Games to drink to

At a games meetup, I was introduced to Champions of Midgard, a Viking game where you worker-place for supplies and dice warriors then send them out to battle Nordic beasts.Armed only with a big flagon of lager, I gathered and I slayed, I swilled and I triumphed. I found myself smacking the beer down with a splosh, declaring “I will slay the troll!”, grabbing a fistful of warrior-dice and throwing them in the direction of the foul creature while bellowing a barbarian Yawp.

Champions of Midgard

I had a blast.But recently, I watched Paul Dean (shutupandsitdown.com) review Midgard, and he had plenty of good things to say about it… but then said that this game became stale near the end. A bit too easy. Good to introduce new players, he said, not heavy gamers.Taking a moment to recover from Dean calling me a noob, I realised the difference: Dean, sober, thought it flagged. New players, and beer-fuelled me, loved it. Or maybe I am a noob. Hope not.Thus started my quest: To find out which games went better with booze.NB: There is a lot of drinking in this article, which I don't recommend to any great success, but in the name of research, spaced over a half-year, I took those bullets so you don't have to.You're welcome! ...onward:I dropped in to my brother’s house with an Unlock escape game. He looked at the box, saw that it was an easy difficulty rating, brought out a bottle of vodka, and poured generously.He called it ‘Increasing the degree of difficulty’.Success! Faced with what should have been an easy puzzle to solve, with a game that might have bored us and left us unsatisfied, instead fun ensued!We tried it again the next week with a hard one: not so much fun. We swore at the cards and flung the box across the room followed by leftover pizza crusts.Evidently, not every game is enhanced with booze.A few weeks ago, with some friends who are light game players – they go for Settlers of Catan and such – I had two games on the menu: Colt Express and Betrayal on House on the Hill, served with a few bottles of a nice Sav Blanc.

Catan at the pub

Colt Express is a game of robbing a Wild West locomotive by programming your movements to run, shoot, and punch people out of your way to grab the goods.You can’t really plan much in Colt Express, since you don’t really know if your plans to get that briefcase won’t be thwarted by a punch you didn’t see coming.So here’s what happened: The new players relaxed and didn’t care about planning, but having fun. I found myself not caring about winning, but not getting bored through lack of challenge either.Wine, I discovered, makes Colt Express is a winner. Try next with Tennessee Whiskey for added theme.We then moved on to Betrayal at House on the Hill.Betrayal is a simple 'explore a haunted house' game until a big twist in the middle, the haunting, where one player becomes the monster and needs to learn a different set of rules alone to play the villain against the rest of the party.Tori found herself The Haunted, and had to go off to learn new rules about how to manage a pocket of ghosts, which represented a sudden learning curve, and found that the Sav was becoming the betrayer, as in her half-cut state, her eyes started to glaze over with the attempt at inebriated cognition.Betrayal, we discovered, does not go well with wine.Another night, another game, another bottle. This time it was Spyfall with whisky.Spyfall involves each player being handed the same location card with a role on it, except for one player whose card merely says “Spy”. Through questions, the players need to find the spy before the spy works out the location.Spyfall is a tricky beast – people either get it or they don’t. If they are competitive and care about winning, then it won’t be much fun. If they don’t care so much, it can be hi-larious.Perhaps our experience was tainted by being veterans of the game and not caring much about winning anyway, but after a few rounds – in both senses – we REALLY didn’t care, and often, even after knowing who the spy was, kept the round going just for the laffs, as inhibitions dropped and theatrics rose.Spyfall – a little drink can help get players on board, and once they are, pour freely. The increased ‘degree of difficulty’ is relative only to each other rather than the game, and it keeps players in the zone of engagement throughout.Next week, again at my brother’s house, we and his housemate took on Bunny Kingdom with Shiraz.

Lots of bunnies, multiplying.

Bunny Kingdom’s basic rules were easy enough, except for the eye-straining tech essays written on the special bonus cards, but what hit us was the maths. For each fief you have, multiply towers by different produce types, add them all together, add more maths for the final round for a maths fiesta. With bunnies.

First round: not much to count. Easy to do, especially given that the whisky was still high in the bottle.

Fourth round, with damage to ourselves and the bottle, we were presented with such a string of algebraic equations and bonus-card maths that our happy bubble was burst and we scraped against the cognition that we were required to do, needing bits of our brains that we had packed away in a tall glass. Rabbits were flung in a way that rabbits oughtn’t be.

Still, this meant the theory was a success – if we, half-drunk seasoned gamers, couldn’t handle something that was kid-themed, then was it really that good a kids’ game? If I had sprung this on newbies, would they ever let me suggest another game?And so I propose Stuart’s rule of sauce: Test for complexity while drinking. In order to test if a game is suitable for newbies or youngsters, drink down to their level, and play.

Cheers!