When I'm Not Reading #2: Felicia's Tabletop Club

When I’m Not Reading talks about things that we do when we’re not bent over a book. Us, booknerds, we’re a dedicated bunch. We live and breath books. But we also have lives outside books and it’s fun to talk about it from time to time, in between our bookish discussions. If you want to be featured, email or tweet me!

For this edition of When I'm Not Reading, Felicia of A Silly Girl (one of my favorite blogs) dropped by to share what she does when she's not occupied with a book.

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When I’m not reading, I… wauw, I can’t even begin to tell you. There’s too much stuff! Most of it is really ordinary, like I go to work, I work on making my life-long dream about making professional theatre for a living come true, I cook dinner and fail horribly at it, I do the dishes, wash my clothes, go grocery shopping, pay rent and go online. Being an adult really sounds exciting, doesn’t it?

Other than the necessary things, I watch a lot of TV shows, and I’m currently waiting impatiently for the next season of Doctor Who to start while I’m being totally heartbeatingly anxious for the last five episodes of Breaking Bad (update: Felicia finished it and emailed me right after to sort of fangirl about it! - Joy) which is just waiting for me on Netflix. I read comic books – the Walking Dead, Sandman – and try to get my best friend to buy Fables, so she can lent them to me. I go rollerblading alone when the weather is nice. I drink way too much, and I daydream a lot.

And I game. Yes, I’m a gamer.

Game night! #gamenight #whydoikeeplosing #smashup

A photo posted by Felicia (@feliciajafari) on Jan 25, 2015 at 6:54am PST

I don’t play videogames. No, not very often at least. I play tabletop games, like board games and card games and sometimes even roleplaying games. I have a tabletop club with three friends, and we get together once a month to play games. We usually make some dinner together, and we make sure to have enough crisps and soft drinks, and then the Monday evening turns way better than Mondays usually do when we leave this world to go battle monsters or diseases – or mostly just each other.

It’s usually just the four of us, but sometimes we invite others to play with us. If we’re playing a game that require more people or is just more fun with more people, we pin-point people to invite. Sometimes people ask us if they can join, and then we obviously invite them too. The more the merrier – though not always, because most games has a participant-limit.

I have absolutely no idea how this started, and apparently my memory is really bad, because we haven’t been on it for more than a few months. I guess I had been talking a lot about this card game I had played one time called ‘Axis of Evil’, and when I finally bought my own, I wanted my friends to play it with me. At my 23rd birthday, I wasn’t feeling very happy, so I wasn’t in the mood for a party or anything, but my best friend still thought I should be celebrated, so she decided on inviting me over to her place with a few people of my choice and then play Axis of Evil. So we did, and I guess that’s when we started boarding the tabletop train.

By now, we have tried out quite a few tabletop games, but we do however have our favorites. If you feel like you want to try something out, here are my recommendations:

Castle Panic
The players work together as a team to defend the castle against the monsters that are attacking it. You win as a team and lose as a team, though the player who slayed most monsters get the title as Master Slayer – and of course you want that title! But remember, if your team loses, there is no Master Slayer, because you’re all dead.

Gloom
This is definitely one of my favorite games, and I’ve even bought expansion packs. You are a family of misfits, and your mission is to have them all die while being miserable. It sounds coldblooded, but it’s really fun. While playing, you tell the story of your characters and what happened to them to make them so miserable – or happy, since you can also put cards on your opponents’ characters to bring them some happiness.

Axis of Evil
This was one of the first tabletop games I played that wasn’t just Monopoly or something like that. It’s a card game, and fair warning, you shouldn’t be too easily offended if you play this game. You play a team of six Evil-Do’ers, and your mission is to kill every other Evil-Do’er and take control of the world. The thing that makes this game really fun is that you can form alliances with your co-players, so you can defend each other when someone is attacking you. But there is only one winner, so you better stab your allies in the back before they do the same thing to you!

Pandemic
This game is a pain in my… well, you know. The world has been infested by diseases(seriously, who came up with this?), and you and your co-players are the final hope to save humanity. Playing together as a task force from the Center of Disease Control, your goal is to keep the diseases from outbreaking, finding the cures and eliminating the diseases. This game is so damn difficult! We have played it seven times and never won! So we just keep playing, half out of stubbornness and half because, well, even though you’re just sitting around a table, your heart start racing whenever a city is close to an outbreak.

Settlers, Munchkins, Small World and Smash-up can also really be recommended, and so many other games! Seriously, tabletop nights are some of the best!

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Felicia's Monday nights sound so awesome. Geeky but cool! Gloom and Pandemic (which definitely reminds me of the Kdrama 'The Virus') sound intriguing. And I think Felicia's friends are cool. Let's hang out when I visit Denmark. *wink wink*

Do you play board games? Are your Monday nights as interesting as Felicia's is? What do you do when you're not reading? Let's discuss more in the Comments!