15th Dec 2022 - Festive Fun & Review Of The Year

• Recent games

Merry Christmas everybody! If you didn’t make it to the festive week this week, you missed a great night. We had mince pies and quizzes and a raffle and all good things. There was even a free bar – but most importantly, it felt like the long-awaited return to the way of things before the pandemic. We may spend some weeks brooding for hours over Brass Birmingham – but this week, the club was all light games, with a friendly and somewhat boisterous atmosphere and the chance to chat to everyone.

There were a couple of very popular car racing games, with both Heat: Pedal To The Metal (the successor to Flamme Rouge) and PitchCar playing repeatedly throughout the evening. The return of the much-missed PitchCar tournament proved far more popular than the “tournament” tournament ever was, with 23 entrants spread across 3 heats. I also saw Cartographers, and a new game called Ready Steady Bet – a chaotic game about horse racing in which we all panic about how to spread our bets in real time, while Ian suffers a dice-related injury by rolling dice continuously all evening. It was great fun

It felt like a fitting conclusion to a great year at the club. Highlights among the new games I played at the club were Trismegistus: the Ultimate Formula, Clinic, and of course Western Legends, which has developed a sizeable following this year. And we also managed to get a couple of my old favourites back too, and introduced them to others, with Automobile and Bus. And I got to play some really old games, with 1830 and – something I never expected to see – Kingmaker.

We’ve seen the Saturday games days become firmly established as a regular fixture this year – the highlight among a number of new initiatives brought in by Ian and Paul. And it’s been great to see the club continuing to attract new members – and it feels like they in turn are already doing great work spreading the word farther and wider. And to cap it all off we had Vital Night, with a visit from the great man himself.

Of course, it’s not quite Christmas yet – there’s another week, and another chance to prepare for Tsuro with the family with a 4-hour warm-up game of Brass Birmingham. And nothing says Christmas quite like a bank robbery – so we’ll be bringing back Western Legends for one more game before the year is out. It’s High Noon and Santa Claus is coming to town – and the sheriff’s waiting for him. You’d better be good, or possibly bad, depending on your strategy. So get your Christmas jumper and spurs on and come and join us!

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