Sixteen – London on Board

My work meeting finished early.  As soon as I said my goodbyes to everyone, it was time to roll the dice; I was excited. As I rode the elevator to the ground floor, I looked at the Meetup app calendar and saw that there were no events in the late afternoon.  Instead, the earliest event was at half past five and was called ‘Gaming at The Bishop’s Finger’ and was hosted by a Meetup group called ‘London on Board’, a group that played ‘adult board games’.

Being a former member of the geek community (in the sense that I used to watch Star Trek, played the occasional game of Dungeons and Dragons, and enjoy messing around with computers because I didn’t have any friends), you realise that there are many other parallel ‘geek universes’ out there. There are comic geeks, fantasy geeks, electronics geeks, and there are also board game geeks. As a teenager and student I pretty much avoided these other dimensions of geekdom. When I read the Meetup event description, I had a few key questions that I needed to answer: what were these ‘adult board games’, how do you play them, and what is there to get so excited about to make you want to create a whole community of people that meet with each other after a tough day at the office?

My phone offered me some instructions about how to get to a pub; I needed to catch a bus. My bus took me through the back streets of Islington, past the Angel underground station and towards the heart of the city. I got off by The Barbican and had a ten minute walk to the pub, which was situated on a square close to Smithfield Market. The area was quiet; the time for trading had long passed. Motorcyclists and cab drivers stood on a corner, chatting and drinking tea. With about an hour to kill before the start of London on Board, I ordered a drink and settled down with a book at a table that overlooked the square.

‘I’ve been with him for two years, so obviously he’s the one I’m going to marry…’ Two women were talking loudly. After gently eavesdropping for a few minutes I realised that they had both attended the same course and were having a crafty glass of wine before heading off to a restaurant.

‘I’ve been with my boyfriend for six months but, you know what, I find it impossible to be faithful!’

‘You know what, I’m exactly the same’.

I was finding it impossible to read; I had been subject to my ex’s infidelity and this conversation was starting to dredge up some uncomfortable memories.

A phone buzzed.

‘He’s texting me shit about the wedding. I’m going to ignore him.  I don’t have work stress but I do have him stress; I have relationship stress! He’s going to move in to my place, you know? He’s going to move from his parents; it’s best this way – I’ll get him away from them’.

I looked up from the page.  I had been re-reading the same sentence for the past five minutes.

‘I don’t want his family to raise my kids. I don’t want them to fill my kid’s head with rubbish, you know? His family totally does my head in…’

I took a sip from my drink and looked out at the taxi drivers who were having a chat. One driver was sitting in the back of another’s taxi. A motorcycle courier had finished his tea and was pulling on his helmet.

‘He earns, like, fifty grand doing software or something, and I earn thirty, so he needs to give me some money, you know what I mean? He could like, set up a standing order or something, to do a transfer every month – for the wedding, you know?’

I couldn’t stand any more. I looked at my watch; it was time to go inside.

The event took place in a function room on the first floor. I was the second person there. I introduced myself to Lloyd, who was our host for the night. Lloyd asked me about my interest in games.  I said that I didn’t have any particular interest, and told him about my one hundred Meetup quest.  He seemed genuinely interested; he asked me how many groups I had visited and which one I had found the most interesting.

Within half an hour, fifteen people had arrived, many of whom were carrying board games that I had never heard of. Lloyd set up a card game that had one hundred and four cards. He patiently explained all the rules which seemed to be profoundly complicated: ‘each card has got a number on it, and you’ve got to put the card down on the other cards that have a lower number than your card – and if there are six cards, you take them all and put them to one side, and then at the end of the game, you count up the number of bulls you have on your cards’.

‘Bulls?’

‘Yes. That card has five bulls, this other card has just one bull – the winner is the one of us who has the lowest number of bulls’.

None of this made any sense. I was starting to panic.

'The game is all about the bulls?'

Three people sitting around the table nodded in agreement.

We played, and Lloyd narrated every single step of the game so we could all jointly assimilate all the rules. It gradually started to make sense; I needed to get rid of as many bulls as I could early on in the game so that others were forced to pick them up and they would lose. It turned out to be fun!

With more people arriving, Lloyd set up a new, totally different game, which was all about building societies.

‘The winner is someone who builds three temples. The other way to win is to build two towers, or you could use all your huts; you win if you haven’t got any left. Basically, you put down these hexagons on each go, and when you’ve done that you can build some huts, but you can’t build on a volcano, but what you can do is put one hexagon volcano onto of another hexagon volcano, so that way you can build upwards, and only then can you build a tower…’

I had absolutely no idea what Lloyd was talking about.

A new visitor called Keith arrived and sat down at our table. He introduced himself and announced that his game of Zombie Fluxx was ‘a gift to the group’.

‘Anyone fancy a game of Warewolf?’ Keith asked.

‘Don’t worry… its easy; I’ll explain it’ he said, noticing my expression. There were four of us who were prepared to play.

‘The idea is that you’ve got to discover the Warewolf, okay? Each card is, like, a different character and they do different things. You take a card at the start, but this card might change, so you don’t know who you are. There’s a villager who wants to find the warewolf, and there’s the hunter who, like, kind of commits suicide. The hunter can accuse someone of being warewolf, and then shoots him, and that can finish the game, but then the hunter kills himself. Then there’s the see-er who can see what some of the other cards are. There’s the troublemaker who swaps cards with other players so they don’t know who they are. A thief does another swap. The insomniac can see what their own card is after everything has been moved around – and we’ve got six minutes between us to figure out who the warewolf is, and then we all take a vote’.

I started to panic again.

Keith was visiting London; he was on holiday from Los Angeles. Board games were apparently Keith’s ‘thing’. Before the game of Warewolf started, Keith said that he belonged to a similar group in LA, and regularly went to a huge gaming convention in San Diego. He clearly knew how to play Warewolf.

‘What kind of stuff do you do when you’re not gaming?’ I asked.

‘Erm… the best way to put it is that I catch bad guys over the internet’.

‘You’re a spy?’ I asked undiplomatically. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to; I would completely understand if you can’t’.

‘I’m kind of like a spy. I work for a big accounting firm in their security division and we do research into people to help to create cases’. Keith used to work for the US Military before moving into information technology; his current role seemed to cross the boundaries of both these areas.

Keith got out his smartphone. ‘The way the game works is that there’s an app that takes on the role of a moderator; this gives instructions at the start of the game’. Keith pressed play. Spoken instructions told different characters to shuffle different cards around, so everyone knew different bits about who was who.  In the six minutes of the game, everyone had to work together to pick out the bad guy, and the ‘warewolf’ makes stuff up to put everyone ‘off the trail’.

As the timer on Keith’s smartphone counted down, accusations unfolded and bedlam ensued. ‘I think you’re the warewolf!’ someone called Graham shouted. Despite being a mere villager, half of the participants thought I was the bad guy. It was fun, but confusing. I ‘got’ the idea of the game, and understood how its fast paced dynamics combined with the need to talk nonsense could make it quite compelling, especially after a couple of beers.

After a second game of Warewolf, I have to confess that I broke my ‘bitter end’ rule; a migraine that had gently started in the early afternoon had taken hold and I needed to get home. It was a shame; my initial fears of not being able to understand anything had rapidly dissipated: newbies were tolerated and everyone was patient. I could see how everyone was enjoying everyone’s company and the absurdity of the games; they were all wonderfully escapist.

As I waited for a bus to London Bridge, I asked myself a question, ‘would I like to go back to this group?’ The answer was a clear and unambiguous yes: this was a dimension of geekdom that I could happily embrace. ‘I could always come back’ I thought, ‘but only when I’ve done my one hundred’.