So far, 2021 is looking like the party year. On New Year's Eve, our entire static except for Kan got together for an impromptu board game night. I use the term "night" loosely; we started at 6 pm, with a break for dinner, and went until around 5 am.
numbers was the GM. He was wildly drunk but had picked out several games ahead of time while sober. One of them was Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, a mafia-esque game in which a group of detectives tries to solve a murder, but one of them is secretly the murderer. I was the murderer once, using a fan and an electrical wire, which I thought was a pretty nondescript and hard-to-guess way to kill someone. But HGR was the game master, and he spun a story of old lovers in their bedroom late at night, with a common-seeming death that appeared to be an accident. (They're going to bed together, one of them is hot, they go to turn on the fan...what a familiar and nostalgic scene. And it rules out so many means of death and pieces of evidence! What would an old couple plausibly have in their bedroom late at night?) Then, on the third and final day of the investigation, HGR drew the card that let him describe the temperature at the time of the murder. newbie was like "What good is that?!" Then HGR said the murder happened when the weather was hot, and everyone looked at my fan, and that was the game.
Despite enjoying that round, I feel like I've lost my taste for mafia-like games. To be clear, I love them in fiction. I love watching others play. There's something special about watching a town scrambling around. But I don't like participating any more. Chalk it up to laziness, I guess: I don't want to think that hard, either to ferret out the truth or to deceive and misdirect. I just want to chill out with friends.
Anyway, that was just one game of several. Unfortunately I can't remember the names of the others, but they were all good. There was one card game where you had to get your teammates to guess the cards you were holding, and the third round was a Pictionary round. With like 5 seconds on the clock, Dante drew a super clutch Very Hungry Caterpillar that was just, like, six circles in a row, and both Silver and I got it.
HGR's drawing round did not go as well. As a hint for Grimace/Hamburglar, he tried drawing burgers, but literally nobody could figure out what they were. They did not look like burgers. They looked like bugs. (head, thorax, abdomen) He also tried drawing Chun-Li, and this one was dead obvious—female fighter! thunder thighs! fighting game health bars!—yet none of his teammates got it. He was SO MAD.
===
A couple days later, we capped things off with a double raid weekend. We almost beat Iconoclasm on Sunday, but instead got a 0.1% enrage OOPS. It's my fault (well, it's everyone's fault, but it's definitely my fault) because I was barely attacking at all during whirlybird. We've only seen the mechanic a few times and I was still trying to process how it works. Split into three teams! Dodge the rotating spiral exaflares! Grab your orb! DON'T touch anyone else's orb! I got tagged by splash damage from Silver's orb—those explosions are huge—which of course changed my color, causing me to die when I grabbed my own orb, costing us additional dps. oops oops oops
Still, not bad considering it's only our third play session. It's generally acknowledged that Iconoclasm is just sort of a breather before the notoriously hard Shiva fight. Kan recommended that we all watch videos in advance to familiarize ourselves with Shiva's mechanics, causing HGR to snort in derision. Wonder how many people will actually do it.
You must be signed in to post a comment!