Another year passed! December was a very very busy month, and this year even more so because I made the… questionable decision of Insta-storying my escape room advent calendar every day! Plus we saw tons of family and friends and zipped about the country a fair bit.
Here are the details of the games I played along the way…
Escape Rooms
As mentioned, I spent 1st to 24th December sharing my advent calendar on Instagram. Tim bought me the Exit The Game The Advent Calendar, and rather than opening the puzzle and solving it like a normal person, I decided to film myself solving each day’s puzzle and uploading it to Instagram! It was quite the experience, but a lot of fun to share some puzzly content every day of the month. I’m not sure if I would do it again next year though…
For Tim’s birthday (yes, that was another thing making December busy!) we headed over to Hatton Escape Rooms to play The Outfitters. You might not have heard of Hatton before, but if you’re into escape rooms you may well have heard of their parent company… Tulleys Farm! This is widely considered to be one of the best escape room companies in the country, but it’s all the way in Crawley in West Sussex. Hatton is just a 20 minute drive from us!
The Outfitters room was without a doubt one of the best I’ve done, and probably the hardest. Full review to follow…
Board games
Just a warning – this section is ridiculously busy. I played 14 different board games this month, some of them multiple times. In fact, it’s probably easiest if I go through the different mega-board-game marathon sessions one by one…
First up, for Tim’s birthday, after the escape room, we played Century: Spice Road (a trading game that I wasn’t very good at), followed by Chameleon and Wavelength. These are two of my favourite party games, and it feels like it’s been forever since I played Chameleon! I even almost got away with my single attempt to be the chameleon…
I actually played Wavelength with five different groups of people during the month, and the second group was during a work gaming session with colleagues. We played the digital version, which unfortunately I don’t think holds up as well as the physical version. We also played the digital version of Codenames, which is an excellent digital implementation overall.
In between these marathons and Christmas, I played the next month of Pandemic Legacy Season 2, finishing out July and shockingly winning another game! Every single month we are convinced we will lose, and somehow manage to win!
We also played Arkham Horror LCG with our friends in Japan, Ellie and Callum. We started our current run of the Circle Undone back in December 2020, and this month started the final scenario… although unfortunately we had to press pause before completing the game. (Luckily, as of the start of January, we have now finished the scenario, but more on that in next month’s recap.)
Back to some serious gaming sessions… we visited my parents for Christmas and managed to pack in more Wavelength, Carcassonne, Deception: Murder in Hong Kong AND Paranormal Detectives. My family are all pretty big nerds like me, so it wasn’t even me and Tim pressuring them into playing these games!
And then we visited Tim’s family, who are less into board games. But even so, while visiting them we played the Genius Star (a logical spatial reasoning game) and Ticket To Ride (which is not my favourite game but is theirs). And Wavelength, ofc.
Fiiiinally, we spent New Years’ Eve at our friends’ (Harrison and Holly) place in Nottingham. Their house is such GOALS and the food was to die for. Plus we managed to pack in four or five games of Quartermaster General, a fast-paced strategy war game that I actually generally enjoyed… at least for the first couple of times… We also played a game of Quartermaster General 1914, but this was a) much less good, and b) after midnight on New Years, when we were all pretty tired, so we didn’t actually finish the game.
We also played Cheese Thief, a fun little deception game where you are mice, and one of you steals the cheese. My funniest memory of this New Year’s was loudly singing “What is love? Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more” to cover up any noises made by players when stealing cheese or peeking at other players’ dice. I don’t really remember exactly why we did it.
We did also play Wavelength, but actually this was in January, so really there were only four different playsets of this game during the month. I won’t go into all the games we played on New Year’s Day, as this section is already long enough…
Video games
The Girls That Game group in Leamington had a virtual Secret Santa gift exchange, and we ended up playing Split The Room, a Jackbox game that I’d not actually done before. It’s quite a fun little game where you need to come up with a hypotherical scenario which divides opinion. I even managed to win a round!
In the Steam Sale, I bought Assassins Creed Odysessy, and have sunk about 20 hours into it already. I’m definitely not enjoying it as much as AC2, and probably not as much as Black Flag either. The game is a lot more open-world, and there’s a bigger focus on levelling up and having the right weapon set. And combat is harder. But I’m keeping going – and finally able to play as a female character!
I also bought Civ VI and the Untitled Goose Game, but I’ve not had a chance to play those yet.
And I briefly got back into Cities Skylines, creating a new city that accidentally had a beautiful park and castle overlooking my industrial zone. Oops…
Other gaming
Also over Christmas, I played a Discord-run roleplay game called Ironford. It was a turn-based game with daily actions centred around the namesake city of Ironford. It was under pressure from the nearby Empire to allow passage of their soldiers through so they could continue their war against another of our neighbours, the Kingdom. I was THE CARDINAL, responsible for the souls of all the citizens of the city of Ironford.
We nearly agreed a treaty with the Empire, but delays meant that the one with the Kingdom came though first. The city was overrun, but my benevolent acts during the game meant that I was able to save some of the poor Ironford civilians. I did draw the ire of one of my teammates, THE MAGE, who were against the Empire and their anti-magic crusade, for being too willing to make a deal with them in return for protection of my faith.
It was an interesting game, but unfortunately I didn’t end up with as much time to devote to it as I’d hoped.
TV and movies
December saw the end of the Doctor Who Flux season. I don’t think it ended particularly on a high – the wrap up was too quick and too many plots were smushed together. I do think that the strongest episodes of the season were two and four – the ones that focused specifically on particular villains.
It’s Christmas, and that meant time for the annual Love Actually watch. I find the movie quite hard to watch from a feminist perspective – I try to pretend that the Colin plot completely doesn’t exist, and I just feel so awful for Emma Thompson and Laura Linney’s characters. But the movie is such utter nostalgia to me, that I just focus on the plots that I love and the Christmas spirit.
I’m also a huge proponent of the fact that Die Hard is an official Christmas movie. But I’ve only seen the original! So this year, on Christmas day, we watched Die Hard 2. Maybe we’ll carry on the tradition and watch Die Hard with a Vengence next year.
Our new show of the month is Around The World in 80 Days, a remake starring David Tennant that’s on BBC iPlayer. It’s an interesting little series, especially considering that I haven’t actually seen any previous film or TV adaptions. In fact, my only prior experience of the setting is the Fire Hazard game I played in London.
And I’ve been rewatching all of the Expanse in preparation for watching season 6. I honestly think that it is one of my favourite TV shows of all time.
What else happened in December
Considering the amount of gaming, you might think I didn’t do much else!
But we also managed to pack in a visit to Hayashi, an excellent local Japanese restaurant, for Tim’s birthday.
We made another trip up North, so I could attend my work Christmas party, and to drop in on my best friend Keeleigh who had her baby son in November. He was tiny and adorable.
It was so lovely to spend Christmas day with my parents and brother. I’ve not visited their home since Christmas 2019! But it had all the hallmarks of a traditional Ladley family Christmas, including duck rather than turkey, lots of Christmas nibbles, and two mice that sing to each other (you have to be there to understand).
I also got to see my cat Jack for the first time since 2019. In addition, we managed to see both my surviving grandparents (mum’s mum and dad’s dad) on Boxing Day. Overall, a fantastic time to see family.
Finally, I decided to start bullet journalling as a way to be organised in 2022, so watch this space for a few pics of my spreads!
Oh! Also I broke my toe. It’s mediumly painful, but mostly super annoying because I don’t want to walk anywhere and aggravate it.
Next month
We’re right back into the swing of things with January, with a panto, visits to friends and from friends, the MIT treasure hunt, and ramping up for MegaCon at the start of February! Speaking of which, some of our megagames are running low on tickets… are you coming?