venta

Last weekend, I was scooped up by chrestomancy in his large, purry car and delivered to ebee's house, where there was a Tentacle party. Involving full English, cake, boardgames, more cake, more boardgames and, of course, tentacles.

I'd not had time to make a cake, so hurriedly made some tentacular ginger biscuits and iced them (green, of course). However, everyone else seemed to have had pots of time and when I arrived just before lunch time there were a wide variety of tentacles waving atop cakes. Bloodshot mini-egg eyes balls stared at me from cupcakes which waved strawberry lace tentacles. A hideous mess of eyes, teeth and tentacles stared, snarled and snatched from a lurid green cake (it turned out to be a devil's food cake with peppermint icing, which is as awesome combination). A rather polite, tea-drinking, top hat-wearing octopus sat on an iced sponge (reading a book). And many others, of which my favourite was an extremely detailed marzipan Cthulu bestriding a Battenberg. Ebee has some extremely clever cake-making friends.

However, the express intention of the congregation was board games, so in between eating and drinking and eating and drinking I squeezed in a few of those. Having faffed about doing ridiculous social things like talking to people, I eventually joined in playing Walk The Plank. Which turned out to be one of those silly, low-entry-level games that soon devolves into a combination of luck and malice as you try to force other people's pirates into the sea. It's one of those games that's lots of fun, but I can't imagine wanting to play it very many times. Or at least, not very often.

Having rounded up enough spare people who'd finished whatever they were playing, a few of us then completely failed to save the world in Pandemic. I think Pandemic was the first co-operative game I every played, and I have a bit of a soft spot for it. Despite the several kinds of cards, piles of coloured cubes, and so on it's not hard to learn the rules and start playing.

After a break for pizza, in which I desultorily tried to help out someone struggling in a game of Trivial Pursuit (they were using a really odd box of music-themed questions that seemed unanswerable by almost everyone), and watched fascinated as others played Khet we settled down to play Seaside Frolics.

Now, Seaside Frolics claims to repesent an "Edwardian seaside holiday", and I've have guessed that it was from the 60s. It turns out to have been made in the late 80s, and (starting from a position of knowing very little about the evolution of boardgames) I'm speculating that it was conceived just before Germany began properly storming through the world of games.

The premise of Seaside Frolics is that you travel from 'home' to the seaside, spend an agreed number of days there, and travel back. While there, you choose your own route through various attractions, optionally visiting them and collecting teeny-tiny (sometimes saucy) seaside postcards. Each card has a points value, and at the end you count up, deduct any penalties, and declare a winner. There's a lot of free will about where you travel, you have a set amount of money each day to spend, and the clock which ticks down the hours each time introduces another constraint which makes it more interesting.

However... to move about, you roll a dice and count squares along the board. It's possible to be stuck waiting for a particular dice roll to get you somewhere (though to be fair, you can pay to alter your score by one). It's possible to have a run of bad dice luck fail to make any progress. At some points, it does just feel like you're doing the work to get to an end. But it's a long way from the county-board games of my childhood. As an artefact, it seems like a really interesting halfway house between the two styles. (Although it does suffer a couple of design flaws - like there is no real incentive actually return 'home', since the maximum penalty for failing is considerably less than the points you could earn by just not bothering.)

And then it was just waiting until all members of our travelling party were done with their games (and blimey, can Arkham take a long time when there are people trying not only to defeat the Great Old Ones but unravel and combine their conflicting sets of house rules).

And hurrah! What a jolly nice day out. I should spend a day eating cake, drinking tea and wine, and playing board games more often :-)