Games At The Library

Today is International Games Day @ Your Library.

This is an international games day. And it's held at libraries.

Our local library, which is always good for an event, ran some games, sponsored by one of the local games shops. There was Minecraft and computer gaming on the go in one room, whilst tables were spread around between the shelves for board- or card-games. There had been a promise of D&D as well, but the people who could have run it weren't able to make it at the last minute, so it had to be canned.

Catherine Maya and I turned up for a little bit, to chat to other players and some of the people organising things, and then to play something.

We left Maya upstairs playing Pandemic, and got ourselves a game of Dixit with a lady named Melita and her two young sons, Jeremy and Hugo. We'd not played Dixit before. None of us had. But that wasn't a problem since it was a simple. Each player has a hand of cards with gorgeous, and sightly surreal, illustrations on them. In each round, one player secretely picks a card from their hand, and makes up a sentence, phrase or even a sound about it. The other players each choose a card from their hands which they think best fits that 'story', and pass it, face-down, to the first player. The first player shuffles the cards and arranges them in a line, face-up, for the other players to see. The players then secretly vote for the card that they think is the one chosen by the first player to inspire their statement/story.

The aim is for the storyteller (the first payer) to get some people to select their card, but not all (by making their statement too obvious) or none (by making it too vague). The scoring reflects this. Other players score points by either guessing the right card, or by other players choosing the one they selected.

Here's the scoring track which, for some reason, consists of cute wooden bunnies hopping through a garden

And here's some of the cards in play. I can't remember which one was the 'real' one in this set.

And here's Melita, Jeremy, Hugo and Catherine with some of the cards. Melita holds the record for being the first person ever to specifically ask to have her photo on this blog. Hugo's card (bottom right) was one of my favourites; a disturbing cthuloid dice thingy.

Hugo was our winner, pipping me to the victory by one point on the very last round. Catherine came a very distant last.

Back upstairs we found that Maya was just finishing up with Pandemic, the players having lost their bid to save the world.

I took a picture of the board, but they'd cleared most of the pieces away.

Numbers did seem a little disappointing, which we think was down to poor advertising locally. However this is an excellent idea for an event, which I hope we will get a chance to support again next year. It would be nice if we can take along some miniature wargaming for people too see or try. If not, then there's still board and card-games.