Civilan Games Night ~ At the Games

This week's poll: would you meet someone who only knows you as a female, when you are in drab?  For instance, a t-friend you met as part of a group, or the woman who does your mani-pedi.  Assume they know you're trans.  The choices are:
* yes, if s/he's trans too
* yes, if  s/he's a civilian only
* unqualified yes
* no

This one's important.  And the results so far have surprised the heck out of me!


At the start of the evening, we all sat around and introduced ourselves and talked. 

Who's imitating whom?

I'm starting to introduce myself as simply "I'm Meg" instead of "call me Meg."  As I go out more, I feel like Meg is more a part of me.  A couple of players use nicknames; I think I can honestly consider this mine.

There weren't any new players, I think, but there were some who I've never run into before.  Meg was as welcome as anyone.

Eventually I said "why isn't anyone playing games?" and we split into tables.  Some people played hearts, some played King of Tokyo, a

We're green ~ one square from the endgame!  W00T!

Blokus game started up.  I'm starting to know many of these games.

I played two games, both of the party variety.  One was Cranium, which I had played before.

Cranium is kind of a cross between Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary, with Charades thrown in.  You might have to act out something (either vocally or mime or charades), or hum or whistle a song, or draw something (sometimes with eyes closed) or make something out of clay.  There are also word questions (definitions, unscramble, spell backwards) and trivia questions.  Due to the fact that my team was able to avoid most of those categories except trivia (until the end when you need to answer one question from each category), we eked out a victory!

Havin' a good time.

I avoided things where I may have to speak up.  When we did ones where you could act as a person, I passed to my partner (she did an amazing "Kramer).  When there were mime or charades act outs, I took the lead.  Each turn someone not on the team of the player has to read a card.  I tried to not do that, but if I was closest and no-one reached, or someone said "Meg?  Do you want to read?" I always agreed to do so.

I'm often at a disadvantage when we get to the geek stuff.  I think geek is generational, like other trivia.  One of our questions was about cloning a Wooly Mammoth that was thawed which led to me making a comment about "using frog DNA to fill in the missing bits" and that led to a series of Jurassic Park references.  I assessed the table and said "I bet I'm the only person who saw Jurassic Park on opening day."  One of the guys sitting across from me shook his head.  I said "what were you?  Four?"  He said "how old do you think I am?"

King of Tokyo at the rear table.  Pandemic in the foreground
Me ready for a round of sleep.

He has very long straight hair (he should try dressing, if he hasn't) and I would have thought 24 would be about right (Jurassic Park came out 20 years ago on my birthday).  But I did some quick math and figured the youngest a kid would probably get to see that (on opening day: parents couldn't check it out first) would be ten.  So I said "thirty."  He looked surprised and said "that's exactly right."

Six of us went downstairs to play Catch Phrase, where you split into teams and pass a gadget that has a card with words or phrases in it and you have to give clues that your teammates can use to figure it out.  You need to do this quickly.  The game is fast, and we played three rounds.  And that meant I did a LOT of talking ~ describing the word(s) or trying to guess.

The fun thing about party games is, people get excited and blurt things out.  On different occasions, from different people I heard exclamations such as "how did she know that?" or "it's her turn" directed at me.

They're a good bunch of guys and I had a great time.  Sometimes, I think the games are getting boring and maybe I'd like to do something else, but this is becoming comfortable.   They're having a Halloween thing this coming weekend, and I'm thinking of going (the t-group is also doing a restaurant/bar hop that same night) if I can think of a costume.  So far, I haven't.

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