The games blog I always wanted to write

The game of my year, not to be confused with my game of the year, has been Activate. ( Read more... )

It's a bit like real-life co-operative Mario Party, or a bit like The Crystal Maze, but with a sport-of-the-future vibe. ( Read more... )

What this means in practice is that you form a team of two to five players, then play your choice of fast, big-scale physical games from a large selection in one of about a dozen high-tech arenas. Some of them are running or jumping games, some of them are word, memory or trivia games, some of them are throwing games, some of them are dodging games, some of them are pattern recognition games, some of them are high-cardio, some of them are primarily mental. There's loads of variety and you can pick games in order to suit whatever mood you're in; you can work up a sweat or cool down as you see fit. There are even competitive games if you want to play against your teammates rather than alongside them.

For my money, Activate implements this set of principles very well. It offers a very wide variety of games and a very cool toybox with which to play. The implementation is very smart, it hits the spot for me and keeps me coming back. It's got me out of the house close to thirty times this year, so far. That doesn't happen except for games which really speak to me.

( And this is why... )

I reckon that the things I've got from Activate are probably as close as I'm ever going to get to some of the things that people get from being serious about golf, and I can live without the more conservative social aspects that golf has and that are not a factor here. It's not a very cheap hobby, but through deals, I'm averaging a price of 13-14 pounds an hour (when rack rate at the weekends gets up to thirty) with an hour being a very fine serving size. That's within my budget, especially at London rates, in this day and age, and every single session has been more than enough of a treat to justify it. It's the teamwork, it's the vibe, it's the variety, it's the playfulness, it's everything.

If you're reading this, I'd bet coins against crumbs that I'd enjoy playing Activate on a team with you. Let's agree a time to play!

Electromagnetic Field, a camping festival with a focus towards makers and hackers, was the highlight of my summer 2024, as previously described at length. I'm not sure how I found out about the Strange Games Festival in lateish April, but I know that when I did, I thought "that might be a bit like a cross between Electromagnetic Field and a games convention, that could be spectacular". Now crossing two things I like may not result in the best of both worlds - a notorious vegetable curry, heavy on cabbage, still gets referenced almost three decades after the fact as demonstration of this - but it's surely a good starting-point.

I am also famously not outdoors-y at all, but the fact that there was a pre-pitched glamping option made the event rather more appealing. Accordingly, I put the word around, found a couple of other friends (Weaver and David) who were interested in going, and we all went over the past long weekend. Very happily, the Strange Games Fesival is very likely to be the highlight of my summer 2025... and at least one of my friends considered it, and the thoughts it raised, to be their highlight of a longer time period still.



The festival has been running for approaching ten years. It started as an event for a group of Werewolf (aka Mafia, etc.) players to meet to play around a camp fire and camp overnight, but it has grown over time, gained its wonderful branding and moved around a little over the years as it has outgrown its roots. Crucial to its ethos is a clear statement that "We don’t tolerate any discrimination, and the Festival particularly aims to be a safe and welcoming space for members of the LGBTQIA+ and neurodivergent communities". This is a lofty and worthwhile ambition, and one that it appeared to me (from my point of privilege, so I note I'm not the best-placed to judge) to live up to its goal very successfully. If the combination of that ethos and "a camping festival themed around games" appeals, and if you can live with the realities of a camping festival, the event is very highly recommended indeed.

( And this is why... )

It's easy for me to find two big reasons to get very excited about the Strange Games Festival as a movement. One is the vibe, the other is the potential. The Strange Games Festival movement is taking off; in previous years it was a single annual event, this year it has grown to be one festival plus an additional campout which is a little smaller and without big organised events, next year will celebrate a tenth anniversary and there will probably be one festival plus two campouts, one away in Bristol. So if the movement is not rooted to the spot, how far might it go? Bushy Wood is a very happy home, but could there be an even bigger, better one somewhere else, now that discussions in terms of "as well as" rather than "instead of" are on the table?

Dreaming bigger still, what could a Strange Games Festival with not five hundred but, say, three thousand people look like? If it looks at all like Electromagnetic Field, from which I got so much, wouldn't that be a wonderful thing? (Some might dream yet bigger still, to the UK Games Expo, to Gen Con, to Glastonbury. That's an order of magnitude or two too big for even me... for now.) Maybe Strange Games Festival people might also like Electromagnetic Field; maybe Electromagnetic Field people might also like Strange Games Festival. I would feel comfortable saying that there are all sorts of cool camping festivals out there and you might like more of them than you knew about. I'm prepared to believe there could be others that I don't yet know about that I might like, in the same way.

Many, many thanks to everyone who worked with such dedication, expertise and talent to put on such a good event, whether running a game, volunteering or organising the whole show. How far you have already come, how late I am to the party, and how appealing it is to contribute in the future to something bigger and better still. If you can measure the effect that an event has by the number of smiles it raises, the Strange Games Festival scores a critical hit.

Yesterday and today saw the eleventh and, alas, final Now Play This games festival at Somerset House in London. I've always found them to be better than merely good; some landed for me better than others, and happily this one - while probably a little smaller than most of its predecessors - was top-tier, by my sense of taste. Not every game at every event has been a hit, but in terms of fun ideas and people, this was a regular highlight of the calendar, and I'm prepared to forgive a lot more misses than there ever were for the odd big hit.

This year, over the course of an evening and an afternoon, I enjoyed two video-game-derived musical performances, clapped along vigorously to one, played movement games in front of a crowd, listened to some talks, caught up with two old friends, met some splendid new ones, made a tiny 'zine in ten minutes flat, devised a silly game, playtested other people's games and read three books.

Three books in a weekend is probably as many, or more, books than I have read in three years, but these were books with descriptions of (and often rules for) games. Some people love reading cookbooks for the recipes, I love reading party game books in very much the same way, because of the way they fire my imagination. I'm glad to see that publishers still produce them, from time to time, and the ones of the 2020s are just what you'd hope for from them. Often the games are familiar, but the descriptions and the context in which they're presented are ever more relevant and just as delightful.

In that tradition, and in keeping with this year's festival's theme of folk games, I commend my barely-playtested party game to the world. My interpretation of it is released under creative Commons 4 BY-SA, so share, remix and enjoy. (I am not aware of it having been published and played elsewhere but very probably it has.)

---

The walk of PERIL

Folksonomy tags: co-operative, indoor/outdoor, easy, walking, counting, guessing, OK for adults and kids aged probably about 5+, party, about 2 minutes to learn and about 5 minutes per round to play, playable by as few as 2 but probably most fun for about 5-10, good-naturedly stoopid.

This game is played by a group, who win or lose together. One player is selected as the walker. The other players agree among themselves on a lucky number without letting the walker know. (This should be a natural number, probably between 5 and about 15.) The other players should then agree among themselves on an unlucky number, again without letting the walker know. This unlucky number should be either two higher or two lower than the lucky number. (Hard mode: one higher or one lower. Easy mode: three higher or three lower.)

Once the lucky and unlucky numbers have been decided, the group then communally agree upon a location to which the walker should walk. The walker will walk to that location, using large steps, small steps or dance steps as the spirit moves them, by a reasonably reasonable route of their choice. Everyone should count the steps taken along the way out loud.

Again without telling the walker what the lucky and unlucky numbers are, the number of steps taken is compared to these lucky and unlucky numbers. If the number of steps taken is the lucky number, everybody wins! If the number of steps taken is the unlucky number, everybody loses. If the number of steps taken is neither lucky or unlucky, the group communally decide on a different location and the next walk is taken from the ending-point of the previous one.

Once the group have either won or lost, pick another walker and another pair of lucky and unlucky numbers and try to win again. Repeat until everyone has had a turn as walker and/or the novelty has worn off.

---

My memories of Now Play This will be very fond. I always enjoyed reading and thinking about Come Out And Play, Hide and Seek, The Sandpit and other such festivals, almost always from afar; Now Play This was the one where I happened to be in the right place at the right time. These things do tend to chew up and spit out their organisers over time, at least in this capitalist world, but the demand for them is surely growing rather than fading. Many thanks and much love to everyone involved with Now Play This over the years.

Only very recently did I learn of the existence of the brilliant-sounding Strange Games Festival, the format of which is a cross between a games con and a camping festival. It's not really talked about in the board game convention circles I frequent, but it probably fits the description; maybe it's a bit more RPG-ish and a bit more social-deduction-game-ish to be exactly the same crowd, but as is so often the case, the most interesting developments are the ones at the margins, crossing over and picking the good parts out of other related endeavours. The camping festival part may be off-putting for many, and frankly it isn't a big plus for me, but I did enjoy EMF so perhaps it's worth considering for future years.

Part of what Now Play This offers, that I don't get so much elsewhere, is that when I'm with my friends and playing games, we tend to be drawn to playing pre-defined games. Even among game-playing folk, there's a lot more playing games than there is just play... specifically, spontaneous, undirected play. They absolutely both have their places, but I have a suspicion that my diet is a little heavier on one and a little lighter on the other than I might quite like.

This helps me refine my thoughts about what, if anything, I might want to do to celebrate my big birthday this year; it's only a bit trickier in that play party is a bit of a, well, reserved term with... specific implications and connotations. (Not negative ones at all, I hasten to add, but it seems to me there is likely to be wisdom in the saying "don't try to make your friends into swingers, try to make the swingers your friends".)

One other unrelated but innocent question that Now Play This inspired in me. I thought I knew how music notation works. Specifically, I thought I knew how music notation works with triplet notes. However, one thing I don't know (and haven't been able to find in a quick search) is how rests work in triplets. Imagine you want something that would effectively be quaver quaver quaver-rest quaver quaver quaver-rest in 6/8 time, but in a piece written and played in 4/4 time. How would you notate that? (Crikey, even trying to describe that in text isn't immediately clear!)

...I say cuchi-cuchi too!

Twenty years ago, on my first trip to Boston to see Emerson while we were still long-distance, on the day after his birthday we went to see the Blue Man Group. (I wrote about it at the time, and used the same gag. Good, good.) They're a performance art troupe of three mute blue-painted individuals, this time accompanied by a somewhat more human-looking female multi-instrumentalist known as the Rockstar. There is a great deal of drumming on distinctive, often somewhat improvised and/or industrial, percussion, there's a fair bit of dancing, a handful of short videos while the set is being changed and plenty of silly physical comedy, much of which involves audience members co-opted with an assumption of consent, but the atmosphere is very sympathetic towards participants throughout.

Many of the highlights of the show decades ago remain highlights today. A lot of the drumming remains as do some of the most impressive physical stunts. Much of the rest has changed, keeping up with the times somewhat, and there was even a little local humour, for the show was in town only for a week as it tours five British cities plus Paris, playing 1-2 shows a day for five days before moving on. Seven cities, I believe, have permanent productions aside from the shows on the road. I'm pretty strongly convinced that the touring productions are inherently a little more tame, somehow, not least as you can't customise a theatre for a week to nearly the same extent that you can when you're going to be staying there for longer; if you have the choice, I'd recommend the permanent production over a touring show.

If you know anything else about the Blue Man Group, it may well be that they are famous not just for their drumming but for drumming on drums covered with liquid paint that splashes dramatically. To this end, they provide the front few rows of the audience with plastic ponchos to wear to protect their clothes. In practice, I can confirm that (at least in the touring version of the show) they weren't really necessary, save for a few seconds of a water hose being gently fired into the front row.

I'd long held an ambition to go back and see the Blue Man Group again some day, ideally sitting in this poncho section. When I saw an advert for the tour on a poster in an Underground station, I decided to have a look... and found that the London Palladium shows had a smattering of tickets going. One of the shows had a single seat in, more or less, the centre of the front row of the stalls. I took this as a sign that it was meant to be and booked the seat.

The approach I took to the show was... an unconventional one. I knew to expect the poncho, but decided to eschew it. Additionally, I decided to purchase some white (well, cream) jeans and a brand new white shirt, on which I painted the words "PAINT ME" in fabric paint. I was very hopeful that the shirts might get... decorated as evidence of the splattering paint. On balance, this was a rather self-centred move, putting it as kindly towards myself as I possibly could - very occasionally you'd see video footage of parts of the audience from the performers' perspective, and you could see the whole of the front few rows in identical blue ponchos except for me looking Very Very White and sticking out clearly. I don't think I spoiled anyone's experience, but I may have damaged the aesthetic.

The show was a lot of fun. As discussed, the ponchos were very much surplus to requirements, with only really one audience member getting particularly painty - someone is pulled out from the audience, dressed in a white boiler suit and a welding mask, then painted thoroughly blue (and their outline spray-painted pink). Maybe they're a stooge, maybe the backstage footage is another video rather than being as live as it purports, maybe it's for real. Along with a guy next to me who I had never previously met, at one point we were gestured to stand up and dance (from in front of our seats, rather than on the stage) in a few specific and ridiculous fashions for ten seconds or so, then swap seats with each other in order to set up a bigger-scale gag a bit later. Partly because we were doing so with our backs to the audience, partly because of the atmosphere, this was a very easy and enjoyable way to play along.

The only other way in which I might have inadvertently stood out was at the very end. The whole of the audience were invited to stand to dance and applaud, then the lights went down. We called for an encore and received one, but it turns out that when the lights went down, most of the audience decided to sit down. I didn't realise this and was still standing when the Blue Men came back out for their encore, not realising this for, I don't know, maybe twenty seconds after at least some of the lights went back up. Hopefully my front-and-centre position won't have blocked anyone's view - seems unlikely in context.

The highlight, and it was a tiny little thing, was that at one break between scenes just before the applause, while the lights were down but we were standing, a Blue Man came to the front of the stage and quickly and silently gave me a delightful double handprint on my shirt. This was masterfully handled - it must have been clear to them that I had wanted this, with my shirt explicitly inviting them to paint me - and yet they found a way to give it to me without drawing attention to me or spoiling anybody else's experience. What absolute pros and what a perfect souvenir.

Four and a half stars out of five, of which half a star was for the double handprint. You'd probably enjoy it just as much as you'd expect you would, or wouldn't. Looking forward, already, to doing it all again in another twenty years' time.

( Pics or it didn't happen... )

If you were to line up all the 47-year-olds in the world by order of how important music is to them, so you might have people who make a living for it and search it out constantly at one end, and perhaps who are genuinely completely neutral about it at the other, I suspect I would be much closer to the neutral end than the essential end. At a guess, I reckon I might be something like 20% or 25% of the way along the line. My neutrality is not profoundly pronounced; I know what I like, and like many people, it's music that reminds me of feeling young, noting that I got most of my music influence from the (mostly video) games I was playing or the TV I was watching, rather than being from listening to music played for music's sake on the radio. This doesn't mean that it has to come from the '80s or early '90s, but that's the mood I often look for.

If you were to line up all the 47-year-olds in the Eurovision Song Contest broadcasting area by order of how important music is to them, I reckon I'd be rather further from the neutral end of the line - maybe 60% of the way along, noting that the people at the non-neutral end of the line are really, really into it. Eurovision is still a minority interest - the 2020 Grand Final was estimated as getting a 23% share of TV viewers - but just about everything's a minority interest, and Eurovision is a much bigger one than most. My fandom is to the degree of "I'll probably tune in for the Grand Final if I remember".

Putting the above together, along with everything else you might know about me, it'll probably come as no surprise that I'm into Eurovision for the numbers rather than for the music, and Eurovision has always been deeply numeric as a result of its scoring system, with the (mostly moderately slight) variations in the scoring from one year to the next keeping things interesting on a macro- scale as well as a micro- one. It's fairly rare for any of the songs in the show to stick with me, and often it's songs associated with Eurovision rather than directly from it that stick. I have decidedly mixed but mostly positive feelings about Netflix's Fire Saga, but the Song-Along is joyful and I have watched it dozens of times, and one of the things I'm hoping for from a return to ( spoiler for last night's winner, just in case you don't know. )

So it's fairly rare for any of the Eurovision songs to grab me. I don't mind at all when a song tries to be jokey, and Wadde Hadde Dudde Da? still pops up as a punchline in my life somewhere once or twice a year. Among the other non-obvious hits, in the very early days of my LiveJournal I was smitten with Hello From Mars from 2003. There may have been others, but they don't immediately jump out at me.

So imagine my surprise when something hit home for me last night, and something fairly unlikely based on everything I've said above, to the point where I've listened to it at least six or eight times since the event. I was listening more than watching, and the staging of the live performance is not particularly special, so I'll instead link to the official video, with a shiny alert that I would recommend against it for the particularly photosensitive: Promise by Voyager, representing Australia, or at least the broadcaster SBS who selected them. I love it; I'm not entirely sure why, but here are the reasons that I've been able to discern, or at least guess at. (Timestamps refer to segments within the video above.)

1. 0:06 - moderate, but attention-grabbing, opening beat.
2. 0:57 - "promise me it's gonna be alright" is a very human, relatable sentiment.
3. 1:03 - the last -oh-oh is killer, though I suspect it's textbook from music theory.
4. 1:23 - "have you ever been alone too much?" - yes, yes, I have, especially over the last four months minus one day.
5. 1:24 - "have you ever prayed for human touch?" - ditto, and the lift on the "touch" is delightful.
6. 1:29 - "have you ever just lost a little part of you to find a little something new?" - absolutely resonant for me at the moment.
7. 1:54 - the drama of a half-second of silence followed by a big drop back in is not a particularly uncommon trick but it's a popular one because it has impact.
8. 2:37 - such a lovely contrast on the electric guitar as the song works up to its big finale.
9. 2:43 - it's a mid-tempo song but the fast keytar segment takes this from very good to great for me by reminding me of '90s demo music as much as anything else.
10. 2.52 - lovely closing chord progression to tie everything up (though probably used for hundreds of years).
11. 2:57 - powerful and surprisingly long-held closing note with a triumphant and jubliant conclusion.

On top of that: they look great, their look really suits the music, especially the variety in hair at both ends of heads, the lead singer sounds less aggressive than he looks, they perform dramatically and energetically in a fashion that suggests they're having a great time, the outdoor segments of the video are somewhere beautiful, the indoor segments are a certain sort of nostalgic high-tech, the whole thing really nails the ending, they're not all-male, the female guitarist adds greatly the effect and just notably shifts her spectacles at 2:20.

What's not to love? Or, at least: if you're me, right here, right now, what's not to love?

I have the very sad duty to announce that my beloved husband Emerson Milford Dickson passed away at some point between midnight and 9am of Sunday 15th January.

Emerson had struggled with his breathing before Christmas. He subsequently had an echocardiogram which confirmed that one of the ventricles of his heart was working very inefficiently, and he was due to see a cardiologist this Friday. Resting over Christmas had helped him feel much better, and there were no real indications that things were wrong other than a vague and fairly moderate feeling of unwellness on Saturday. I'd gone to bed before him on Saturday night, and found his body on the sofa on Sunday morning, which came as a horrible shock. Friends have been taking very good care of me since.

The coroner has decided that a post mortem will be necessary to determine the cause of death; I expect the cause to have been heart-related, and suspect he had fallen asleep on the sofa and passed away as he slept.

Man, it sucks that I seem to only ever sure this journal for death announcements, and I'd been thinking of trying to do a brief State of the Chris a couple of weeks ago, which would have been rather happier. It's possible that I may do some (appropriately trigger-warned) grief journalling as well.

Here is a simple, free-to-enter game to celebrate the recent turn of the decade.

As I type at 2000 local UK time on 13th January 02020, the following sums of money are worth approximately the same:

GBP 10.00 (10.00 British Pounds)
EUR 11.67 (11.67 Euros)
USD 13.00 (13.00 US Dollars)
AUD 18.82 (18.82 Australian Dollars)
CAD 16.96 (16.96 Canadian Dollars)
INR 919.9 (919.9 Indian Rupees)
AED 47.74 (47.74 Emirati Dirhams)
ZAR 187.2 (187.2 South African Rand)
THB 392.3 (392.3 Thai Baht)
NZD 19.60 (19.60 New Zealand Dollars)

Which three of these are, on average, going to be worth the most on 13th January 02030? You don't have to use just those ten; you can use GBP 10.00 worth of any other reasonably major currency instead, if you prefer, including (but not limited to) Swiss Francs, Japanese Yen, Chinese Yuan Remnimbi, Russian Roubles, CFA Francs and so on.

You name the reasonably major currency, I'll establish the starting value (you don't need to work it out yourself!) and I'll come back and work out the 02030 value in ten years' time. Submissions must be entered within two weeks of me making this post. You don't need any sort of account to play, but do identify yourself so that I can award you a prize in 02030 if you win.

( Read more... )

The first meme to have really caught my imagination for a few years popped up on Twitter the other day.

Originally, Jennifer Scheurle asked: Let’s play the game version of this: Name 5 games that you’d recommend to someone to play to convey you best as a person. Go!

You would have to have a time machine to play mine but here we go:

It's A Crime!
Brian Clough's Football Fortunes
The Cyberdrome Crystal Maze
The DASH 5 puzzle hunt
Liar's Dice

( It seems to be implied that you're meant to just leave it at the five titles, but the really interesting part is *why*, especially as I've chosen a few fairly obscure things. )

Meg and I are in Wales this weekend! We are staying with friends and playing board games. We arrived fairly late last night after coming up from London by train. (There was a braying wedding party on one of the trains we took, then we were joined by several fat, drunk Scousers who had mostly lost money at Chester races. It wasn't the most pleasant journey.)

After our late arrival, I only played one game last night, but it was such a good one that it's worth sharing. it started off as regular Perudo (Liar's Dice) but - as tends to happen sometimes with this crowd - we reasonably quickly started seeking a little variety. I choose not to explain the basic rules of Perudo, deeming it sufficiently familiar; Quintin Smith of revered-but-slightly-hipster board game site Shut Up and Sit Down tells the tale of having travelled in China, not speaking Chinese, but still ingratiating himself with the locals by getting into games of Perudo with them.

Fourteen years (and more than one blog) ago I posted about a remarkable game of rule-changing Perudo that I once played. Last night generated a rather less alcoholic and rather more restrained inadvertent sequel, but nevertheless we spawned some variants worth sharing. We were playing with four players, leaving the blue and yellow sets of dice alone.

Before long, we substituted one blue die per player in for a regular die, with the variant rule that a 1 on the blue die wasn't wild and that the blue die had to be lost last. Tracking the number of unseen dice became slightly trickier as you now had to track the number of blue dice separately.

This left one spare coloured die per player. The next stage of the variance was to roll these spare dice to generate a fresh turn order per round; while rolling them to try to find a highest-to-lowest order generated far too many ties, rolling the handful and seeing which die rolled farthest worked well and added a little amusement.

The real winner of the night was substituting the blue dice for yellow dice with a different variant property still: they counted as minus one die of the colour they rolled. Yes, rolling a wild one on a yellow die counted as minus one to everything. (The yellow die, again, had to be lost last.) The game broke down somewhat towards the end, though not without great entertainment, but everyone's first topic of discussion this morning was how to fix it because it was sooooo-o-o-o-o-o nearly there.

The current plan to fix it is that higher bids are measured by magnitude. A bid of minus one of a number suggests that there is at least one more yellow die than coloured die of that number. Bids of minus numbers outrank bids of positive numbers of the same magnitude - so the sequence goes one 2 to one 6, minus one 2 to minus one 6, one 1, minus one 1, two 2s and so on.

Worth a try. Variants do not often survive rule-changing mayhem where the games created are generally intended to be played only once, but this one has legs.

I've mentioned Dan in the past, haven't I? Over the course of the past year, Dan has become family-by-choice to both Meg and me. Dan was part of our DASH 5 puzzle team, then we hunted together remotely on some online hunts, then he came up for ChrisCon and played our Puzzled Pint recast, then he has started (co-)running Puzzled Pint in London. Five months in, and to his great credit it has proved a hit, to the point where I'm not worried that "a bad month" or two will put the event in danger of fizzling out. (April's event happens on Tuesday 8th; the location puzzle is out now!) Dan is very dear to us both.

So this story starts nearly six months ago when Dan tweeted "It's my birthday in November. Please make me a treasure hunt around London. Thanks.", as you do. Remarkably, Scott took up the request. In December, the day after the second London Puzzled Pint, Meg accompanied Dan around London on this hunt. A great day was had by them both. Accordingly, they purchased a commercial self-guided London hunt for a trip to London for New Year's Day and enjoyed that as well. In February, Meg and I went down for PP, and the day after, the three of us played and enjoyed HintHunt, as discussed. Meg was very specific about wanting me to come down for the March Puzzled Pint, but also mysterious about the reason.

It wasn't hard to guess. The March Puzzled Pint was excellent and happened ten years to the day from the day Meg and I first met, but the main event of the trip was on 12th March, ten years to the day from the day Meg and I first... told each other that we loved each other. (I wrote about the day only a couple of months after the event - nothing changes there, then - back at the time as a Friends-locked post on my steam-powered LiveJournal.) We tend to have a lot of anniversaries (legal marriage date, real marriage date...) and there's the small matter of Valentine's Day as well, but 12/03/04 was always a memorable date, thus 12/03/14 was quite a milestone to celebrate.

Meg and I both busily prepared for the event in our own way, in the days up to the event. I stayed up late the night before Puzzled Pint, making her an anniversary 'zine with 100 (almost entirely happy) memories from the first ten years, which raised some hand-squishes, a few laughs and lots of happy reminiscence while we were waiting for a train. Meg had been working long and hard on her particular project and managed to give nothing away before the day, even when I did rather rudely attempt to discern what was on her screen once or twice.

In practice, on the 12th of March 2014, we first travelled out to Heathrow in order to see gwendolyngrace and etakyma for the first time in years (since our real wedding and since a HPEF event, respectively) sharing lunch with them at the airport; happily, theirs was a friendship where it was very quick and easy to get back up to speed. Meg had told me that she wanted to spend the afternoon with me, but hadn't said why.

After waving them off to airside, Meg handed me an envelope. Opening it, it contained a puzzle. *grin* Over time, it transpired that she had written me my own hunt, even more special and personalised than the ones that she had been on. To do this is a great labour of love and the finest gift that one puzzle fan can receive from another (or, if they're very lucky, from a whole community - see also the slideshow and the podcast with a fuller description). It turned out to be the case that the hunt retraced our first day together. Could there be a sweeter or more perfect anniversary celebration?

( Puzzles within! )