I accidentally found out about this group when doing admin on Meetup
for the Marlow one, and since I know one of the people involved…
Yeah, it's a Wetherspoon's. Unfortunate, but they're happy with
the place, and nobody gave me any grief for wearing a mask. (Though
the only other people who were were fellow gamers and the bar staff.)
We started with Mysterium
Park, an
interestingly cut-down version of Mysterium (which I've played quite
a lot). I liked some of the optimisations, like the card of
permutations to show e.g. where in the grid Red's clue is this round,
and I didn't really miss the competition for psychic points though the
betting game on other people's guesses can be fun. The "spooky
carnival" theme didn't do much for me, though.
Then on to Lovecraft
Letter.
Because the theme of the day was "horror", I searched my collection on
BGG for "horror" and "owned by me", and realised that I haven't played
this since the beginning of 2019. It's good to give it another go; not
quite as pared-down as basic Love Letter, but with enough of the
play that it's quick to pick up. It's not one of my top games ever,
but I'll try to get it back into the rotation.
And then A Touch of
Evil,
first physical game. It's a fascinating game: on the one hand there's
a whole lot of randomness, but on the other one can pick up mitigators
for most of it. I used my draft cooperative rules document (in the
published rules coop mode is an optional extra so one has to jump back
and forth) and things seemed to go pretty well, with a hard showdown
against the vampire that just saw us win. I think we were playing
for about two hours, but it didn't seem to drag.
How did I end up wielding both the Rosary and the Book of Witchcraft?
Well, fighting evil makes for strange bedfellows… at one point, as
Heinrich the Drifter, I was being followed around by Lord Hanbrook,
shortly after his wife had been revealed as an Evil Elder. "Well, my
lord, what I've found has always worked for me in these situations is
low-quality distilled spirits…"
Costumes were encouraged.
This was a really friendly bunch, and I'll certainly try to get to
more of their gatherings.
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