Well, I thought I would throw up some more party-related photos from a recent party (Saturday afteernoon), as a supplement to my earlier entry about such parties.

For somewhat arbitrary reasons the theme of this particular party was H.P. Lovecraft and the horror mythos he created. Just as with the Shark Week party, my artistic friends provided theme-related food:

An interpretation of the King in Yellow

Cthulhu melon..

Front

and side

I would like to take a second to inform you that none of us actually ate any of the Cthulhu melon. Perhaps  we were restricted by some unearthly, ancient force; perhaps we were simply too frightened,or perhaps we were actually just frieghtened by the sheer size watermelon that originally came from (look at the diagnol picture and consider the scale given by the cup of straws and cake nearby). I can not say that the King in Yellow got off so easily.. leading to this terrible joke o_o:

Anyway, the primary reason for this party’s theme was because one of the main events was playing Arkham Horror. To those of you who don’t understand the horror of Arkham Horror, or mistakenly think it is simply due to the Lovecraftian elements.. there is also some horrible, as with the melon, in the sheer size of the undertaking (again, my phone doesn’t do a great job of capturing scale.. but consider the size of people, and my hat .. and the sheer number of pieces)

*nerd talk, feel free to skip*
If anyone is interested about the actual specifics of this game itself (assuming you are already familiar with the rules, which are much too complicated to go into here): We were playing with an Ancient One ( I believe Glaaki whose attack was simply to raise the terror track, defeating and devouring all if it reached 10. Due to a complete lack of Elder Signs and failure to get places quick enough, 6 gates opened with only 1 being closed. Thus with 8 players, we faced an awakened elder god (with a full doom track, though I’m still not sure that it should have automatically filled with the awakening) with a need for 8 hits per counter. At -5 bonus and a physical resistance (half off bonuses for physical weapons), this meant that we had 10 turns to roll 8 x 12, which is to say 96 positive fight checks (in layman’s terms, out of approximately 280-320 d6 rolls, 96 had to be a 5 or a 6 … before you throw in random factors caused by other game elements). Against (or right at, by my probably incorrect math) the odds, we successfully defeated the GOO (with the help of a sacrifice by one player giving us 3 extra turns), and Arkham, Dunwhich, and Kingsport were returned to safety. .. in other words, we somehow managed to win! ^_^
*end nerd talk*

Log story short, after a couple hours of playing, we all won… except for the game’s owner, who got devoured by an ancient god… meh, it happens.

Anyway, it was fun and I was glad to get to hang out with all my friends again. I really am going to miss them..

~Donald

EDIT:

Here is a picture of my friends.. also, another edition of the great game entitled “how many people can we fit on the couch?”: