It’s on very very rare occasions that we at Fenland Gamers charge to attend a gaming session. It’s in the clubs dna, we don’t believe in charging people to play games. As gamers our games are expensive enough, and it’s hard enough getting them to the table without having to pay to do that.

But for the second time only we ran a session that required those taking part to hand over some dosh. Like the previous time we had a really good reason. We were gaming for charity. So the money paid was really a donation to the charity we were raising money for.

The charity chosen this time was the Alzheimer’s Society who are running an Autumn Gaming event to raise money and awareness for Dementia.

There are a lot of great charities out there. And to be fair I could have gone with several that had a personal link of some kind. But this one had that personal link also. So when club member and manager of our hosting establishment asked if we would run something for this particular one, we jumped at the opportunity.

So last night was the night we chose to hold our charity gaming evening.

Our hosts for the evening were our most excellent regular hosts The Luxe Cinema.

We started off the evening with a couple of rounds of the ‘filler’ game No Thanks! while we waited for Nathan to turn up. It’s a classic, and rightly so. And the evening started off as I hope the rest of the evening would be going with me winning.

As my victory celebrations were coming to an end there was still no sign of Nathan. So we went ahead with playing Wingspan with the first expansion for the game (that had only just arrived through Jonathan’s letter box that morning).

Surprisingly Jonathan had gone a different route to the one I would have gone for a first play with an expansion like this. I would have just used the new expansion so we got to see what it had to offer. Jonathan had mixed it in with the base game. Which is fine, no problem with that at all. After all that’s how it’s designed to be used.

We did get to see some of the new birds and mechanics introduced by the new expansion. Sadly luck of the draw meant we didn’t get to see any of the new end of round scoring conditions.

It’s great to see European birds now in the game. With the new mechanics, new bonus cards and end conditions, it’s more variety for an already great game. And to be honest if you have both, something you shouldn’t be playing without, even with new players. The new overhead to learn and teach is so negligible it’s not worth even considering.

I did use the WingMate scoring app for the first time ever. Which looks beautiful and totally in keeping with the look and feel of the game. However I’m not totally sure about the flow of the app when doing the scoring. But it was a single use, and I need to play with the app more first. But as you can see from the screen grab above Jeff won. With Nathanial and Jonathan drawing for last place.

Next up saw us diving for treasure in Deep Sea Adventure. What can I say about this? I managed to walk that fine line between pushing my luck and getting the treasure back to the surface and running out of oxygen and dropping my loot to the sea bed. In other words I won.

After the underwater adventures it was time to be artisans and create some stain glass windows in Sagrada. Although I did feel like I was being punished and handicapped by my secret objective card. After all how else would you interrupt having to score the sum of the yellow dice you have in your stain glass window? That’s the card Jonathan should of had with his unnatural love of playing that colour.

But after creating our beautiful stain glass windows the scoring judged Jeff’s window to be the most awesome to behold.

Our evening of gaming for charity ended with a couple of games of Rhino Hero. That saw Jeff win the first game, and then share the victory with Jonathan for the second and final game.

We had a great evening of gaming for charity.

Thanks to Jonathan you get to see some wonderful photos below of me on my journey to becoming full unkept hobo dwarf.

Games played: No Thanks!, Wingspan (with new European expansion), Deep Sea Adventure, Rhino Hero, Sagrada

If you feel that you would like to donate to our Just Giving page to help the Alzheimer’s Society fight Dementia you can click HERE.

I’d like to end this post with a big big thank you to those that donated and played, to those that only donated, and our hosts and their staff at The Luxe Cinema. Your generosity and support was most appreciated.