USD ($)
EUR (€)
The following is a guest post from the team over at Herefordshire Board Gamers, who have just completed a 24-hour game-a-thon to help raise money for Herefordshire Mind.
We did it!
The 24-hour game-a-thon was good fun and I didn’t find it too challenging. I had a quick nap, then got back up and played a few more games of Blood Rage. Now back onto prepping for our mega, charity day including making a secret, surprise, giant board game which will make Tsuro look tiny.
As a team we spend a huge amount of time behind the scenes arranging the day, organising events and prizes and in this case dozens of hours making giant games. We had 10 players in total with three dropping in and out as they could around work and life.
24-Hours!!
We mostly played lighter games throughout the day, partly due to the number of players and the width in gaming tastes. We also had sponsors donate £50 for us to play Qwirkle and Monopoly (yay)!
Monopoly ate up four and a half hours (more on that later) and Rising Sun took us from 8pm to midnight. The rest of the time we played mostly lighter games; Telestrations, Cross Talk, Codenames, Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, Secret Hitler and Concept - all games where we could all be and play together socially.
As expected, the hardest hours were 3am to 7am. We made the brave decision to try a new RPG, which is a medieval, fantasy heist game called Dusk City Outlaws. A ragtag team had to rob a necklace off a dead royal family member and they got away with it due to a combination of illegal magic and good old-fashioned thieving skills. They were only hampered by trying to out-drink a rough and tumble bounty hunter and the faithful hound. We probably didn’t do the game justice, but it went down well.
Between 7am and 9am we dropped to five players with two players dropping out at hour 22, which is still amazing. Our nine-year-old player also managed 14 hours of gaming as well! For the long, long last few hours we played Werewords, Bring Your Own Book, Anomia and Cards Against Humanity, which we had to dust off.
We played almost totally non-stop, with just toilet stops and quick food breaks throughout. There were a few heavy eyelids from about four to 6am, but I think most of us found it fairly easy and we were coherent even playing Anomia to cross the line at 9am.
A Reflection
Rising Sun is excellent. I won by 11 points by only winning a single battle. Monopoly is a terrible game even played by the correct rules as written; far too luck based, player elimination and minimal strategy. Rules as written do help but the rules still aren’t great; no directions on how to run an auction or priority order for buying houses which are key.
The first two players were knocked out at about 90 minutes, two more at three hours and the last 90 minutes was a death spiral, held off by incredible good luck and managing to avoid all payable spaces which, amounted to over half the board.
Monopoly Gamer, Qwirkle, Azul and several rounds of Concept were all played during the time it took for Monopoly. Monopoly Gamer is a great improvement and took just over an hour due to having a set number of rounds.
All of the social games and light games we played were excellent, the weakness of course being Cards Against Humanity but one of our guys hadn’t played and we wanted it to know if it would be funnier after being awake for a whole day.....It wasn't!!
Herefordshire Board Gamers - Looking Ahead
Our next activity is our mega, charity day on May 19, where we expect up to 80 players and hope to raise over £600 to add to the £238 donated for the 24-hour game-a-thon and the £220 raised from our smaller charity game days. We are on target to raise over £1000.
You can keep up-to-date with the Herefordshire Board Gamers on their Facebook page.
- Zatu Games have donated a couple of games for the Herefordshire Board Gamer's charity day.