Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Travels, Games and Airport Security. Or how many games can you stuff into a Codenames box?

QUEENSTOWN AIRPORT, NEW ZEALAND.

I’m going through the X-ray check-point just before the boarding gate when I hear the dreaded words that no passenger wants to hear.

“Excuse me, is this your backpack? Could you please step aside?”

“Sure, mate.” Okay, just smile and keep casual while frantically running through the mental inventory of what I packed into there. Oh God, I did not put the nail-clippers in there, did I? That’s an embarrassing rookie air-traveller mistake.

“Something came up in the X-ray,” explains the officer with my backpack. “Let me just have a look through, okay?” He’s nicer than most airport security personnel I’ve met so far. In fact, this whole country is filled with the nicest people in the world, almost as if the colonial powers back in the day had migrated all the nice people here and left all the grumpy ones back in the old country.

After a brief rummage (which fortunately was nail-clipper-less), he finally pulls out a box. “Can I open this?” he asks.

I stare at it. “Sure thing.” It’s Codenames. Why on earth would Codenames set off the X-ray machine?

Okay, well, yeah. There’s more than just Codenames in that box.

Saturday, January 20, 2018

Who are 'we' in 'Games We Play'?

First blog post for 2018, and I realise that we haven't updated (or created!) our profiles on our blog. So I decide to rectify this, and go round up the various members of the family today to interview them one at a time. Turned out to be an interesting exercise, with me asking gaming-related questions and typing furiously into the laptop while the family member drawled on about games they love to play.