Bank holiday boardgame day!
Introduced my wife to Settlers Of Catan, which seemed to go down well. Not least because she won. Then more people started turning up and after warming up with a quick round of Liar's Dice (which Elaine won again) we played Cosmic Encounter. I drew the Laser as my special power, which was a bit of a double-edged... lightsabre? I got to pick my opponent's attack card at random which meant they were leery of attacking me because the result was a lottery, but meant I couldn't negotiate even if I wanted to. Almost everyone got to 4 of the 5 colonies they needed to win with relative ease, then everyone started allying with whoever was defending to stop whoever was attacking winning the game and the whole thing descended into hilarious chaos with weird powers interact and edicts flying back and forth across the table grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory and, eventually, the other way around. Cosmic Encounter is so great that I'm seriously considering splashing out for the recent Fantasy Flight reprint to replace my shonky £4 second-hand eighties-era GW copy.
A nice sedate game of 7 Wonders to calm everyone down and a break for dinner, then it was into double-plus-hilarious-chaos with The Resistance - which is very similar to Werewolf or Mafia, except with no player elimination and no need for a referee/adjudicator. I sat out the first game to make sure that everyone was bedded in with the rules then was on the winning side for the next two, managing to root out the filthy spies in the one game then suckering the resistance dupes into sending two of my fellow spies on a critical mission in the next.
We rounded off the evening with a game of Risk: Legacy. Risk: Legacy is BONKERS. Effectively, it's similar to the the old boardgame standby most of us grew up with except that every game you play, you're making PERMANENT changes to the board, the territory cards and the armies that effect every future game you play. The game comes with sealed packets of cards and components which are opened when certain events happen (ie, when someone wins their second game or the first time a faction is eliminated) and permanently change the rules of the game. I don't want to go into too many details because so much of the fun comes from the surprise of opening those packets and working out how that's going to impact the game going forward, but suffice to say we got to open one of the wells of components last night and our collective minds got blown.
My throat is now raw from being The One Who Knows The Rules And Therefore Has To Spend The Entire Day Talking. Totally worth it.