El Prez MIA, Tara leaps further ahead
On a rainy night in Engadine there were just five of us to meet – thanks to Nicole for the hospitality. Louise and Steve were unavailable, and Wayne was recovering from a bout of Covid. Although theoretically at the end of his mandatory isolation, he wasn’t feeling 100% confident to attend meetings.
The games were two new ones introduced by Nicole, and both were well received by those present. The scheduled main game was to be Catan – a teams event, but there being an odd number we reverted to the standby, also a new game, Snakesss. For those not present, here’s a quick description: It involves multiple choice trivia questions, but with a difference:- in each round one random player is a “mongoose”, and two are “snakes”, the rest are “normal humans”. Nobody knows which other players are snakes. When the trivia multiple choice question is read out, the snakes get to see the correct answer. There follows a brief discussion in which the snakes try to talk people into an incorrect answer. The mongoose tries to convince everyone to go for the answer they think is right. Everyone then puts in their token (A, B or C) for their chosen answer. The snakes don’t choose an answer as they already know it, so they put in a snake token. The tokens are then revealed. Snakes get points for all the wrong answers, mongooses get points for right answers, humans get a point if they got the right answer. The scores were close – Tara, Genelle and Ross got 34, 30 and 27 respectively. It seemed that Ross spent most of his turns being a snake rather than a normal human!
The backup game was Hues and Cues, a colour describing game played on a board with 480 squares of different colours. There are many different shades of the basic red, green, yellow and blue gradually shading across the board. On each turn the player draws a card with 4 colours on it, each matching one of the 480 squares. One colour is picked and the player tries to describe that shade with one word, for example “canary” for a shade of yellow. You can’t say the common colours like red, green, blue, etc. You can say things like “shirt” while pointing at a shirt. All the other players then place one token on the shade they think might match the word. The player then gets to say one more word for the same colour. Players then place a second token on a nearby shade indicated by the second word, for example “lighter”. Players get points for how close their tokens are to the actual colour. Rob had the brilliant idea of picking a shade of yellow close to his SBGA shirt, but completely stuffed up by letting everyone see his colour card when comparing it to his shirt. He was allowed to have another turn. At first this game was described by the blokes as “a girl’s game”, because a bloke would describe something as “yellow”, where a woman would say “lemon”, etc etc. However, the placings were Rob (bloke), Tara (non-bloke), Ross (bloke), so go figure.
With two helpings of points Tara has now increased her lead to a frightening 185 points over Rob who leads Nicole by 100 points. The absence of Louise and Wayne helped Genelle overtake both of them into 4th place. Ironically, the only WHP was our host Nicole.