Bringing People Together

The Daughter was up between 4:15 and 4:30 every day last week, so I didn't get as much done as I had intended on the NaGa DeMon winners' copies of Zombology. Still, the clocks have changed now, so I'm hoping that she'll be sleeping to something past five on summer time, and I can start going to bed a bit later myself - and get the last couple of copies finished off and then get them all in the post. It's Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday, so that'll be a late night and then there's Games Night on Thursday, so I'll have to fit the construction in around those.

So, not much progress to report but and interesting thing did happen on Tuesday. I went to Manchester again for work (it's becoming a regular occurrence since we were bought by an American corporation whose UK headquarters are in Manchester). It's often my boss and I who go down, and since he's a Games Night attendee, I usually take my iPad full of board games to help us while away the six hours of train journeys. The boss couldn't make it this week, so I opened it up to the floor and Sam one of our two new starters came instead. Sam's also a gamer, so the iPad came too. We played a lot of games on the two journeys many of which Sam hadn't played before. The last game of the first journey was Carcassonne (new to Sam) which Sam won despite my literally hundreds of games of experience.

The second journey was very busy - the train was crammed. Fortunately we'd booked seats and so had table space to play some more games. As we pulled out of Manchester, I offered Sam another game and he chose Carcassonne again. Sam and I were sat diagonally opposite each other on a four person table and we'd been on the move for about 5 minutes before the guy sat next to me started offering Sam advice! As the game went on Mr. Random Stranger helped Sam out a few times - he could sense I was the more experienced player and so was helping 'the underdog' :-)

The game came to an end, and seeing as Mr. Random Stranger hadn't got off yet, I asked if he wanted to play too. Pat (his name as it turns out) happily joined in and we spent the next hour and a half playing three player games until Pat got off at York. It turns out Pat had been to Beyond Monopoly (the games club in York I used to frequent when I lived there) and knew Jon, the guy who runs it (who used to help me playtest games when I ran Reiver Games). It's a small world. I also felt like I vaguely recognised Pat, though that might be my imagination, I've met a lot of people through Reiver Games, and I'm often bad at remembering names and faces.

In case you ever read this Pat, it was a pleasure to meet you - thanks for joining in!