Saturday 11 April 2009

Games night

We aren't going away this Easter so, for Good Friday, we had some friends over for a games night. After perusing the supplies at both of our parents' houses, we found some board games we'd enjoyed playing in the past. With daylight savings ending in New Zealand last week, it's now time for winter get-togethers to happen. The Easter bunny had popped in earlier and left some goodies.

My sweetie and I warmed up with a couple of matches of Connect 4 and Othello. As our guests arrived, and the drinks started flowing, we moved to some games which allowed more players to be involved. Scattergories is perfect for this, providing that everyone is using the same list to play. If someone chooses to play with another list, as we found, then the scoring can be incredibly difficult but extremely amusing. We had some really interesting debates about what counts as an acceptable word within a category; eg is "exit" a way to get from here to there? Is "European" really a thing you shout? (It turns out that European was meant to be written down as a type of ethnic food, the category above. We laughed about this one for hours afterwards!)

After dessert, we moved on to Balderdash. I hadn't played this game before; it is absolutely hilarious. You are given a very difficult word and have to make up a definition for it. One person collects up everybody's definitions and writes the correct one on a piece of paper, then reads out everybody's definitions to the group. Each person chooses which definition they think is the right one. Those who are correct score a point. You also score points if other people choose your definition, ie if you have fooled someone else with your convincing definition. As the evening progressed, the definitions became even more 'creative', and some were straight-out dodgy! It was great to see so many of our friends crying with laughter while playing this game.

My sweetie has never played Cluedo before, a game I absolutely love, so we will have to keep it out and get a couple of others to join us on another occasion. I'm so glad that I chose this to be one of my 101 goals: #28 - Play a board game with friends. I'm even more glad that we had such a fun evening with friends on a long weekend.

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