Banner day for Owl House yesterday. All nine of the people who said they’d show up did, indeed, show up. Karen, a recent arrival in town. Bryan and Shelly, the usual stalwarts. Joel and Brittani, first-timers, I think. Cody and Lupe, returning after a break of a year or more. And then Marianne and Dave, the last to arrive, first-timers, too, but among the last to leave.
Before the others showed up, I ran a few errands to prepare the long, plastic folding table that we have. It’s hard to manipulate cards and other bits that are flat on that table, so I bought some felt and a grippy runner to keep the felt in place. A bit piece of felt in a lovely royal blue edging toward purple. But you have to buy a certain width as well as length, so I ended up with a lot of felt. Dana will use the extra material in some project or other. She has a host of amazing projects.
Shelly and Bryan had brought some light games that let us all sit down and get to playing quickly. We started with two rounds of Wits & Wagers and moved on to another game from the same company, Say Anything! We also had a metagame going on, a card game that Bryan had brought over called Say What? Each card has a noun or a verb, and you give a card away to anyone who says the noun or does the verb. First person to get rid of their cards wins.
By the end of Say Anything! we had ten people—a much too large number for most games. We broke up into two groups of five to play Dixit, the recent SdJ winner. The game is stunningly beautiful. The real barrier to winning the game is the aesthetics. It’s far too easy to get drawn into the illustrations on the cards and forget what you’re supposed to be doing. We milled around after the games talking about the illustrations.
At this point we’d been playing games for almost four hours, and some of the players took off to pursue other entertainments. Those of us who were left—Bryan, Shelly, Marianne, Dave, Karen, and I—sat down to play Cable Car, a tile-laying/route-building game that came out earlier this year. Or maybe last year. I know that it was a re-publishing of a game named Metro. I had a little difficulty explaining the rules, but we got the game going eventually. It went over well with everyone but Bryan, but he didn’t complain. For the last game of the evening, we played Carcassonne on Bryan’s iPad. That iPad format allowed us to have a fairly lively conversation (and play with question cards from MooT), but the format made it difficult to focus on gameplay even as the machine made it easier to keep track of scores and tiles. An interesting conundrum.
The house emptied out by 8:30 or 8:45, just enough time to replace the furniture but not enough to get the games put away. One of our neighbors came over during the resetting with a sympathy plant and card for Dana, which was very nice of her. She helped me sling furniture around, too, so really just an all-around nice person.
And then it was time to head out to the airport to pick up Dana and Wendy. I got to the terminal ten minutes before their plane was scheduled to land, but, as sometimes happens in Lincoln, the plane was twelve minutes early. I waved to them as they headed into one of the two elevators that functions as a bank of elevators in the small airport, but I nevertheless managed to lose them in the small building. When I finally tracked them down, Dana was frazzled (and had been for some time, the frazzling was not a new thing), so I followed Wendy around the building while the crew unloaded the luggage. And that was the end of the evening.
Today, we’re off to the Kids’ Museum or the zoo, depending on the weather. And then Dana and I will sit down to some game or other this evening.
Thanks again for the invitation! Dave and I had a lovely time. I kept admiring the color and idea of the felt tabletop but didn't get a chance to tell you.
Posted by: Marianne Kunkel | 07/11/2010 at 03:17 PM