I already knew what I was doing on Thursday night because I had found it when searching ‘Things to do on a Wednesday night in Kettering’ the previous evening. The Kettering Board Games Club met at the Mind Centre every Thursday. It started at seven p.m. and you had to bring a board game with you – those were the only details the Kettering Board Games Club web page had to offer. So I phoned my friend Wardy (the sign thief) and he agreed to come along as well, because why not?
I brought a board game called Thrice with me. Thrice is a ‘simple game of tactics’ where you roll three or four die and then leapfrog them over one another as if they were counters on a board, and if you jump over your opponent’s dice I believe that means something, maybe you win, I’m not sure. All I knew was I couldn’t bring Monopoly or something obvious like that (this was the Kettering Board Games Club, mainstream games would not be welcome), but I also couldn’t bring anything too obscure because then I’d look like I was trying too hard. This ‘simple game of tactics’ was perfect for the Kettering Board Games Club. It would show that I was smart but not arrogant and that I didn’t follow the masses but I also avoided pretension. We knocked on the door of the Mind Centre, Thrice in my backpack, and the door was answered by a bearded man in a Star Trek T-shirt (I know that sounds clichéd but it’s what happened). He looked at us, perplexed.
‘We’re here for the board games club!’ I said. He looked shocked, literally reacting like no one had ever turned up to Kettering Board Games Club before. Like it had only ever been him, sitting in a room, week after week, hand frozen in a ‘flick’ position and poised above a spinner, waiting for someone to walk in and challenge him to a game of Articulate.
‘Oh, OK, cool, come on up,’ he said, having composed himself. We followed him upstairs and into the room where the games took place and it’s fair to say I wasn’t fully prepared for what awaited me.
I was not, and still am not, familiar with games such as Dungeons & Dragons or Warhammer, but that’s what they were playing. There was a game that looked like D&D but was actually called something like Hero Quest being played by two guys on one table, a game that seemed to just involve cards with magic people on them being played by three other fellas on another table (Magic the Gathering?) and a third table where a game that seemed to focus on one of the World Wars was being played by our host and another guy. These games had clearly not been started tonight – they had each been going on for months on end and would continue to last for many months thereafter. Everyone eyed us up with suspicion and I decided to leave Thrice where it was, firmly in the backpack.
Side note, there was not a single board in sight. No boards. At Kettering Board Games Club. The name of the club was misleading and I don’t think this particular misunderstanding had been my fault.
I wasn’t sure if they’d let us join in, considering we clearly had no idea how to play the games in question. If they refused to let us play non-board games with them then maybe I could sing ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ for them all and get last night’s goal done and dusted instead? After all, at least five of them were huge fans of magic so might have appreciated a song about how great magic is.
But the guy who greeted us at the door was on our side. ‘You can play this First World War game over here if you like. One of you can partner me and the other can partner Chris.’
We agreed and I sat next to Chris, who was thirteen or thereabouts and had zero respect for me.
Before the game could begin, the guy who met us at the door asked the question that had to be asked. ‘Who wants to be the Germans?’
And I said, ‘We will’ as soon as he had finished his sentence.
This caused the whole room to look at me as if I were an actual German spy. I was just trying to get the game started quickly but apparently you should never volunteer to be the evil Germans.
Chris rolled his eyes. ‘Fine, but I’m not happy about it.’ Yeah, shut up, Chris.
The game was hard and really complicated. We had to roll a bunch of dice at the same time (similar to Thrice but with a million dice) but each die meant something different: where we could shoot them, how much damage we’d do, how many bullets we used up, how many steps we could walk, etc. And Chris was not suffering me lightly. Every time I made a decision he’d say, ‘Great, you do you realise we’re going to lose now?’ or, ‘Nice one, I hope you like losing,’ or, ‘Would you like me to roll the dice for you?’ It turned out that Chris had actually written the rules to this game himself and we were testing them out for him. And he was now on the losing team, thanks to me. I could kind of see why he was so cross. I was making him lose at his own game, and he’d probably been up late figuring out all the rules and regulations, and then I’d walked in off the street and demolished all of his dreams within seconds. I noticed something familiar about the British soldiers and after asking Chris I learned that yes, he had painted them all to look like the characters from Dad’s Army. At one point I had to decide whether to shoot Pike in the chest or the face. And I chose the face.
Even though I was awful at the game and Chris invented it, he lost all of his soldiers before I lost all of mine (up yours, Chris) and so the last moments of the game consisted of me fending off Corporal Jones and Godfrey from behind a rock before Fraser killed me with a long range shot from a tree he’d been hiding in. Chris was full of pure rage and so the other KBGC members sent him to the kitchen to calm down (I got the feeling this was not the first time Chris had blown his stack and been sent to the kitchen to calm down) and when he returned he brought back a packet of plain digestive biscuits even though there were caramel digestives in there, because we ‘hadn’t earned the nice ones’.
When we got up to go and said goodbye to everyone, none of the gamers looked up at us or acknowledged our farewells as they were way too engrossed. One of the people on the Hero Quest table didn’t hear what we said as he was too busy placing a card on the table in front of his opponent before grinning and saying, ‘H-ho! Looks like Greavesy wants a word with your wolflord!’ I still don’t know what that means but as we descended the stairs towards the exit I heard the other guy say, ‘I have been fearing this moment for quite some time.’