Holiday Games

So here I am, back after a two-week holiday road-tripping through the Northern Territory. 

Actually we hired a camper-van in Darwin and just drove down to Uluru, but that's road-tripping in my book.

Anyway, I always try to post a run-down of any games we played whilst we were away, but this time the pool is rather small. With one thing and another we didn't find a lot of time to sit and just play; that's not to say that we didn't have an interesting (and mostly good) holiday; we just didn't manage much in the way of gaming time.

So let's get started. An evening in a pub is always a good place for games. We actually spent a lot of it playing pool and darts, and technically since I counted the latter as one of my 52 Games I should count the former as well. But I didn't take any pictures and I'm not sure it really counts anyway, so I'll be leaving it. However we did break out Fluxx, and that is a new addition to my 52 Games list. We played several games with just the four of us - Catherine, Maya, myself and our travelling companion Rafaela, who used to live with us whilst she was at university in Wollongong and who now lives in Darwin. Raf finds some of the games we play confusing at first; here she is wondering how Fluxx works.

And here's one of my winning positions. I think we all won at least one game.

Afterwards we had a go at A Walk In The Park, which seemed to confuse Raf a lot and baffled Maya and Catherine for a bit as well, but we were all quite tired (we were doing a lot of travelling and driving), so that's understandable. We also played Skull, which is far less confusing. In fact, aside from one more game of A Walk In The Park in Alice Springs, Skull became the go-to game for the rest of the holiday.

Owing to an incident with our camper-van we found ourselves stuck at the pub for the whole of the following day. However it's the Daly Waters Pub on the Stuart Highway, and there are far worse places you could be stuck for a day whilst waiting for a mechanic to turn up. We played more pool, lounged about in the pool and, in the case of Catherine and myself, played some Blood, Sweat & Cheers, mostly to justify my carting a box of 25mm gladiators across the country. I made a small travel arena as well, using the underside of an old table-mat.

The main bar of the Daly Waters Pub at 10am on a Thursday in the off-season.

Rufina the thraex fights a murmillo.

Rufina is one of my unlucky models, and even Catherine couldn't prevent her defeat.

The whip-wielding Rodan fell to Cygnus the hoplomachus almost immediately, after being impaled by a thrown spear.

Catherine finally scored a win in the next game, with Rodan (or his twin brother), taking on the armoured scissor Syphax ...

... and defeating him

One thing we did try was to not only treat the Imperial Favour card as a Glory card, but have it such that if it had been played during a turn it caused the entire discard pile and deck to be reshuffled. 

So, in summary, it was a good holiday (aside from the mechanical difficulties, the ridiculous heat and the radioactive material incident) but we didn't play many games.

 52 Games - Game 63