A Tough Week

As I mentioned last week, Tuesday was the inaugural Newcastle Playtest UK meetup at The Bridge Hotel. "How was it?", I hear you ask. By all accounts, very good. "Wait, what now? Weren't you one of the organisers?", I hear you ask. Yes, and therein lies a story.

Monday night had been tough, The Daughter wasn't well so we had all been awake for a good chunk of the night. The next day she seemed a little better, and despite hideous sleep deprivation, I was determined to make it along to the Playtest meetup. I soldiered on through work mainlining coffee directly into my veins, but all for naught, as we ended up having to take The Daughter to the out of hours GP that evening instead. A far more 'exciting' evening than either of us had been hoping for, and one with far fewer games than I had anticipated.

The Daughter's fine now, thanks for asking.

In other news, it was Newcastle Gamers' 100th meeting on Saturday, so there was all-day gaming for free :) I managed to make it along about 7:30pm, and got three games in. I'd taken Die Speicherstadt, K2, X-Wing Minis and Codename: Vacuum. I ended up teaching Die Speicherstadt to John and Christine, followed by K2 to Michael (with Michał) and then Die Speicherstadt again, this time to Michael and Michał. A great evening's gaming plus a chance to catch up with Gareth, who used to run Newcastle Gamers and come to my Thursday games night :).

I've also arranged an impromptu Playtest meetup at The Bridge for next Tuesday to make up for missing the last one (and in fact I can't make the next official one either - we're away in York that night). I'll take along Vacuum, but play what people fancy. I've changed the number of endgame conditions you score back to similar to how they used to be, in an attempt to reduce the play time and add some urgency (and rushing as a valid strategy), Paul's talk of 45 minutes per player game time has spurred me on to speed things up - simplifying things will help there too, so I also need to keep that in mind.