dimensional as it gets. There isn’t even a board, as such: you build up the board out of hexes as you go along. Anyone who looks at it would be forgiven for never even giving it a chance.
I played 11 different games over the course of my stag weekend, most of them several times over, so it seems fitting to do a bit of a stag edition of my usual What I Played chats.
I have split this into 3 blog posts for the sake of your sanity. Here’s the first: party games!
One Night Ultimate Werewolf
Every time I introduce this game to new people, I find that it surprises me in different ways. We mess with the roles a lot, we find new ways to lie, we find new tactics to catch people out. This time around, we saw an incredible move from the werewolves claiming masons in a game where there were already two masons, causing much chaos, and an incredibly well played robber into werewolf that no-one saw coming. I can’t wait for the expansion.
I have a hard time buying presents for people. I fret and worry about how it will be received, what the present means for the other person, what the act of giving says about our relationship. Will they like it? By giving it, will I reveal that I know nothing about the person I am giving to? Receiving a present puts me in a similar boat. To receive a present you don’t like is to realise that someone else doesn’t know you like you thought they did. Surprises are the same. Stag weekends are the same. When your friends begin planning a weekend for you, you hope, and you pray, that they are, in fact, your friends. That they know how to show you a good time.
Another fortress crumbles and I start again. I thought I was building near a river last time, but when I embarked, there was no river to be seen. Perhaps, I thought, it is underground, and my dwarves dug and dug until they all died of dehydration.
I start again, gazing once more upon the world screen where I chose the location for my next little (vast) dwarf house (fortress). This time, I make sure I am near a river. It transpires, through a conversation with Charlie, that I was not near a river at all. It turns out that, when on the embark screen, looking at the world map, the region map, and the local map, you don’t actually embark onto the entire local map. You embark onto a tiny square inside that, lit up, and movable using yet another set of keys that I hadn’t even spotted on the cheat sheet along the bottom of the screen. I was never near a river. My dwarves had dug in vain.
On Tuesday 30th September, I gave blood for the first time. I’ve always thought about it, but never ticked the box on the form for some reason. Signing up for a new GP this year, I finally decided to bite the bullet and go for it. I chucked myself on the organ donor’s list, too, for good measure.
I forgot about it after that, but a letter dropped through my door a month or so ago with red ink on the envelope, inviting me to book an appointment at the upcoming blood clinic. I was stressed and busy at the time so I skipped over it, and felt bad. I left the letter on my desk as a reminder to sort it out next time they came around.
