DWCon 2008: The Joy Of Panel Games

“I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue What You’re Talking About”

or

The Joy of Panel Games

One of the many, many worrying things about a DW con is that, if you walk up to someone at random and say “Elephant and Castle”, chances are they’ll say “Baker Street” (because we all know about the 1973 northwards Bakerloo Prohibition, of course). A discussion will then ensue about the validity of that prohibition

[1], but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, the point is that chances are people will know what you’re talking about. There’s also an above-average chance that they’ll be able to play any panel game you care to mention, and play it passably well.

And so it was that a hodgepodge of panel games, Have I Got A Nac Mac Feegle For You, found its way into the main programme on the very first day; hosted by the one and only Davina, this pitted Bernard Pearson and - was it Pat "Quack" Harkin? - against each other in a clash of titans, each assisted by mildly flummoxed crosspondian assistants. The battle opened with a volley of Just A Minute, where Bernard’s knack for the spoken word was somewhat hampered by his tendency to forget to hit the bell. Things got silly after that, but I can't remember exactly what games they were...

At that point the battle was interrupted by a surprise cavalry charge of the 4^th Mornington Crescent Hussars, where the cunning use of the Westwards McMillan Gambit caused the competitors some confusion. But the sneak attack was soon repelled, and the combatants closed to Swannee Kazoo range for a fierce round of tongue-to-tongue fighting[2].

After all that, I can’t remember now who won. Either way, I’d come prepared with bells and stopwatch, so it was the final straw that set me off, and thenceforth I became a sort of panel game Godzilla, buttonholing[3] people at random and ensnaring them into impromptu games, whether they’d heard of them or not.

But it didn’t stop there, oh no. After all, Diane Duane and Peter Morwood had been forced to cancel, so their two two-hour slots left the Cavern free. A quick visit to programming, and an inter-guild Just A Minute tournament had been scheduled.

In retrospect, I should probably have thought to make a note of the competitors’ names, but you can’t win ‘em all. But the topics covered such diverse subjects as “How to Find a Man in a Hat,” “The Joy of Velcro,” and “Why Bacon Is Good”. The Witches made a valiant attempt at The Relevance Of Bees, but despite a fairly interesting debate on the various species of hymenoptera[4] they ended up second to last with five points, beating off only the seamstresses with their two. The guild of Small Gods fared slightly better, finishing with thirteen points at the end of the hour, but from early on it was clear that the true battle was between Judith[5] for the Teachers and Davina for the Conjurers. Eventually, with the Teachers finishing on an impressive 24 points, the Conjurers only just snuck into the lead, winning the game with 26.

Oh, and we also established that I am a god, but not a small one.[6]

After that I filled my weekend with impromptu games, culminating in the phenomenally, terrifyingly ferocious midnight battle of Post-Watershed Just A Minute in the bar. And the Earth shook, mountains fell, Mary Whitehouse found herself beyond censor range, and so on.

There were other guild reps present, of course; a steady stream of witches, wizards, and small gods sat their stint at the table, but once more a duel to the innuendo[7] emerged early on. Unsurprisingly, Davina once more kept his end up, though Conina kept him on the defensive, pounding at every chance with a variety of ferocious challenges. While the representative from Small Gods handled Vestal Virgins, the Witch rep spent 25 seconds on The Lovely Samantha, but ultimately Conina – with her intriguing explanation of Broomsticks And Their Uses[8]  – drew level with Davina, finishing in a joint first place with a phenomenal 31 points each. Against Davina, that’s got to count as a victory.

That was the end of the more-or-less official games, but naturally more cropped up. Perhaps most memorably, at one in the morning following the always slightly sad Dead Monkey Party.

There I was, sitting in the bar, chatting amiably to Cat, Rgemini, a couple of delightfully evil Irish sisters whose name tags I really should have tried to read at some point[9], Sabremeister, and Probably Alex[10].  Then, suddenly, those fateful words were uttered.

“Baker Street.”

That kicked it off, of course.  Three of us knew the game; the others didn’t, and made a valiant effort, but not knowing the London Underground left them without a chance. So, to give them a fair fight[11], we settled on European Rules, assigning The Hague as the destination. They still seemed rather confused, but nevertheless the Hibernian contingent managed a number of shrewd moves. In particular, a move to Dubrovnic left Rgemini in a very difficult spot, which he only just managed to sneak out of.

Then we moved on to that game where you utter words that mustn’t be connected to the word before it. My memories of that game are pretty blurry, but I do remember that one of the Irish sisters – Nicola, if my memory serves, which is never certain – mentioned the name of their old school. So when Mary-Ellen (probably) followed it with something else – I can’t remember what now – I challenged on the grounds that anything she said was spoken by someone who had attended that school. Evil, perhaps, but she had helped[12] with the ultra-evil version of Walk The Walk.

Oh, and the winner of that game? Nicola. A novice, and she thrashed all of us once we got to the Sudden Death round.

I love panel games.

 

(Oh, and for anyone who thinks an ISIHAC con – I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Con – would be fun, give me or Davina a yell. It’s the antidote to fan cons.)

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[1] As you will recall, naturally, it was enacted by the then non-quorate MCA, and is thus considered non-standard by many purists.

[2] Oh god, I wish I hadn’t spent so much time talking to seamstresses this weekend...

[3] “Buttonholing” is a good word. Make a note, Darling; I like it, and want to use it more in conversation.

[4] I knew my Wikipedia addiction would come in handy.

[5] Probably. You know what my memory’s like. I may well have muddled things.

[6] Bloody seamstresses. Pass the brain bleach.

[7] I am required by law at this point to deploy the traditional “in whose end?” joke. That was it.

[8]“Flagellation”, apparently.

[9] Now that I’ve got home and had an uninterrupted 14 hours’ sleep, I’m pretty sure they were Nicola and Mary-Ellen. I’m even pretty sure I’ve pinned the right name on the right sister.

[10] Sorry about that, by the way. In my defence, it was one AM and my memory’s terrible at the best of times. One AM isn’t the best of times. On the up side, Cat had her face painted as a cat, and “CAT” on her forehead. At one in the morning, this was helpful.

[11] Within reason, of course. We hadn’t explained the rules to them at that point.

[12] Well, I say “helped”. “Co-conspired” would probably be more apt.

DWCon 2008: Dead Monkeys

Dead Monkeys

Someone once said, when confronted with calamity, “This too shall end”. Unfortunately I can’t remember the exact words, but the idea was that sooner or later, even the worst circumstances end. Quite often, as far as I can tell, by getting worse.

The point – and unfortunate corollary – is that not only bad things end.

That, then, is the foundation of the traditional Dead Monkey Party. A distilled summation of the con’s insanity, it basically involves a bunch of remarkably sober congoers getting together to convince themselves that the Con ain’t over ‘til we say it is.

And it’s always, without exception, fantastic.

It started soon after the closing ceremony. I was in the bar – because the bar do chips; as some of you will know, I can’t be bothered with booze, particularly given what I’m like sober. I suspect combining my usual level of bonkersness with alcohol would cause some sort of supercritical event. And if you doubt that, just consider that on just two portions of chips and a can of Coca-Cola I was leading a procession marching towards the DMP, singing Colonel Bogey in Dwarfish[1]. Loudly.

We reached the door to Lancre Forge. They were all in step, to my astonishment. They performed a perfect Right Wheel when I bellowed the order, halted as the book prescribes, and even executed a textbook dismissal. I was terribly impressed. It got us some odd looks – admiring, I shall assume – from those already at the party, and we headed in to join the fun.

By the way, if you’re ever at a party where there are lots of lunatics and almost as many balloons, avoid having chandeliers. There will invariably be multi-ball games of whatever it is, and I was starting to get rather nervous by the end of the evening. I still get chills at the sound “clink”.

Where was I?

Oh yes. I got chatting to Cat – who was investigating the goody bags – and after a chat with Martyn we seemed to get assigned to running Walk The Walk. Well, someone got assigned to it, anyway, and we had a whole bunch going, but I’m not sure anyone’s really clear on who – if anyone – was really in charge.

It started out as a perfectly sane, ordinary game[2]. Then I got into designing the course. The first course – which I didn’t set up – was fairly easy, and guided through it by my distinctive bellows, Essy completed the course with considerable aplomb.

That’s when things started to get silly.

The courses gradually got trickier. We used flipcharts as obstacles, angling them away from the correct route to subtly guide walkers into the walls. We set up dead ends, obfuscating the easier route and nudging players towards more obvious but much harder routes[3].

“Hey,” someone said, “this is a garden, isn’t it? Postman trying to reach the letterbox. We need a dog.”

So we got a volunteer, scrawled “DOG” on her forehead, and set her to hounding the walkers. Then we got a cat – Cat, of course – who pawed and clawed at walkers as they went by. We cast someone as a plank, lying treacherously across the path. When Kai ran the course, we blocked the route entirely, forcing him to go under one of the flipcharts.

Think that sounds silly? Well, we were just getting started. The air gradually filled with our evil laughs, as we added insane neighbours with shotguns[4], balloons on the path, random underwear models posing in the garden, the evil Cossack neighbour...

Then I had a brainwave. We set up a fairly easy course, with an almost empty section in the middle, occupied by just three lone flipcharts. Very, very easy to negotiate.

Until the walker had been blindfolded, at which point three of us each picked up one of the flipcharts and started shuffling them back and forth across the course. Moving obstacles. And you might think there are very few things as funny as hearing the guide shouting “RUN! RUN FASTER!” – but sillier was to come.

You see, by now we were completely bonkers, and Cat and I reached the same evil plan at pretty much the same time. Great minds, and whatnot.

It was a great plan. Sheer genius, a scheme of such beautifully evil simplicity that we just couldn’t resist.

So we set up a course. It looked fiendish; leans, jumps, covered sections, double-backs, dead ends... I’m not convinced it was even completable. Well, I know for a fact it couldn’t be completed; we’d removed the postbox. But that’s beside the point.

We found a victi... volunteer, let him get a glimpse of the course, blindfolded him... What he didn’t know was that his guide was in on the scheme. She – one of the Irish sisters I mentioned in my Panel Game article – had a marvellous streak of evil, which she locked and loaded as she lined him up at the start of the course.

Meanwhile, the rest of us were quickly and quietly removing all the obstacles. Every one of them. And we were getting the camera phones ready.

What happened next... well, it should be on Youtube by the time you read this[5]. But she ran him through the most evil non-existant imaginary course her magnificently twisted brain could produce, and it was great. “Duck! Step over the plank! Lean to your left! Forwards! No, faster!”

Then he finally got back to the finish line, the blindfold was removed... I’m not sure the words “you bastards” have ever been so funny.

Anyway, after that nobody wanted to do the course, and we couldn’t be bothered setting it up again anyway, so we set up a bunch of dragon racing. One of the dragons was retired with a broken neck, but other than that a good time was had by all.

Then what... oh yes, Twister. There’s always Twister. But even Twister loses its charm after a while, so we manufactured a net out of flipcharts and settled in for a game of volleyballoon, which worked rather well.

By the way, if you’re ever at a DWCon and someone offers you liquorice, decline.[6]

Anyway, by that point during the evening, the crowd batting balloons around in the middle of the room were hitting the chandelier rather more than was probably good for it, so we of the evil dispositions decided to absent ourselves before anything happened to it.

So we retired to the bar, and the proceedings there are more interestingly described in my Panel Games witterings. So have a look at them instead. Go on, shoo.

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[1] “Gold gold, gold gold gold GOLD GOLD GOLD...”

[2] Or as sane and ordinary as a game of Walk The Walk can, anyway.

[3] Whoever it was who managed to guide someone through my cunning dead end by steering their walker through the ostensibly unpassable gap, you did a bloody good job.

[4] Popped balloons

[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDcNtFdCTiU

[6] Particularly if they say “Close your eyes and open your mouth”. But declining that is probably good advice in general.