I'm Emma. And I don't own a single board game.
I might as well have switched the last bit of that for 'And i mainline heroin' for the shocked looks on my co-adventurers faces when the words tripped off my tongue.
Listening to them chatter excitedly about such and such board game and the expansion pack for thingy jabbed at my inner child and made it move its sluggish midweek arse and start shaking some dice.
With Julie Dodd
Julie is Director of Digital Transformation and Communication at Parkinson's UK and quite possibly one of the most inspiring bosses i've had. She's a powerhouse, always on the ball, never missing a detail, and a self confessed nerd. The minute I asked her what she wanted to share with me activity wise she was quick to suggest 'games', no extra info needed I knew it was going to be good. We managed to recruit 2 more nerds to join us, Faye from the Digital Product team and Ben from Finance.
GAME 1: 'ESCAPE THE DARK CASTLE'
The first game we played was a warm-up, a card and dice based strategy game which was actually invented by Julie's friends. The premise was quite simple to follow (a godsend for me, i'm not great at following instructions AND having fun consecutively) We chose a character, 15 story cards were selected at random from a possible 100 and put in a pile in the middle and we were given a dice which correlated with the skills of our chosen character.
Starting with 12 health points each we turned the story cards one at a time and followed the instructions, fighting various scary looking creatures with a roll of our dies and then collecting an assortment of slightly crappy weapons and mouldy food which boosted our health when things got desperate.
We got pretty competitive over this game, ending in a blaze of glory when Faye's dice roll spectacularly killed the big boss flame baddie and meant we didn't get singed. High-fives all round!
Find out more about the game here.
GAME 2: 'DEAD OF WINTER'
I'm going to struggle a little more describing this one mainly because 60% of the time I wasn't really sure what was happening but I knew I was having fun.
It involved picking 2 characters from a possible 4 dealt to us and then using those character's skills to kill zombies, collect food and find medicine. I had a doctor as one of my characters and turns out that's pretty useful during a zombie invasion. We were playing the easier version of the game to get us started and it turns out it might have been a little too easy as we only encountered 3 zombies and collected the medication we needed to complete the mission with relative ease. Or we're just awesome.
For what is actually quite a complex game (normally i'm more of a Monopoly girl) I enjoyed it and my head didn't explode. In real life and in the game.
Find out more about the game here.
