Games Evening

[jack]

I went to games evening. It was fun. I met several old friends I haven't seen for a while (particularly Neil, but also Tom and others) and met new nice people. Ian swears he's seen me there before, but I don't *think* I've ever been.

We played a pattern-matching game which I was awful at. Visualise, where you have a score of dice with pictures/glyphs on and have to form phrases from them. I started badly but ended ok, with even a couple of puns.

And Apples to Apples. Last time I was hopeless, but here I got the highest score or nearly highest score, partly by ruthless psychological tactics such as physics arguments, blatant flirtation, and reverse psychology.

I have become a loud person. I used to be painfully shy. I remember at a ?MO event spending literally minutes trying to make myself speak to someone I didn't know. Now I talk a lot. But it's overcompensating, too much sarcasm and innuendo, and not enough interest, and not enough talking *to* other people. Can I change *again*?

Magic: The Gathering. I spied on several people's magic game. I'm always intrigued by it, but I think I don't want to wate time now learning. But it's still funny. And there actually *is* a "wrath of god" card: when Cryponomicon proposed cards like "ex-USSR nuclear arsenal" and "Yahweh" I thought it was *joking*. OTOH MD *did* explode a nuke in a roleplaying campaign, to not much effect, though if we'd been a bit more secretive about it it might well have been a marvellous kamikaze run.

Comments

[atreic.livejournal.com]

I went through exactly the same becoming loud, perhaps a few years earlier than you. But I'm not very good at self observation - I would guess that I stayed a loud person, so maybe that doesn't give you much hope :)

Magic doesn't take very long to learn to play at all. It's just that cambridge people get carried away with the twiddly bits - imagine if you saw someone trick shuffling a deck of cards by riff shuffling, making them fly in the air etc etc etc, it would be wrong to conclude you could never shuffle cards - the actual mechanics of randomising cards is quite easy. You'd just have to do it in a more boring less interesting way the first few times.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

"I went through exactly the same becoming loud, perhaps a few years earlier than you. But I'm not very good at self observation - I would guess that I stayed a loud person, so maybe that doesn't give you much hope :)"

Perhaps. Though, in my limited experience of talking to a group of people including you, you don't seem too loud, or loud to the exclusion of other people, which I worried I could become. But maybe everyone's just too harsh on themselves.

"It's just that cambridge people get carried away with the twiddly bits"

Mmm. Yes. I do know the basic rules. But if you're playing someone and every card is primarily a special effect you feel you should have some idea of what they are. A bit like moving from knowing what a knight is to knowing what a fork is, perhaps? Or I should just call them all sad geeks :)

PS. Modulo my bike working I will probably drop in to the castle this evening and then maybe go off to games later.